English Poems Essay By Alex Harrison
Essay Question
How do poets construct their poems to reveal the values of the composer and their context, and what do these poems say about the Australian experience?
The Convicts Arrival by Francis MacNamara
The narrative poem “The Convicts Arrival” or a “Convicts Lament on the Death of Captain Logan”, written by famous poet Francis MacNamara. The poem that was written around 18 October 1830 reveals Francis MacNamara’s values, perspective and the context of Australian experience by using multiple techniques throughout the poem that include metaphors, repetition and rhyming and many more. The purpose of “The Convicts Arrival" is to put the harsh realities that the convicts faced after being transported
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This allows the viewers to read with more compassion and see the text as more of a story. This formal style is expressed as a poem that needs to be taken seriously. MacNamara includes a range of other techniques in this text similar to context, metaphor,repetition and rhyming. He uses historical context to describe the transportation of convicts to australia. MacNamara takes advantage of repetition in the quote “Leave those tyrants far, far behind”. The use of this technique is to advance the emphasis and emotion of the desperation of wanting to get away. The second technique is the use of the metaphor, "to trace from heaven the morning dew" that is used to express the daily routine of waking at the break of dawn, continuously being forced or coerced into a full day of hard labour and graphic environment. This is followed up by two lines after; “Our daily labour for to renew.” meaning that they have to continue the labour. Rhyming is another familiar technique used in this text. Although there is no traditional rhyme scheme, it’s still used to evoke emotion for the audience like empathy, compassion and sorrow to give the reader a pleasurable reading experience about the convicts being able to start anew in a new land where everyone is equal. The context is the British Empire using Australia to decrease the overcrowding population of the British …show more content…
The poem projects the values of Banjo’s and the Australian experience with using many techniques such as simile, rhyming, alliteration and humour. The poem has 4 lines - 11 stanzas with an exception for the first stanza, with 8 lines commonly called an octave. The purpose of “A Bush Christening" is to tell an entertaining, funny story for the readers of the poem so they can indulge in the experience. The audience for A Bush Christening is for anyone looking for a story with humorous context that readers nowadays can project their own experiences through. The poem is about a little boy who is afraid to get christened by a priest after his mother announces her worries about him not officially being part of their religion and wouldn't get into heaven if something were to happen to him. The first technique Banjo Paterson has used in his poem is rhyming, which keeps the reader entertained and influences the audience to see the poem in a more lighthearted context. The rhyming pattern is an ABCB rhyme scheme, which is where the last word in the second and last line of each stanza rhymes together. This allows the reader to get involved into the story on a more personal level and helps develop the humorous poem even more. Another technique used is alliteration, which has an effect of