Australia 23103

Australia - A.D. Hope Alec Derwent Hope was born on 21 July 1907 at Cooma, in the Snowy Mountains area of southern New South Wales, where his father was a Presbyterian minister. He was educated at home and at schools in Tasmania and New South Wales as the family moved around to different parishes. Matriculating to Sydney University, he graduated Bachelor of Arts with majors in English and Philosophy in 1928 and won a scholarship to University College, Oxford. His Oxford career, however, was not a distinguished one; he returned to Sydney in 1932 with a disappointing third-class degree and trained as a teacher. In 1937 Hope married Penelope Robinson with whom he had three children. He was appointed lecturer in education at the Sydney Teachers' College in 1937, later becoming lecturer in English there from 1938-44. During the 1940s Hope took part in the Australian Broadcasting Commission's Children's Session, as 'Anthony Inkwell' conducting the literary section of the Argonaut's Club. In 1945 he moved to the University of Melbourne and in 1951 was appointed Professor of English at Canberra University College (later the Australian National University) where he taught until his retirement in 1968. Although he had been writing for many years, Hope did not publish any of his poems until the 1930s. His first collection, The Wandering Islands, did not appear until 1955, by which time he had built a reputation as a poet through publications in various periodicals. It was praised for Hope's skilful use of traditional verse forms and critique of contemporary values and received the Grace Leven Poetry Prize. His second collection, Poems(1960), was published in London, underscoring the fact that for many years Hope was the best-known Australian poet internationally, appearing in many anthologies and receiving in 1965 the Arts Council of Great Britain Poetry Award, in 1968 the Levinson Prize for Poetry (Chicago) and in 1969 the Ingram Merrill Award for Literature (New York). A small volume of selected poems, A. D. Hope (1963) in Angus and Robertson's Australian Poets series, was soon followed by Collected Poems 1930-1965 (1966). Thereafter collections of new poems appeared at regular intervals, interspersed by new editions of Selected Poems in 1972, 1986 and 1992, the latter sharing the Australian Capital Territory Book of the Year Award for 1993. A Late Picking: Poems 1965-1974 (1975) received The Age Book of the Year Award, Imaginative Writing Prize for 1976. The satiric note so strong in much of Hope's earlier work, and seen especially in his mock-heroic Dunciad Minor (1970), a contemporary version of English eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope's The Dunciad,is less evident in his late poems. His interest in mythology, seen as embodying 'the great commonplaces' of human life, remained until the end, as is apparent in the title of his final collection Orpheus (1991). In addition to his many volumes of poetry, Hope was a widely published critic, reviewer and editor. The Cave and the Spring: Essays on Poetry(1965) won both the 1965 Britannica-Australia Literary Award and the Volkswagon Award for 1966. After some years in a Canberra nursing home, Hope died on 13 July 2000. In 1981 he had been made a Companion of the Order of Australia for services to literature. Australia A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey In the field uniform of modern wars, Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.

They call her a young country, but they lie: She is the last of lands, the emptiest, A woman beyond her change of life, a breast Still tender but within the womb is dry. Without songs, architecture, history: The emotions and superstitions of younger lands, Her rivers of water drown among inland sands, The river of her immense stupidity Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth. In them at last the ultimate men arrive Whose boast is not: "we live" but "we survive", A type who will inhabit the dying earth. And her five cities, like five teeming sores, Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state Where second hand Europeans pullulate Timidly on the edge of alien shores. Yet there are some like me turn gladly home From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find The Arabian desert of the human mind, Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come, Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes Which is called civilization over there. Introduction: A.D. Hope is an Australian poet. Australian poets write about aborigins (native Australians) and about their identity in their poems. The poem Australia talks about the present condition of Australia. The present condition of Australia: Australia was once a land of trees, but today it is full of war and soldiers. The lands are now covered by the military uniforms – green and grey. Its hills are dark and broken like the broken lion statues of Egypt. People call Australia as an young country. The poet does not agree with them because Australia has a long history. It has its own songs, arts and history. It may look young but it has a long history to tell. The aborigins are enslaven by the alien countries. The aborigins does not live but they are said to ‗survive‘. The five major cities of Australia (Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Canberra and Adelaide) are colonised. The aborigins are chased out by the alien rulers. The original citizens are no more given equal rights. Conclusion: The poet is hopeful. He ends the poem with a positive note. He says that some prophet would emerge or come from the Australian ground, who would claim freedom and rights to liberate the aborigins and Australian culture from the colonisers.

Jessie Mackay : The Noosing of the sun-god "Tiraha, Te Ra! I am Maui,— Maui, the bantling, the darling;— Maui, the fire-thief, the jester;— Maui, the world's fisherman! Thou art the Sun-God, Te Ra of the flaming hair. Heretofore man is thy moth. What is the life of man, Bound to thy rushing wings, Thou fire-bird of Rangi? A birth in a burning; A flash and a war-word; A failing, a falling Of ash to the ashes Of bottomless Po! "I am Maui! The great one, the little one; A bird that could nest In the hand of a woman. I—I have vanquished The Timeless, the Ancients. The Heavens cannot bind me, But I shall bind thee, Tiraha, Te Ra!" Ah, the red day Of the fighting of Maui! How he waxed, how he grew; How the Earth Mother shook! And the sea was afraid, And receded and moaned Like a babe that is chidden. The rope that was spun In the White World of Maui With blessing and cursing Curled on the dazzling Neck of Te Ra. "A pull for the living That gasp in the light! A pull for the dead In abysses of Po! A pull for the babes That are not but shall be

In the cool, in the dawn, In the calm of Hereafter! Tiraha, Te Ra!" The sky was a smother Of flame and commotion. Low leaped the red fringes To harass the mountains, And Maui laughed out: "Hu, hu, the feathers Of the fire-bird of Rangi!" But the rope of the blessing, The rope of the cursing, It shrivelled and broke. He stooped to the coils And twisted them thrice, And thickly he threw it On the neck of Te Ra. "Twice for the living! And twice for the dead! And twice for the long Hereafter! All the heart of the heavens, The heart of the earth, Hung on the rope of Maui. But the red lizards licked it, The fire-knives chipped it, It frittered and broke. Then Maui stood forth On the moaning headlands And looked up to Io— Io, the Nameless, the Father, To whom the eyes pray, But whom the tongue names not. And a thin voice clave the fire As the young moon cleaves the blue Like a shark's tooth in the heavens. "O my son, my son, and why are thy hands so red? Wilt fight the fire with fire, or bind the Eterne with deeds? Shatter the strong with strength?—Nay, like to unlike is wed; What man goes forth to the river to smite a reed with reeds? "Soft and wan is water, yet it is stronger than fire; Pale and poor is patience, yet it is stronger than pride. Out of the uttermost weakness cometh the heart's desire: Thou shalt bind the Eternal with need and naught beside.

"Plait thee a rope of rays, twist thee a cord of light; Twine thee a tender thread that never was bought or sold; Twine thee a living thread of sorrow and ruth and right, And were there twenty suns in Rangi, the rope shall hold." Then Maui bowed his head And smote his palms together.— "Ina, my sister, little one, heed! Give me thy hair." Ina, the Maiden of Light, Gave him her hair. Swiftly he wove it, Laughing out to the skies: "Thrice for the living! Thrice for the dead! And thrice for the long Hereafter!" The thin little cord Flew fast on the wind Past the Eyes of the Kings To the neck of Te Ra. And then was the pull, The red lizards licked it, The fire-knives chipped it, But it stood, but it held! And measured and slow Evermore was the flight Of the fire-bird of Rangi.

David Rubadiri's "A Negro Labourer in Liverpool" Introduction David Rubadiri's "A Negro Labourer in Liverpool" strives to highlight the plight of a negro labourer in Liverpool. The indefinite article 'a' points to the lack of a specific identity. They are just one among a group, one of the community, who do not necessarily possess any individual identity. They are labeled according to their work(labourer)or corresponding to their geographical location

Explication David Rubadiri hints at the indifference of society as a whole to the plight of the labourer as he states that he 'es' him. He slouches on dark backstreet pavements. His 'marginalization' is evident in his position 'slouching'. Further, it is also emphasized in his being side-stepped on the pavements. Again the pavement is qualified by the phrase 'dark backstreet'. The head is 'bowed' when it would have preferred to be straight. He is overcome with fatigue and totally exhausted. He is a dark shadow amongst other shadows. He has no unique identity, his life is not colourful. The poet asserts that he has lifted his face to his, as in acknowledgement. Their eyes met but on his

dark Negro face. The poet probably refers to the reflection of the speaker's eyes in the eyes of the labourer. The eyes are foregrounded on his dark face. There is no sunny smile as he wears a forlorn expression. The sun is an important and recurrent motif in African poetry. A wise man once said that a man is poor if he does not have a penny; he is poor if he does not possess a dream. The labourer here neither has hope nor longing. Only the mechanical 'cowed dart of eyes' that is more mechanized than the imive activity of the people. People in their 'imive' fast-forward life fail to notice the labourer. He painfully searches for a face to comprehend his predicament, acknowledge his suffering. It expresses his utter solitude and utter desperation. Notice that the poet shifts from the indefinite article 'a' to the definite article 'the' in addressing the Negro labourer in the second stanza. It is to assert and affirm his existence in society that the poet does the same. David Rubadiri goes on to describe him in of his motherland; and in of his emotions: 'a heart heavy'. He bears a century's oppression that had sought after an identity. He strives to attain the fire of manhood. But ironically, even in the Land of the free (England), he is unable to attain the same. Nevertheless, the free here are also dead, in a state of decay and stagnation, for they too grope for a light, a ray of hope. He awaits a new dawn, as fresh as that promised as he arose from his mother's womb. He longs for the rays of hope of a sun that will never set for him. Presently his hope is his shovel-his hard work, and he discovers content in its fulfillment.

Dereck Walcott: Ruins of a Great House ―Ruins of a Great House‖ is a very early poem by Derek Walcott, written sometime in 1953-4. Walcott was then a postgraduate student of 24, studying for a Diploma in Education at the University of the West Indies, in Jamaica. On a walk with one of his tutors, the poet John Figueroa, on Guava Ridge in the Blue Mountains, he saw the ruins in question which, so he said a year later, inspired this poem . (1) The poem was among those sent to Roy Fuller and chosen by Geoffrey Moore for publication in New World Writing in November 1956. It was republished, with a few interesting changes, (2) in Walcott‘s first major collection, In a Green Night (1962), and has since appeared in every collected and selected volume of Walcott‘s poems. The period 1953-1956 was a time of more or less conflictual decolonization, in Malaya, in East Africa and in Walcott‘s native cricket-playing Caribbean. In what was increasingly seen as the twilight of Empire, one of the central questions was that of what would survive, and that in turn raised further questions of legacy and memory, questions of divided loyalty, which I would like to explore through this poem (3). The poem begins with a specifically Caribbean site of resistance: the Great House, both a literally commanding presence in the West Indian landscape and a supreme symbol of the plantation economy based on slavery. Walcott was not alone at this time in taking the ruins of a Great House as a point of departure (4) . As their titles suggest, great houses also figure in the first novels of George Lamming and Wilson Harris: In the Castle of My Skin (1953) and Palace of the Peacock (1959). Indeed, like these novels, Walcott‘s poem can be read as a miniature bildungsroman, in which the historical reality and persistent patriarchal presence of the Great House of colonialism are transformed into an extended metaphor for a life-and-death struggle between the old and the new. We immediately recognize the poem as an ode written in the manner of the English Romantics, both a description of a view and an anatomy of the viewer‘s emotions. True to type, (5) it is irregular in form, with apparently random, yet emphatic, masculine rhymes, as well as the more modern half-

rhymes, and eye-rhymes. The description of the ruins of the Great House, emblematic of the end of Empire, is a masterly variation on the Romantic theme of decay, with the scattered stones reminiscent of the stones which mock the fallen pride of Ozymandias (6) . Something is clearly rotten in the state of Denmark: ‗Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake‘. The sordid reality of the human suffering that lay below the surface of the former life of the great House is conjured up in a powerful series of Gothic images of disease, stench and corruption, ‗the leprosy of Empire‘. The poem thus begins with the question of historical memory, with the Jacobean theme of revenge; all the scattered traces of the past ‗shriek with stain‘ (4). The rotting slave literally reeks, and (pun intended) metaphorically wreaks his particular revenge for the historical wrong done to enslaved Africans. But the poem does not stay with this ancestral memory; more interestingly, it moves on to another form of memory, in order to end, in a way that seems to surprise the poet himself, on the theme of comion, in the form of a dialogue between friends. Following Aristotle, the poet moves from the particulars of history to the universal world of poetry. The site of struggle is displaced from history to poetry, with the fire metaphor of my title providing a key moment in that transition: But, as dead ash is lifted in a wind That fans the blackening ember of the mind, My eyes burned from the ashen prose of Donne. 1. These lines are pivotal because they express a reversal of what we would expect: the poet‘s eyes are no longer burning with revenge, no longer ―Ablaze with rage‖, but cool to the black coal of comion . Paradoxically, the comion comes from ―the ashen prose of Donne ‖ , from the core of the enslaving civilization of the dead white male. The Great House, as the allusions to Donne‘s magnificent "Meditation XVII" remind us, (7) is also the House of Death, that universal destination which awaits all mankind. No temple of the body is safe from the ―worm‘s rent or the mouse‘s attentions. . The poem is drenched with allusions to the idea of man‘s mortality: from the epigraph taken from Sir Thomas Browne, ―it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness ‖ (8) to the three crows of lines 7-8, who are perhaps the three ravens of the Jacobean song and mystical allegory ―There were three ravens sat on a tree (9)‖. The ―evil days‖ and ―evil times‖ are not merely particular accidents of history. As the allusion to Milton‘s Paradise Lost reminds us (10) , they are part of the Fall, part of that ―aboriginal calamity ‖ (11) which affects all men. The Great House thus becomes a Pastoral site where a return to innocence is possible, where, as in Blake‘s poem ‗Night‘, the lion can lie down with the lamb (12) . For Walcott the Christian poet this is possible because the advent of Christ effects a transition from the Old Testament, the era of rage and revenge, ―eye for eye, tooth for tooth ‖ (13) to the New Testament, an era of comion and accommodation: ―In my Father‘s house there are many mansions (14)‖. Christlike, poetry performs a healing function, the poet using what T.S. Eliot called ―the sharp comion of the healer‘s art (15) ‖. Walcott heals the hurt of history by putting it into the universal perspective of the grim comedy of Death. Such imperial victories as might have been won by the surprise attacks of padded cavalry are short-lived triumphs, when compared with the continual struggle against Death, the ―padded cavalry of the mouse (16) ‖ . In Walcott‘s poem the history of the slave rotting beneath the former beauty of the Great House and garden, is ‗silt‘, ‗silt that clogs‘, a metaphor for the rage at history that impedes creative thought. For Walcott, as for T.S. Eliot , history on its own is merely ―roots that clutch‖, ―a heap of broken images‖ (17). The poet‘s eye must see beyond that of the historian, find the rivulet, and release the waters of Lethe so that ―The rivers flows, obliterating hurt.‖ Not history, but the hurt of history must be seen in perspective if something new is to be constructed. That is exactly what the poem does in its central stanzas, when the poet himself becomes part of the landscape: ―I climbed a wall…‖, ―And when a wind shook in the limes I heard‖ and ―pacing, I thought next‖. The thoughts that occur to the poet ‗pacing‘ (18) are memories of ―ancestral murderers and poets‖, Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake

(19) . These slave-traders and pirates were ‗ancestral‘ for Walcott who, as a man, came of mixed blood and who, as a poet, was inevitably apprenticed to all the poets that had written before him. How to resist the murderers without sacrificing the poets? In ll. 23-4, Walcott literally and metaphorically surmounts the paradox: ―I climbed a wall with the grille ironwork / Of exiled craftsmen‖. The image of the grille ironwork offers an escape from a silting sense of guilt because it was made by ‗exiled craftsmen‘ with whom Walcott can identify, as indeed can all humanity, in the sense that we are all exiles from paradise, all disjecta membra. The poet uses the work of these former craftsmen in order to see beyond the wall of history, and what he sees in that perspective is that man‘s exiled condition is universal and apparently permanent. Over time, all people are both colonizing and colonized: the Greeks, the Romans, the French, Faulkner‘s slave-owning South. ‗Albion too was once / A colony like ours. As Walcott said in a later interview: […] the whole process of civilization is cyclical. The good civilization absorbs a certain amount, like the Greeks. Empires are smart enough to steal from the people they conquer. They steal the best things. And the people who have been conquered should have the sense to steal back (20) . This is exactly what Walcott the poetical pirate is doing in this poem: stealing and giving back. The entire poem, as an early critic pointed out, is ―strung on a framework of quotations (21) ‖. In the 1950s, the struggle between the strong culture and the weak one might have been unequal, but it was never entirely one-sided. Walcott‘s borrowing is interactive, enriching both the new (Caribbean) culture and the old (European) one. In his reiterated use of allusion Walcott is literally writing back into the Modernist tradition, and also into the seventeenth and eighteenth century traditions of the Country House poem (22) . Walcott was criticized for talking to and with the enemy, but he always defended himself in of the cultural situation in which he found himself, in the Caribbean in the 1950s: […] the fact remains, the masterpieces of the language in which I work are from a white literary history. That must not prevent me from mastering the language; it is not a matter of subservience, it is a matter of dominating. One becomes a master, one doesn‘t become a slave (23) . Indeed, in this poem we see no evidence of slavish borrowing: the images of the Old World are transformed by the landscape of the New. Walcott‘s version of the Garden of Eden contains, not an apple and a snake, but limes and a lizard. The familiar is made rich and strange: as in the reference to Henry V (24) . Surely only a Caribbean, island-loving poet could so affectionately draw our attention to the vividly vernacular in Shakespeare: ―nook-shotten‖ . Walcott‘s doubly creative borrowing works in a way that is not hostile, but accommodating, an openended dialogue between friends. The unfinished end of the poem suggests the beginning of a new exchange between former enemies. The final allusion to Donne in the last line ―as well as if a manor of thy friend‘s‖ is a brilliantly mocking and self-mocking pun. Manor is also manner, Walcott writing in the style of his friends, in the manner of the colonial tradition. Some postcolonial critics have argued that in shifting the site of memory from history to poetry, Walcott evades the main issue. The dense intertextuality at work in this poem might seem to create an entirely self-referential, self-enclosed world outside linear time. Yet poetic comion, in obliterating the hurt of history, does not obliterate history itself. Quite the contrary: in poetry history is resurrected. Memory is constructed not in stone, but in language, in the ‗memorable speech‘ that was Auden‘s definition of poetry. It is in that sense that poetry can offer such a formidable site of resistance. Poetry is the sovereign site of memory and, as the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah once pointed out, for the wretched of the earth, memory is a subtle but potent weapon.