Symbiosis and Harmony with the Landscape in the Poems of Judith Wright and Samuel Taylor Coleridge Olivia Clare 12th Grade

It is through the concept symbiosis and harmony with the landscape that Judith Wright effectively presents a positive experiences between individuals and their environment. These notions are most transparent through her poems, South of My Days and Flame-Tree in a Quarry, of which publication dates span from 1942-1970. Furthermore, Samuel Taylor Coleridge consistently and evocatively expands upon the notion of harmony with the landscape to demonstrate the encounters between people and their environment through “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”.

Judith Wright’s “South of My Days” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” both present personas who feel an intrinsic connection with the landscape, one so deep that they become symbiotic in harmony, and this is demonstrated through the real, remembered, and imagined environments. The character of Old Dan within South of My Days acts as a representation of the influence of the remembered landscape, and how it continues to affect individuals into the present, “Seventy years of stories he clutches round his bones. / Seventy summers are hived in him like old honey.” Metaphor physically connects Old Dan with the landscape as they become one, and the anaphora of “seventy...