Train Journey Literary Elements

The first-person speaker observes the landscape outside the train she is traveling on.

The poem is written in free verse, resembles a Shakespearian sonnet with an added couplet, and contains loose rhymes that create a sense of rhythm.

Metaphors
-"your delicate dry breasts" (Line 4): The land is compared to the body of a woman.

Similes
-"and the small trees on their uncoloured slope / like poetry moved" (Lines 5-6): The movement of the trees is compared to the ideal way that poetry itself moves: articulate, sharp, and purposeful.

Alliteration
-:your delicate dry breasts" (Line 4): The /d/ repeats.
-"under the crosswise currents" (Line 6): The /c/ repeats.
-"Break with your violent root the virgin rock" (Line 8): The /v/ and /r/ repeat.

Assonance
-"dry flight" (Line 7): The long "i" sound repeats.

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Lyric Poetry, Nature Poetry

The setting is a train traveling through the Australian landscape at night.

Dreamlike, Concerned, Celebratory

The protagonist is the beautiful and resilient nature of the trees, which soothes the speaker's worry. The antagonist is whatever contributes to the barrenness of the landscape (such as drought).

The major conflict in this poem is the speaker's concern for the ability of the landscape to produce life. The land is represented as the body of a woman who has "delicate dry breasts," meaning that she cannot feed her children. This alludes to anxiety concerning the survival of all life, including humans.

The climax occurs when the speaker awakens in the last two lines of the poem and witnesses the trees burn suddenly into flowers more lovely than the moon.

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-The "delicate dry breasts" of the landscape allude to the experience of motherhood.
-The line "country that built my heart" alludes to Dorothea Mackellar's "My Country"

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-The land is personified as a mother.
-The trees are personified when the speaker addresses box-tree and ironbark, urging them to claim their strength.

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