Gwen Harwood relationships throughout poems

Gwen Harwood’s poetry endures to engage readers through its poetic treatment of loss and consolation. Gwen Harwood’s seemingly ironic simultaneous examination of the personal and the universal is regarded as holding sufficient textual integrity that it has come to resonate with a broad audience and a number of critical perspectives. This is clearly evident within her poems ‘At Mornington’ and ‘A Valediction’, these specific texts have a main focus on motif that once innocence is lost it cannot be reclaimed, and it is only through appreciating the value of what we have lost that we can experience comfort and achieve growth.
Gwen Harwood’s poetry explores the reality of human existence, utilising a number of personal experiences in order to impart meaning onto the responders. The poems, At Mornington and A Valediction, explore countless thematic concerns including the loss of childhood innocence, comprehending mortality and maturation of individuals. Utilising a regular variation of tense, between past and present, and her own personal relationships with others, Harwood’s poetry provokes an appreciation of the past, and reinforce themes, which highlights their universal significance. Within the beginning of the poem At Mornington, Harwood explores a childhood memory, at “the sea’s edge”, in order to highlight her apparent childhood strength in her naïve belief that she could defy nature by “walking on water/it’s only a matter of balance”, only to be saved by her father. This nativity is reinforced in the parable of the pumpkin, which grew upwards in “airy defiance of nature”. The biblical allusion with the attempt to walk on water reinforces the blind faith and innocence of the child which is contrasted to the personas self-awareness and acceptance of her own mortality, “at the time of life, when our bones begin to wear”. This childhood recollection can be deemed as the commencement of her acceptance of death; however it is only upon self-reflection on this