Summary
The poem introduces us to an old prison, which has no roof and is a vessel for the icy wind.
It is a “dark and fierce day” and the poet compares the wind to “an angry bee” hunting for honey in the sea.
The bones of the prison are awash in shadows.
The poet wonders who built this place and who worked here.
The wind and sea respond and say that the people have been blown away from their “cold nest.”
The poet knows the prisoners were lonely and solitary in their cells, neither breeding nor loving.
She concludes that they spent their days crying just like the wind cries.
Analysis
“The Old Prison” evokes William Wordsmith’s poem “Tintern Abbey” and Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Abbey in the Oakwood in its Romantic, haunting depiction of a building in ruins, inhabited only by animals and plants and visited only by wind and rain. Instead of an abbey, though, it is a prison, and those who were within its walls were not devoted to serving God but to serving time.
The prison of the poem is based on a specific one. According to composer and educator Sandra Milliken, who researched the poem for a composition she based on Wright’s work, “It reflects on the ruins of the jail at the historical settlement of Port Arthur, which is located on a narrow peninsula jutting out into the Southern Ocean on the far south-east coast of Tasmania. Established by Governor George Arthur in 1830 and in service until 1877, the jail housed around 2000 prisoners, most of whom had re-offended since their arrival in Australia as convicts. The prison was virtually escape-proof, surrounded as it was by cold, shark-infested waters. There was only a narrow land access route and that was guarded by a line of ferocious dogs. Although it was planned as a ‘model prison’, it was more like hell on earth for the inmates, who had sentences ranging from several years to life. Following its closure, the settlement became derelict and was largely destroyed by bushfires. In 1979 it was restored by the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service and has subsequently become a very popular tourist destination.”
While most modern societies have prisons to house their criminals, prisons have a particularly unpleasant place in Australian history. Australia became a British colony in 1788, and since Britain’s prisons were overflowing, shipping the convicts to Australia seemed like a perfect solution. As the continent was “uninhabited” (i.e., only indigenous people were there), prisons would not be bothersome. Convict labor helped shape the penal colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania), Queensland, and Swan River. Shipping convicts from the British isles to Australia ended in 1868, with a total of over 160,000 men and women undergoing the forced journey. As Milliken noted, conditions were harsh—exactly what Wright would conjure in her poem.
The poem begins with an image of a “row of cells,” which suggests an orderly, strict, and inorganic space to house people. But no one is here now, and these rows are no longer roofed. The wind, compared to “an angry bee” and possessive of a “breath of ice,” hurtles itself through the ruined space, and it can be gleaned that the wind would have been just as cold and penetrating in the days when prisoners were still within the walls. Words like “shadow,” “hollow,” “bone,” “bitter,” and “empty” create a mood of desolation. Wright meditates on who built and resided in this place, comparing their cells to a “cold nest” and depicting their absence as being “broken” and “blown away.” In the final stanza she says they “did not breed nor love” but instead “cried” in their cells alone.
The frequent use of words that suggest sounds—“mouth,” “flute,” “sings,” “song,” “cried”—creates the impression of a haunting, as if the ghostly voices of the formerly incarcerated howl with the wind. Like Wright’s implications in her poems about aboriginal Australians, the prisoners were marginalized people, unfit to be part of mainstream Euro-Australian society. They were set apart in places like “The Old Prison,” but they could not, and cannot, be fully forgotten. The walls that they helped build remain, as do their voices.
