Judith Wright: Poetry Literary Elements

Metho Drinker: Third-person narrator

Magpies: First-person narrator

Legend: The poet/third-person narrator

The Old Prison: The poet/a first-person narrator (there is no "I," but the poet does ask a question)

Five Senses: First-person narrator

Request to a Year: First-person narrator

South of My Days: First-person narrator

Varies

Metho Drinker:
"His white and burning girl, his woman of fire, / creeps to his heart and sets a candle there"

Magpies:
"They look like certain gentlemen / who seem most nonchalant and wise"

Legend:
"He ran like a hare, / he climbed like a fox"

The Old Prison:
"the wind like an angry bee / hunts for the black honey"

Five Senses:
"and as a lily gathers /the elements together"
"While I'm in my five senses / they send me spinning / all sounds and silences, / all shape and colour / as thread for that weaver, / whose web within me growing"

Request to a Year:
none

South of My Days:
"Seventy years are hived in him like old honey"
"It was the flies we seen first, swarming like bees."
"he shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror's cards"

Metho Drinker:
"a dead dark moon"
"the weight and waterfall"

Magpies:
"such a song / of grace and praise — no man nor bird"

Legend:
"he caught it in his hands, the colours and the cold"

The Old Prison:
"the wind like an angry bee / hunts for the black honey /in the pits of the hollow sea."

Five Senses:
"they send me spinning / all sounds and silences, / all shape and colour /"
"whose web within me growing / follows beyond my knowing / some pattern sprung from nothing"

Request to a Year:
"from a difficult distance"

South of My Days:
"wincing under the winter"
"clean, lean, hungry country"

Legend:
The boy is the son of a blacksmith, a trade that deals with metal and weapons and hard, sharp tools, but he is the one able to capture the ephemeral, delicate rainbow.

Request to a Year:
There is verbal irony in "who having eight children/ and little opportunity for painting pictures."

Poetry

Australia, 20th century

Nostalgic, gloomy, reverent, joyous, contemplative

Protagonists: Old Dan, great-great-grandmother, Year, blacksmith's boy

Metho Drinker: Will the man succumb to death from the drug?

Magpies: None

Legend: Will the blacksmith's boy make it through the wilderness?

The Old Prison: None

Five Senses: What does the confluence of the poet's senses manifest for her?

Request to a Year: Will the son survive the river?

South of My Days: Will the stories of the past still be told, heeded, and remain worthy of entertainment and inspiration and warning? Whose stories?

Metho Drinker: The narrator embraces Death.

Magpies: The birds attack their food.

Legend: The boy captures the rainbow.

The Old Prison: None

Five Senses: None

Request to a Year: The young boy almost dies and is saved by his sister.

South of My Days: Dan tells his dramatic stories.

Legend:
"the rain came down like mattocks" foreshadows the appearance of a rainbow at the end of the poem.

Request to a Year:
"(which luckily later caught him on his way)" is an understatement, as the boy's life was saved.

Legend:
The biblical story of Noah's ark and the rainbow, a promise from God to never flood the earth again

The Old Prison:
The penal colonies of Australia

South of My Days:
Droving, aboriginal past

Request to a Year:
"with the artist's isolating eye"

Metho Drinker:
"the flesh that hides from bone"
"It was for Death he took her; death is but this; / and yet he is uneasy under her kiss / and winces from that acid of her desire"

Magpies:
"the magpies walk / with hands in pockets"

Legend:
"Mountains jumped in his way"
"Up came the night ready to swallow him"
"the rainbow shone as brightly as the sun"

The Old Prison:
"the wind now cries"

Five Senses:
"While I'm in my five senses / they send me spinning"

Request to a Year:
"Year, if you have no Mother's day present planned, / Reach back"

South of My Days:
"old stories that still go walking in my sleep"
"the old roof cracks its joints"
"the old cottage lurches in for shelter"

Magpies:
"But not one man that I have heard / throws back his head in such a song / of grace and praise — no man nor bird"

South of My Days:
Crack, shuffles