Trevor's Writing

Poem: And a Good Friday was had by all by Australian poet Bruce Dawe

One of the problems with writing poems about well known Christian themes is just that; they are very well known. It is therefore a challenge to write something fresh and original about a very well known topic. This is what immediately impressed me about this poem. It certainly looks at the crucifixion from a totally different point of view – that of the centurion.

            There is an immediate impact upon the reader, especially one with a deep Christian understanding of what it all means. Here is the centurion dealing with the event as just another day at work. ‘Orders is orders, I said after it was over/ nothing personal you understand.’ It is his casual approach to just another day on the job that bites so hard into those to whom the cross is so significant.

            Dawe has the uncanny ability to describe events in startling imagery. Consider, for example, these lines: ‘he rose in the hot air/ like a diver just leaving the springboard, arms spread/ so it seemed/ over the whole damned creation.’ It is an image that is not easily dismissed – or forgotten. And I love the irony – and spiritual significance – of the phrase ‘the whole damned creation.’ Without the sacrifice of Christ, the whole of creation was indeed damned.

            The final line has a chilling poignancy: ‘and a blind man in tears.’ We are all, in a sense, blind to the truth of what happened at Calvary, until the tears of repentance and acceptance cleanse our thinking.

Poem: Homo Suburbiensis by Australian poet Bruce Dawe

            On reading this interesting poem my immediate thought was that it expressed isolation and alienation. Australian suburban life can be – often is – a lonely, soul destroying place to be. Sadly, many do not know anything about their neighbours, not even their names. The whole poem expresses the loneliness and isolation of one man, lost and confused in his vegetable garden, the ‘one constant in a world of variables.’

            Everything in the poem spoke to me of the ordinary, the every day, the mundane, ‘the clatter of a dish in a sink,’ and ‘the far whisper of traffic.’ Everything in this poem speaks to me of the utter hopelessness of some city dwellers. It is almost a dirge of despair, summed up in the last line: ‘time, pain, love, hate, age, war, death, laughter, fever.’

Poem: Elegy for Drowned Children by Australian poet Bruce Dawe.

An elegy is a poem dedicated to someone (or something) who is dead. This sad poem is filled with pathos: ‘The voices of parents calling, calling like birds by the water’s edge.’ There are touches of dashed hopes, as in the line ‘The little heaps of clothes, the futures carefully planned?’ As a result I found the poem to be disturbingly sombre and oppressive.

            Dawe begins the poem with a reference to ‘the old king.’ The most obvious interpretation of this is to think of King Neptune. It is for the king’s delight that he takes boys down to his realm, one at a time. One wonders if Dawe has something more sinister in mind, but that is not supported by an interview with him I heard. The poem was just a response to children drowning. He stated that no-one in his family or circle of friends who had experienced the drowning of a child.

            Dawe imagines what it must be like to live in King Neptune’s domain. He states that, in order to keep his subjects happy that ‘Tender and solicitous must be his care.’ It is certainly a different view of drowning. Later in the poem the poet uses a stark contrast to highlight the emotions when he writes: ‘Yet even an old acquisitive king must feel/Remorse poisoning his joy.’ He then goes on to imagine that families who have lost young ones dreaming that their child has returned home ‘with wet and moonlit skin.’ This sad and poignant end of the poem it fitting, and in keeping with the rest of it.

            From a technical point of view, I found this poem to be an interesting one. It has five quatrains, each with a regular abba rhyming pattern, though it has an irregular meter.