He took
Her hand and felt its voltage fling his hold
From his calm age and power
It is a charge both sexual and artistic. This meeting of Professor and musician is the violent conjunction of learning and artistry he was one we remember from the first stanza, who could be appealed to through the medium of ‘dry, scholastic jokes’ She is one who knows nothing of reason – her domain is the passion of music, and once she is seated at the piano, her schoolgirls being is transformed into that of a master.
The effect on Professor Eisenbart is devastating as her playin excited in his manhood a ‘rose-hot dream’ of love for her. In her interpretation of Mozart, the whole range of emotions is communicated, with accomplished talent.
He has been overcome by the experience that his self possession crumbles and he looks at music cup and sees his carefully constructed image upside down.
A sage fool trapped
By music in a copper net of hair
The oxymoron ‘sage fool’ dismisses him with a sneer, at the poems conclusion.
‘Prize giving’ gives the prize to art over learning, to passion over reason and at the end – to the beauty of feminine youth over pomposity of masculine age. But we should be careful to note that the girl with titian hair is exceptional. She stands for the artist. She is clearly differentiated (by her hair, as her musicianship) from the other girls around her, as she is from Professor Eisenbart.
The Violets
In this poem of reminiscence of her childhood, Harwood concentrates on violets, both as frail melancholy flowers and as symbolic of our fragile early memories, which we cherish and love to recall:
Faint scent of violets drifts in the air
This positive teaching of the poem, however, is delayed by the negative anecdote which opens it. This is in the adult present and the setting, at dusk, is cold. Once again, Harwood introduces her theme of the dissatisfaction of adult life, which is to be developed here in comparison with a celebration of childhood. Yet in the midst of her despair in the present, she finds the violets, struggling to emerge and survive: signs of new life and beauty rising from the ashes. To try to establish a connection with nature in order to revive her spirit, she whistles a bird-like trill but,
Our blackbird frets and strops his beak indifferent to Scarlattis song.
As before, Harwood is regretting the dissociation of humanity and nature’s creatures, and (like Keats) even sets her beloved music at a disadvantage in comparison with the unpremeditated art of birdsong.
So the setting is at best “ambiguous” with elements both of hope (the presence of the violets for example) and of despair.
The violets have set her memory in motion and she recalls a similar late afternoon in her early childhood. Confused by an afternoon nap, she had woken up looking for breakfast. Sobbing, when she realised her mistake, she asked “Where’s morning gone?” The child’s plaintive question addressed to her mother, is also the poet’s disturbing address to the reader: our childhood and its innocence and beauty will quickly pass, like a morning gone. Yet, we may retain its lovely moments in our adult memory.
To comfort her daughter, her mother:
carried me downstairs to see
spring violets in the loamy bed.
That her father arrives with a whistle (onomatopoeia giving his arrival an aural immediacy) connects the experience with her adult whistling of t he first stanza. On one of its levels, this poem is a celebration of her love for and indebtedness to her parents and the family life they created, the examples of behaviour which she has perpetuated. Nonetheless, although surrounded by this care and affection, she bitterly laments the lost morning that cannot be recovered. However, the teaching of the poem – soon to be disclosed – is that domain of purity and hope is always recoverable, by the imagination and the memory.
Nothing that her subsequent life has know, not even death itself of her parents, for example – can “distort those lamplit presences!” They have an eternal quality. And Harwood’s language and imagery is of a religious and spiritual kind in these closing lines, as she refers (for example) to entering “my father’s house” (a biblical phrase), to “the lamp” and develops the symbolism of light to its beautiful climax in the sheen of her mother’s “goldbrown hair”. Kedron Brook flowed near Harwood’s childhood home in the outer suburbs of Brisbane.
The violets in the present have served the purpose of stirring these memories from the past and, in their fragility and beauty, the flowers are emblems of those memories.
“The violets” is also a social document and commentary, revealing a kind of family life antique by today’s standards. The lamplight and the wood stove, the “child with milk and story book”, the parents with time for their child and for each other, the mother at home to attend to her child’s needs and the appreciation of the beauty of nature close at hand.
My father, bending to inhale
the gathered flowers, with tenderness
stroking my mother’s goldbrown hair
Could be dismissed as an idealisin romanticisation of the past. Or, it could simply be an insight into a better world.
At Mornington
This poem was inspired by a visit to a very dear friend, Thomas Riddell. The poet went to his garden first, then to the Mornington Cemetary where his parents are buried.
The poem begins with the childhood memory in which the poet recalls her first visit to the sea as a child. Believing she could walk on water, she jumped in and had to be rescued by her father. After saving her he was ‘half comforting, half angry’.
Just as she thought she could defy gravity and walk on water, so the pumpkins in her friends’ garden ‘in airy defiance of nature’ symbolised for her the way in which she has been nourished by the fruits of the Earth and is moving through life to ‘the fastness of light’ and the ‘ultimate death’.
She is reminded of death as ‘two friends of middle age’. She and Thomas Riddell, stand by his parents grave ‘among avenues of the dead’. She is aware that these have ‘come to that time of life’ when their bones begin to age and form their body into the final shape it will assume in death just as the ‘drying face of land rose out of earths seamless waters’.
The poet recalls the peace and serenity she enjoyed with her long-time friend in a dream set in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens where they share a pitcher of cool, refreshing water. So their visit to the cemetary, the security she experienced in her fathers arms (when confronted for the first time by a Halloween pumpkin) and the serenity shared in the Botanic Gardens – all these will comfort and shield her at the time of her death, when she is ‘seized at last’ and borne away on the face of the waters forever.
Father and Child
Tone, diction and point of view:
The tone, or voice of Nightfall is not dissimilar to that of its companion poem Barn Owl. Both are, first person narratives but here we sense that one, much closer to the poet herself perhaps. The diction of this poem is even more loftier and more formal than that of the previous poem. The subject matter is weighty; the impending death of a parent, and the diction is correspondingly serious. The sustained allusion to King Lear is an effective one. The notion of the aged father being an old king is a persuasive one that lends him considerable dignity, a sense of decayed greatness and faltering authority.
Imagery:
The extended metaphor of life as a journey is the predominant image in this poem. Images of Genesis, of the father as God, are called up. Another consistent image is that of the father as an old king, Since this is a poem about loss, grief and sadness, tears are also important.
Structure:
The poem has a nature, conversational feel, due to its given structure.
Contrast:
Nightfall is a poem about maturity, while Barn Owl is a poem about immaturity. In Barn Owl we witness a young child coming to knowledge in a terrible way through death, while in Nightfall we see a middle age person come to the knowledge in a natural way, through thinking of the death of her father. All death is change, and both poems examine the changing states of an individual at important times in her life.
Alter Ego
Summary:
In this poem the speaker acknowledges and explores her inner self, or alter ego. She describes the alter ego as a part of herself that has intimate and complete knowledge of her yet acknowledges that her conscious mind does not have a complete and full understanding of this ‘other self’. The speaker expresses a longing for ‘wholeness’ suggesting that to know herself fully there needs to be a resolution between her ego and alter ego.
Analysis:
In the opening stanza of Alter ego, the persona queries both the identity of her alter ego and its extensive knowledge of her:
‘Who stands beside me still,
nameless, indifferent
to any lost or ill
motion of mind or will,’
From the outset there is an evident longing for a sense of wholeness.
In the second stanza a connection between Mozart and his genius is made with the persona and her alter ego (allusion).
Harwood uses the simile:
“dry crickets call like birds”.
to compare the sound of crickets with birds. Because she associates the sound with her first love it becomes musical. A blown flame is used for a metaphor for this love. In the final stanza of the poem a metaphor of life as a journey is presented.
The tone of the poem is one of thoughtfulness and the speaker is comforted by music and memories.
