Judith Beveridge Essay
Judith Beveridge is an Australian poet well known for her skill in illuminating humanity through the means of the natural world in poems such as The Two Brothers and Fox in a Tree Stump.
Beveridge uses techniques such as personification of nature to show the contradictions of how innocent yet destructive humanity can be.
As a feminist poet, Beveridge commonly expresses the characters in stereotypical roles in a manner of females being innocent and kind whereas males are destructive and harsh.
In the poem The Two Brothers, these stereotypical roles are displayed through young children. In this poem, a young girl is being taunted by two young brothers, hence the name of the poem.
The young girl is seen as sensitive and heroic as she …show more content…
In contrast, Beveridge demonstrates the brutality of the brothers after the bothers purposely kill the snails by placing salt on them in stanza 5. Similes are used such as “the snails boil and froth like illicit stills” in line 19.
By the effect of enlightening the young girl and the creatures, the brothers are highly more portrayed as destructive and harmful and so the death of the creatures seem to be more cruel. Thus Judith Beveridge uses this poem to express light and darkness of humanity by using stereotypical gender roles.
Another poem Judith Beveridge has written to illuminate humanity is Fox in a Tree Stump. This poem is quite similar to The Two Brothers as it also has a stereotypical gender role for the characters and combines childhood innocence, human cruelty and the natural world.
The young girl in this poem is faced with a hard decision of whether facing her uncle's anger or going against her own morals. The first stanza starts off with the young girl gripping a branch in stress, as she was left by her uncle to forcibly kill a fox. Beveridge uses metaphors to express the girls churning with fear such as “terror barrel-rode through my stomach” in line
Beveridge uses techniques such as personification of nature to show the contradictions of how innocent yet destructive humanity can be.
As a feminist poet, Beveridge commonly expresses the characters in stereotypical roles in a manner of females being innocent and kind whereas males are destructive and harsh.
In the poem The Two Brothers, these stereotypical roles are displayed through young children. In this poem, a young girl is being taunted by two young brothers, hence the name of the poem.
The young girl is seen as sensitive and heroic as she …show more content…
In contrast, Beveridge demonstrates the brutality of the brothers after the bothers purposely kill the snails by placing salt on them in stanza 5. Similes are used such as “the snails boil and froth like illicit stills” in line 19.
By the effect of enlightening the young girl and the creatures, the brothers are highly more portrayed as destructive and harmful and so the death of the creatures seem to be more cruel. Thus Judith Beveridge uses this poem to express light and darkness of humanity by using stereotypical gender roles.
Another poem Judith Beveridge has written to illuminate humanity is Fox in a Tree Stump. This poem is quite similar to The Two Brothers as it also has a stereotypical gender role for the characters and combines childhood innocence, human cruelty and the natural world.
The young girl in this poem is faced with a hard decision of whether facing her uncle's anger or going against her own morals. The first stanza starts off with the young girl gripping a branch in stress, as she was left by her uncle to forcibly kill a fox. Beveridge uses metaphors to express the girls churning with fear such as “terror barrel-rode through my stomach” in line