The Violets Gwen Harwood Analysis
The Violets by Gwen Harwood was written during the late 1960s and was published in the anthology Selected Poems in 1975. As we know, Harwood’s poems explore philosophical and universal ideas. Harwood herself says “My themes are old ones – of love, memory, experience etc”, all of which are explored in this poem through the use of poetic and language techniques.
Literally, the persona of the poem is outside when some aspects of the nature around her, like violets and a blackbird, trigger a memory from her childhood. The poem then flashbacks to a childhood memory of the persona as a young girl, which is shown through the indentation of the stanzas, where the girl wakes up in the afternoon thinking it is morning and becomes upset when she wonders ‘Where’s morning gone?’. This continues until she falls asleep in the memory, and we are brought back to the present. The last stanza sums up some of her most valued childhood memories which continue to ‘drift in the air’ and remain with her.
Figurative language and sensory imagery is used in the first stanza to create a tone of grieving, loss and nostalgia, through imagery of a dull ‘cold dusk’ and ‘frail, melancholy flowers among ashes’. The simile ‘the melting west is striped like ice-cream’ creates a sense of transition, reflecting the beginning of the persona’s introspective retreat into her thoughts. The use of an anaphora, which is the repetition of a word at the beginning of lines or sentences, in the line ‘Ambiguous light. Ambiguous sky’ also displays this transience. The symbol of ice-cream also represents childhood and a feeling of nostalgia for that time in the persona’s life. Her attempt at ‘whistling a trill’ may be an attempt to imitate her father’s whistling which is mentioned during the reflection of her memory, suggesting that she is trying to recreate her past experience but can’t properly do so. The persona’s direct speech in the line “Where’s morning gone?” is a rhetorical question that is questioning the
Literally, the persona of the poem is outside when some aspects of the nature around her, like violets and a blackbird, trigger a memory from her childhood. The poem then flashbacks to a childhood memory of the persona as a young girl, which is shown through the indentation of the stanzas, where the girl wakes up in the afternoon thinking it is morning and becomes upset when she wonders ‘Where’s morning gone?’. This continues until she falls asleep in the memory, and we are brought back to the present. The last stanza sums up some of her most valued childhood memories which continue to ‘drift in the air’ and remain with her.
Figurative language and sensory imagery is used in the first stanza to create a tone of grieving, loss and nostalgia, through imagery of a dull ‘cold dusk’ and ‘frail, melancholy flowers among ashes’. The simile ‘the melting west is striped like ice-cream’ creates a sense of transition, reflecting the beginning of the persona’s introspective retreat into her thoughts. The use of an anaphora, which is the repetition of a word at the beginning of lines or sentences, in the line ‘Ambiguous light. Ambiguous sky’ also displays this transience. The symbol of ice-cream also represents childhood and a feeling of nostalgia for that time in the persona’s life. Her attempt at ‘whistling a trill’ may be an attempt to imitate her father’s whistling which is mentioned during the reflection of her memory, suggesting that she is trying to recreate her past experience but can’t properly do so. The persona’s direct speech in the line “Where’s morning gone?” is a rhetorical question that is questioning the