Analysis Of Migrant Hostel's Poem 'Polish Word'

A sense of self can emerge where you belong in the world. Peter’s connection to the new world results in a disconnection from a relationship with his father and his Polish heritage in Feliks Skrzynecki. A technique used to show this is irony. Peter struggles to learn Latin but in doing that he forgets his first Polish word, a symbolic loss of parent’s heritage, this is shown in the last stanza of the poem, ‘stumbling over tenses in Caesar’s Gallic War, I forgot my first Polish word’.
In the first stanza, another technique used is simile, this is used in ‘Loved his garden like an only child’ to show a solid connection and the time invested in the garden and didn’t love his own son as much as his garden. Also hints that Peter doesn’t feel as loved as the garden. Peter and Feliks have a distant relationship due to Peter embracing the new world he lives in which left Feliks to have a connection with his garden, a bond stronger than the relationship with his son.
If one does not know who they are or where they came from may cause one to feel like they do not belong which can cause difficulties in ones simplicities. Skrzynecki highlights this in Migrant Hostel using similes. For example, in stanza 3 he shows ‘We lived like birds of a passage, Always sensing a change, In the weather, Unaware of the season’. Although they could sense changes they were unable to respond naturally as birds would do normally, they were always unsure of when they would leave and where they would