My close passionate engagement with the poem, TV, has been affected by its portrayal of the misery that mortality brings, which resonates with my own life experience. As a young person fearing death, I value the way Harwood abstains from skeptic portrayals of mortality, but provides me with a vision of transcendence through memory and the notion of an afterlife. In this poem, the “violets” are a powerful symbol of life and death as coexisting features of the human condition; while these “melancholy flowers” are “frail”, in that single flowers will die, they are robust perennials that will also renew. The use of such an image strengthens my tolerance of death in the face of wistful yearning. The time signifiers that formulate the poem in its cyclical structure: “It is dusk...dusk surrendered pink and white” depict an astute recognition of time that is contrasted with the foolishness of the child who “cannot grasp or name [time]”. In her declaration of religious values, Harwood may be considered as acting against the amplification of the modernist contestation of the religious metanarrative in a postmodern era. The referral: “into my father’s house” can be symbolic of the Holy Father and his guidance in the child’s dark experience. This consolation offered by religious faith in a world of flux is not only consistent with a religious perspective, but with my neo-romanticist perspective also, providing me with an ongoing attraction and value towards Harwood’s work.…