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Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poem

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Silvia Plath’s Mushrooms and Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s Municipal Gum both use extended metaphors to symbolise the poets experience with oppression. Plath’s mushrooms become symbolic of the rise of housewives whereas Noonuccal compares the oppression of Indigenous Australian’s to a native gum tree imprisoned by a city. Through their inclusive language, both poets biographically reflect their encounters with oppression. Both poems are free verse, as Plath carefully configured 11 stanza 3 lined poem, to ensure there are 5 syllables in each line whereas Noonuccal’s 16 lined poem contains a peculiar end rhyming scheme. Plath begins the poem with her ‘mushrooms’ growing overnight to ‘acquire the air’ in different places ‘even the paving,’ metaphorically …show more content…

Noonuccal establishes in the first line, ‘Gum tree in the city street’ the native Australian tree has been placed in a foreign environment continuing with enjambment ‘Hard bitumen around your feet,’ to further illustrate the gum being constrained and denied to live freely by the city, symbolising White Australia. Within Municipal Gum, Noonuccal uses an extended simile, ‘Like that poor cart horse/Castrated, Broken, a thing wronged, strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged/ whose hung head and listless mien express/ its hopelessness,’ to further emphasise the extent of the cruel oppression endured by Indigenous Australians. Within the simile, Noonuccal uses a substantial amount of imagery regarding ‘castrated’, ‘strapped’ and ‘buckled’ to represent the domination over the horse juxtaposing how it should be living in its natural environment. Like Noonuccal, Plath further extends her metaphor by comparing the women to household objects ‘we are shelves, we are/ tables,’ to symbolise the women’s forced domestic servitude. Both poets, predominantly Plath, use sound devices. In Mushrooms Plath uses sibilance, ‘soft fists insist,’ focusing of the strong ‘S’ sound, internal rhyme ‘nudgers and shovers,’ and assonance ‘heaving the needles, the leafy bedding,’ detailing the ‘E’

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