Gwen Harwood's Poetry: Text Guide

Introduction

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When writing about the iconic Australian poet Gwen Harwood, Colleen Keane evokes in The Sydney Morning Herald that “Poetry finds sources of creativity in myth and tradition, but most of all in raw, uncensored life experience.” This is precisely what Harwood does - she draws upon fundamental values of mortality and the passage of time, nature, love and friendships, with all the evocative beauty and rich precision of rhythm, meter, and rhyme schemes embedded in the poetic form. 

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Harwood is a quintessential Australian poet, with much of her writing featuring her personal influences by both the sunny suburbia of Brisbane in her younger life and the colder solitude of Hobart following her marriage. As such, much of her poetry harks from Australian culture and the natural world - but it does so in a way that sculpts out universal human truths. Harwood’s poetry is marked most compellingly by this ability to draw out divine clarity and honest brilliance from the ordinary, mundane, and specific experiences of the individual. 

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Who better, indeed, as a key staple of the Common Module’s focus on “the emotions and qualities related to individual and collective experiences”? As her body of work winds through universal anxieties and joys, we are positioned to emotionally reflect upon these experiences as they will and must manifest in each and every one of our lives - experiences like love, and loss, and growing old. It is important too to recognise Harwood’s mischievous qualities too - her work often aimed to subvert and satirise those in power, ranging from post-WWII patriarchal ideologies to the unyielding hand of literary editors, offering us important insights in light of the module’s focus on “agency and conformity”. 

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The purpose of this text guide is to familiarise you with Harwood’s body of work and establish a clear foundation for which you may begin to understand Harwood’s artistry - and, consequentially, lay the groundwork for top marks in your Common Module essay for English Advanced. 

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Contextual influences

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As with all other English modules, the Year 12 Common Module requires that students establish a clear understanding of the societal and personal contextual influences for your composer and text. This section delves into the key contextual pillars that you should know in order to successfully navigate Harwood’s work.

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Post-WW2 cultural shifts towards patriarchal domesticity

Following the traumatic horrors of the Second World War, Western societies faced an aggressive push towards domestic renewal and suburban stability. In 1942, Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies famously delivered his speech on “The Forgotten People”, praising the Australian middle class and emphasising values of family and self-sacrifice. This idealisation of the “nuclear family” and return towards traditional gender roles characterised the tone of government policies over the 1950s and 1960s. 

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Harwood sardonically critiqued such a reductive commodification of female domesticity, and instead venerated the transcendent beauty of these small spaces occupied by women. She was well known for using a range of male monikers and alter egos within her publishing, and famously used the name “Walter Lehmann” to lampoon the editorial industry. Although critics such as Jennifer Strauss have posited that these were purely pragmatic actions to enable the publishing of her work, Colin Dray has argued alternatively that: 

the ingenious way in which she uses these personas to expand her poetic craft further
than the confines of a page, explore the presumptions of authorship that a reader
brings to any text…

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As such, Harwood’s work was rooted in her praise for the often overlooked, smaller spaces of femininity and womanhood, which fluidly shift into her satire of patriarchal structures within her context. 

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Philosophical influences by Wittgenstein

Harwood has quoted Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work as “informing her entire opus”, as a key figure of language philosophy that influenced and inspired much of her poetry. She references him through indirect allusions and even explicit references, in poems such as ‘Last Meeting’: 

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The world, said Ludwig Wittgenstein,
is everything that is the case.
‍The warmth of human lips and thighs…

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Wittgenstein was an Austro-British philosopher who established himself with his theories of logic and language, and was best known for his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921. Although his perspective on linguistics and truth evolved across his lifetime, his main conceptual argument was that rigid structures like language may mirror the world, but cannot ultimately capture the mystical and ephemeral. Harwood’s choice of quotation from ‘Last Meeting’ is a clear reflection of this view, arguing that cold, academic intellect is unrivalled by felt emotions and experiences like “the warmth of human lips and thighs”. Wittgenstein thus informed a large part of the philosophy and ideas conjured in Harwood’s poetry. 

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Religious influences of Christianity

Although Strauss has previously argued that Harwood’s work “offers little of doctrinal certainty”, other critics including Sarah Golsby-Smith have posited that Harwood’s work subtly reflects her Christian influences. Harwood’s personal context was shaped by the strength and prevalence of Anglican communities throughout her lifetime. 

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The components of Anglicanism born from the structured prayer and aesthetic rituals of Roman Catholicism are prevalent in Harwood’s work, notably her frequent use of images of water and candlelight, and the musical cadence present in her work that is reminiscent of hymnals and liturgy. However, just as Anglicanism is influenced by a Protestant rejection of absolute papal authority and therefore a focus on small communities of worship, so too does Harwood draw upon the divine value of mundane spaces. 

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Golsby-Smith notes that in Harwood’s ‘Lamplit Presences’ essay, she fondly describes her house in Brisbane as a “small weatherboard cottage on stumps” rather than a “heavenly mansion”, supporting the view that Harwood especially venerated the presence of the divine within understated, domestic worlds. 

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Personal move from Brisbane to Hobart

Key Harwood biographer Alison Hoddinott wrote that Harwood described her childhood growing up in the sunny suburbia of Brisbane as a “blessed city of sunshine and colour.” Harwood’s poetry is marked by personal references to this envisioned haven encircling her family line of “strong, self-reliant Australian women” - for instance, referring to her childhood home in Mitchelton in ‘The Violets’. 

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Hoddinott describes Harwood’s move to Hobart following her marriage to linguist Bill Harwood in 1945 as a source of “dislocation”, embodying “the greyer days of her exile”. This sense of alienation and isolation from the lost pastoral paradise and strong matriarchs in Brisbane prefigured much of Harwood’s later work, especially when discussing and satirising the marginalisation of women and female identity in post-war Australia. Nonetheless, much of her poetry still returned longingly to the sun-drenched days of her childhood, often referring to the natural environment of Brisbane as a sanctuary within her work. 

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Musical influences and artistry

Harwood’s childhood was also marked by her talent in piano, studying under Handel scholar Dr Dalley-Scarlett and playing the organ at All Saints’ Anglican Church, Wickham Terrace. She also continued to teach music at St Christopher’s Church of England School for Boys, Brookfield. 

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Aside from poetry, Harwood was also acclaimed for composing 13 librettos across her lifetime (the spoken or sung dialogue or lyrics in an extended musical work such as the opera), collaborating with other prominent Australian librettists such as Larry Sitsky and James Penberthy. Her love of music and its rhythm and meter would often feature in her choice of poetic conventions, as discussed in greater detail in the Form section below.

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Form

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Structure and meter

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Harwood’s body of poetry acts primarily as a response to and subversion of emotional and philosophical dilemmas of mid-20th century Australian life. Her use of formal structures enabled her poetry to become unified, aesthetic objects to ground her audience in the sanctuary of crucial human experiences like love, domesticity, and the passage of time. 

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In her analysis of Harwood’s composition of librettos, Alison Wood notes that: 

Words and music, as Harwood rightly noted, are indissolubly wedded in both
performance and on the page. For, if words are mechanisms for evoking meaning, then
words and music interwoven are not two opposing systems periodically co-mingling, but
are truly multi-modal…In this context words may even be pure music. 

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Similarly, Sarah Golsby-Smith distinguishes the poetic form from other language forms in that it draws upon musical and visual qualities of language beyond only the semantic. This is reflected in Harwood’s tight structure, using the precise metrical frameworks of musicality to evoke the harmonious experiences of humanity that Harwood is interested in spotlighting. For example, Harwood mimics a Bach fugue in her layering of multiple voices in poetry such as ‘Father and Child’’s diptych structure. 

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Although much of her poetry draws upon the rich precision of poetic conventions, including structured stanzas and clear rhyme schemes, Harwood will occasionally disrupt her natural rhythmic baseline with fluid, enjambed lines. This is particularly reflected when her poem seeks to answer key ontological questions, swelling into an emotional climax of transcendence in response. 

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Voice and personae

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Alison Hoddinott, a vital champion of Harwood’s work and her close personal friend of forty years, wrote in The Australian Dictionary of Biography that Harwood possessed “delight in the subterfuge” and wearing “masks”, “[leading] her to create further fictional alteregos”. Although not a prominent feature of the prescribed poems, this use of pseudonyms and alternative identities was a deliberate literary device to form her mischievous social critique and satire. This leads us onto Harwood’s use of the Victorian dramatic monologue to give voice to these characters or alteregos, immersing the reader within their psychological depths. 

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Often, however - and most markedly in the poems we are interested in - Harwood’s voice shifts towards a reflective first-person perspective, echoing her nostalgic and elegiac views. As mentioned previously, these were often anchored in specific Australian landscapes, allowing the physical environment to act as a catalyst for her philosophical meditations. 

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Metapoetry and reflecting upon her artistry

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Harwood self-reflexively venerates the capability of art forms such as poetry to represent lived, shared moments across time. Both explicitly and implicitly, Harwood critiques conventional linguistic structures and classical ideas of philosophical intellect, which has been commonly attributed back to Harwood’s interest in Wittgenstein. For example, ‘The Sharpness of Death’ explicitly challenges philosophers who “cut themselves, and bleed,/and know that knives are sharp,/but prove with complex logic/there’s no such thing as sharpness.” – that is, adhere within their writing to cold logic. Instead, in ‘Beyond Metaphor’, Harwood venerates art that can capture pure and honest humanity - “Only Mozart, perhaps, found the right tone/to make things bearable.” In this way, Harwood frequently engages in metapoetic references to what she strives to achieve and capture within her own form. 

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Navigating Harwood – a hierarchical approach

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Below is my recommended overview of the list of Harwood poems, broken into three tiers of interest – Tier 1 being must-know poems that intricately relate to Harwood’s purpose, Tier 2 being high-value supporting poems, and Tier 3 being poems that can be used selectively to support particular arguments. 

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Tier 1 – Violets, At Mornington, The Sharpness of Death

In my personal opinion, Violets is one of Harwood’s most beautifully constructed poems. As an elegiac lyric, it mourns the passage of time from both a child and adult perspective – the child speaker’s sadness at the loss of time and her poignant question of “Where’s morning gone?” mirrors the adult speaker’s lamentation of the loss of her years and existential questions of mortality. In defiance of the onward march of time and inevitability of death, the speaker revises this melancholy and recovers her sense of peace by returning quietly to her fond memories of the past. From the perspective of the Common Module, this poem crucially connects together the primary threads of Harwood’s work - her interest in the natural world, her response to the inevitability of death, and her philosophical perspective on transience. Thus, it acts as a vital anchor for other selected poems to navigate Harwood’s purpose - especially in relation to “emotions and qualities” of “individual and collective human experiences”. 

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At Mornington similarly follows the ontological vein that runs through Harwood’s body of work - the worth of life, given its transience and inevitable end at death. Being a longer poem, it offers a wide variety of quotes and language features to support your argument. It can also be interpreted in two main ways, enabling its flexibility within your essay: either (1) celebrating the beauty of the natural world, in its reminder to us of the beauty within transience, or (2) the value of interpersonal friendships to overcome our fears of death. Similar to ‘Violets’, this poem anchors together many of Harwood’s key authorial intentions, particularly responding to the Common Module’s interest in ideas of “identity, culture, acceptance, and growth”. 

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Although more challenging to analyse, The Sharpness of Death comes out on top for me as a Harwood favourite. It serves as Harwood’s tender critique of rigid and unyielding philosophy that relies upon cold logic to deny lived experiences, where Harwood instead values art as a fluid mechanism to recognise lived emotion. Broken into the quartet of numbered stanzas, Harwood celebrates the transient, temporary moments of the artist – “blossoms to hold the light that’s gone” – rather than male philosophers’ attempts to create permanent, fixed truths that ultimately prove unfulfilling. For an upper-band 6 essay, this is Harwood’s most explicitly metapoetic poem, and thus is a crucial inclusion if you are aiming to analyse her self-reflexive veneration of the poetic form. 

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Tier 2 – The Glass Jar, Father and Child (I & II)

A marker of Harwood’s ongoing interest in the passage of childhood to adolescence, The Glass Jar evokes a child’s disorienting psychological transition towards maturity, reflecting Harwood’s view of the inevitable passage of time. The tightly-structured sextets physically enact the architecture of the central symbol of the “glass jar”, reflecting the rigid safety of the vessel that the child hopes for in childhood. However, the “glass jar” ultimately symbolically breaks as the child must painfully recognise their loss of childhood innocence and reckon with the truths of adulthood. I would categorise this as a “supportive” poem because it is more narrowly focused on ideas of individual psychological maturation, rather than Harwood’s overarching interest in the passage of time and the natural world. 

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In mirror to this, Father and Child (I & II) offers a strong argument regarding Harwood’s view of the inevitable transition of adolescence. By opening with the visceral images of the child’s killing of the barn owl at daybreak, Harwood communicates a naïvety towards death which the child must unlearn. In ultimately doing so, the diptych form offers Part II at a contrasting nightfall, where the poem slows to a mature recognition of death in its full bitterness and grief. Similar to ‘The Glass Jar’, I consider this to be a suitable poem to support an overall argument about Harwood’s recognition and lamentation of the inevitable passage of time. 

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Tier 3 – A Valediction, Beyond Metaphor

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A Valediction is composed as a farewell lyric, echoed by Harwood’s classical restraint and marked fundamentally by its titular intertextual allusion to John Donne. This could be used to support arguments that have previously been outlined, related to Harwood’s evocation of beauty within the transience of life. It can also be used to support Harwood’s validation of female identity and sexuality in its references to Lou Salomé and Saint Therese of Lisieux. I would use this poem selectively as it is shorter in length and offers less variety in features and form for analysis compared to the previously listed poems. 

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Beyond Metaphor is the shortest of the prescribed poems, examining the limitations of language to capture the pain and brilliance of lived experiences, as captured in the line “I could not write them down.” To echo this, Harwood explicitly references the closing line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”) Although the poem features a fascinating argument that aligns with Harwood’s overarching metapoetic argument in favour of lived experience and transience above attempts to create permanent truths within language, I consider the poem too short to offer a substantial paragraph on its own. However, it is still quite a valid option to support an argument that focuses on Harwood’s views on art and philosophy. 

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Structural approaches

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It is crucial to sequence your selection of Harwood’s poems with reference to your argument, which can be understood in greater detail in the following section on Conceptual Lens. For Common Module, my recommendation is a 3-paragraph structure with each paragraph focusing on one poem, where your essay should evolve its argument as you trace through each poem. References can be made to poems outside of the core three within each paragraph to build a layered argument with scope on the oeuvre.

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An alternative structure involves constructing 3 thematic paragraphs, with each paragraph being focused on a central idea of Harwood’s body of work and integrating evidence from a range of poems to support each point. Although this has the potential to work well, it is likely to become convoluted quickly and disrupt the precision of your analysis – so I would be very careful about implementing such a structure. 

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Conceptual lens

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Below I offer 5 key conceptual lenses from which we may navigate Harwood’s poetry, allowing you to consider potential ways to structure your argument, and how these relate to key concepts listed in the Common Module rubric. 

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Mortality and the passage of time

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I consider this to be the vital underpinning thread of Harwood’s body of work, and also the one that relates the most closely to the concepts of the Common Module. Where ‘Violets’ initially establishes Harwood’s use of a childhood analogy to lament the inevitable passage of time, ‘At Mornington’ shifts us into the hope that interpersonal relationships may offer to accept mortality. Returning to the simple vignettes and memories of these relationships, ‘The Sharpness of Death’ rejects philosophical intellectualism and acts as a soaring conclusion to not only accept, but also to embrace mortality and death. Thus, this lens links to “emotions and qualities” of “individual and collective experiences” in Harwood’s evocation of human responses to the inevitable passage of time, and by extension, “invites readers to see the world differently” and “challenge assumptions” about mortality. 

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P1: Violets

• “I kneel to pick/frail melancholy flowers among/ashes and loam.” – establishes the extended symbol of violets amidst the speaker’s initial grief
• “...she dried my tearful/face as I sobbed, “Where’s morning gone?”” – child speaker’s innocent question mirrors adult speaker’s existential question
• “...used my tears to scold/the thing that I could not grasp or name/that, while I slept, had stolen from me/those hours of unreturning light.” – the day and night becomes a symbol for life and death
• “Years cannot move/nor death’s disorienting scale/distort those lamplit presences…” – lamp becomes an evocative representation within this vignette of the beauty of childhood memories, which refuse the destruction of the onward march of time

P2: At Mornington

• “And indeed I remember believing/as a child, I could walk on water –/the next wave, the next wave…” – Biblical allusion to the narrative of Jesus Christ’s walking on water, symbolises childish defiance of the natural progression of the world
• “Marble and granite parting/the quick of autumn grasses” – personal anecdote of visiting parents’ graves journeys the childish belief into an older, more mature desire to defy death
• “Fine pumpkins…in airy defiance of nature…a skinful of elements climbing/from earth to the fastness of light.” – natural symbol of pumpkins, subverting their typical implications within Halloween and death
• “And when I am…rolled in one grinding race/of dreams, pain, memories, love and grief…the peace of this day will shine/like light on the face of the waters…” – accretive listing to build towards a transcendent conclusion of the beauty of transience

P3: The Sharpness of Death

• “Leave me alone – You will?/That’s your way with us women.” – aggressive apostrophe towards Death, filled with resentment at its cruelty
• “I hope he found some light/beyond that field of black everlasting flowers.” – critiques Heidegger’s philosophical attempt to rationalise death with the symbolic void of the “black everlasting flowers”
• “Seed of the seed of countless seasons/blossoms to hold the light that’s gone.” – aural echoing of the line paired with a powerful visual image to venerate the acceptance of lived experiences and death
• “My/body was full of him, my/tongue sand with his juices.” – sexual allusions and tactile imagery to echo Harwood’s final triumph of life

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Philosophy and religion

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We can also analyse these same three poems from the lens of philosophy and religion, while maintaining that core idea of their conceptual progression. The key difference lies in interpreting ‘Violets’ and ‘At Mornington’ from a more explicitly philosophical perspective, including focusing on their use of Christian imagery - light, water, and her “father’s house”.  Aside from addressing the key concepts of “emotional and lived experiences” noted in the previous conceptual lens, this perspective also allows us to powerfully address “the paradoxes of motivation and behaviour”. While we may approach mortality with behaviours that are motivated by fear and avoidance, such as attempting to craft philosophical permanence, Harwood urges us to recognise that by embracing death, we may “paradoxically” discover greater value in the transience of life. 

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P1: Violets

• “I kneel to pick/frail melancholy flowers among/ashes and loam.” – establishes the extended symbol of violets amidst the speaker’s initial grief
• “...our blackbird frets and strops his beak/indifferent to Scarlatti’s song” – the intricate rhythm and meter of the poem is built upon a Scarlatti fugue, reflecting the initial “indifference” of the world to music/art
• “...used my tears to scold/the thing that I could not grasp or name/that, while I slept, had stolen from me/those hours of unreturning light.” – the day and night becomes a symbol for life and death
• “Into my father’s house we went…to light the lamp and the wood stove…A child with milk and story-book;/my father, bending to inhale/the gathered flowers…” – domestic scene is concordant with the vision of the quotidian Eucharist, where Harwood symbolically returns us to our Father’s house (Golsby-Smith)

P2: At Mornington

• “And indeed I remember believing/as a child, I could walk on water –/the next wave, the next wave…” – Biblical allusion to the narrative of Jesus Christ’s walking on water, symbolises childish defiance of the natural progression of the world
• “Marble and granite parting/the quick of autumn grasses” – personal anecdote of visiting parents’ graves journeys the childish belief into an older, more mature desire to defy death
• “As the drying face of land/rose out of earth’s seamless waters.” – mirrors the Biblical Genesis narrative as a way of ‘transcending’ death 
• “And when I am…rolled in one grinding race/of dreams, pain, memories, love and grief…the peace of this day will shine/like light on the face of the waters…” – accretive listing to build towards a transcendent conclusion of the beauty of transience, draws upon Christian images of water and light

P3: The Sharpness of Death

• “You’re in the hands of philosophers/who cut themselves, and bleed,/and know that knives are sharp,/but prove with complex logic/there’s no such thing as sharpness.” – allegory critiques cold, academic intellect of philosophy
• “I hope he found some light/beyond that field of black everlasting flowers.” – critiques Heidegger’s philosophical attempt to rationalise death with the symbolic void of the “black everlasting flowers”
• “Seed of the seed of countless seasons/blossoms to hold the light that’s gone.” – aural echoing of the line paired with a powerful visual image to venerate the acceptance of lived experiences and death
• “Death, I will tell you now:/my love and I stood still/in the roofless chapel.” – sensual images of sexual love and giving life transcend the mortal in the religious image of the symbolically “roofless” chapel

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Gender and womanhood

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Following on from her interest in warm, intimate experiences, Harwood’s body of work is also deeply interested in sculpting out the complexity of female selfhood and the beauty of womanhood. This acted as a fierce challenge to the patriarchal ideologies and standards enforced within her context, and resonates particularly in our understanding of Harwood as a confident and occasionally satirical female poet. This becomes particularly relevant for the concepts of “seeing the world differently and challenging assumptions”, and “the tension between agency and conformity” in the Common Module. 

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For our previous two lenses, ‘Violets’ was an opener for Harwood’s dialogue on the nature of death - here, ‘Violets’ can instead be read as a feminist veneration of the transcendent importance of feminine, domestic spaces. This can then be elevated with ‘A Valediction’ into Harwood’s praise of female romantic desire, which is enriched in her philosophical reverence for erotic desire in ‘The Sharpness of Death’. 

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P1: Violets

• “...used my tears to scold/the thing that I could not grasp or name/that, while I slept, had stolen from me/those hours of unreturning light.” – the day and night becomes a symbol for life and death
• “Into my father’s house we went…to light the lamp and the wood stove…A child with milk and story-book;/my father, bending to inhale/the gathered flowers…” – concordant with the vision of the quotidian Eucharist, where Harwood symbolically returns us to our Father’s house (Golsby-Smith), echoing the beauty of feminine, domestic spaces

P2: A Valediction

• “I/get from its place the Oxford Donne,/inked in with aches from adolescence.” – combined with title, acts as intertextual reference to Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, drawing this into her lived experience
• “Who needs drugs if she has enough/uppers and downers in her head?” – rhetorical question critiques contextual reduction of female identity and mental health
• “One mistress of half Europe, one/enclosed with a transcendent lover./Dear ladies, shall we meet halfway/between sanctity and liberation?” – historical allusions to Lou Salomé and Saint Therese of Lisieux acts as Harwood’s veneration of female desire
• “Now in his absence let me walk/at peaceful sunset in the pasture…” – visual imagery coupled with female independence in navigating the world

P3: The Sharpness of Death

• “I hope he found some light/beyond that field of black everlasting flowers.” – critiques Heidegger’s philosophical attempt to rationalise death with the symbolic void of the “black everlasting flowers”
• “Seed of the seed of countless seasons/blossoms to hold the light that’s gone.” – aural echoing of the line paired with a powerful visual image to venerate the acceptance of lived experiences and death
• “Death, I will tell you now:/my love and I stood still/in the roofless chapel.” – sensual images of sexual love and giving life transcend the mortal in the religious image of the symbolically “roofless” chapel
• “My/body was full of him, my/tongue sand with his juices, I/grew ripe in his blond light.” – further images of female sensual pleasure and fulfilment

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The natural world

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Much of Harwood’s work is invested in drawing upon influences from the natural world to communicate truths about human experiences, especially using symbols of Australiana in reference to the personal context underpinning her work. Using the extended symbol of daybreak and nightfall, ‘Father and Child (I & II)’ relate the transience of the natural world to our approach towards personal maturation and aging. This sentiment is then carried forward with ‘Violets’, which draws upon the extended natural symbol of the violets to offer a potential source of peace within this transience. This swells to a conclusion in ‘At Mornington’ as Harwood evolves the extended metaphor of water from initially an opponent to be conquered, to a resonant tranquillity that “bears” the speaker towards her death. 

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This underpins the Common Module’s focus on “emotional, physical, cultural and lived experiences”, and “identity, culture, acceptance and growth”, as Harwood draws upon these images of Australian nature and culture to invite us to “grow” in our perspective towards impermanence. 

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P1: Father and Child (I & II)

• “Daybreak: the household slept.” – establishes initial symbol of youth at the beginning of the day
• “I watched…a lonely/child who believed death clean/and final, not this obscene/bundle of stuff that dropped,/and dribbled…” – visceral images of “tangling in bowels” captures the loss of childhood innocence and recognition of the barn owl’s suffering in death
• “Nightfall…birds crowd in flowering trees,/sunset exalts its known symbols of transience.” – child matures to older recognition of death in the temporal shift of the poem, echoed with peaceful images of nature in acceptance

P2: Violets

• “I kneel to pick/frail melancholy flowers among/ashes and loam.” – establishes the extended symbol of violets amidst the speaker’s initial grief
• “The melting west/is striped like ice-cream.” – simile/conceit captures the symbol of the inevitable passage of life
• “...used my tears to scold/the thing that I could not grasp or name/that, while I slept, had stolen from me/those hours of unreturning light.” – the day and night becomes a symbol for life and death (consistent with ‘Father and Child’) 
• “Years cannot move/nor death’s disorienting scale/distort those lamplit presences…” – lamp becomes an evocative representation within this vignette of the beauty of childhood memories, which refuse the destruction of the onward march of time

P3: At Mornington

• “And indeed I remember believing/as a child, I could walk on water –/the next wave, the next wave…” – Biblical allusion to the narrative of Jesus Christ’s walking on water, symbolises childish defiance of the natural progression of the world
• “Marble and granite parting/the quick of autumn grasses” – personal anecdote of visiting parents’ graves journeys the childish belief into an older, more mature desire to defy death
• “Fine pumpkins…in airy defiance of nature…a skinful of elements climbing/from earth to the fastness of light.” – natural symbol of pumpkins, subverting their typical implications within Halloween and death
• “And when I am…rolled in one grinding race/of dreams, pain, memories, love and grief…the peace of this day will shine/like light on the face of the waters…” – accretive listing to build towards a transcendent conclusion of the beauty of transience

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Psychological growth and maturation across adolescence

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A final, slightly nicher, conceptual lens to view Harwood’s work is through the ideas of psychological growth and an individual’s maturation from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, which relates closely to Common Module ideas of “acceptance and growth”. While ‘The Glass Jar’ establishes universal human anxieties surrounding the unknown of adulthood, ‘Father and Child (I & II)’ offers potential salvation through guiding forces of family. This comes to a peaceful conclusion in ‘Violets’, where it is the sanctuary of family and love that secures the speaker against their fears of adulthood and the inevitable passage of time. 

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P1: The Glass Jar

• “A child…soaked/a glass jar in the reeling sun/hoping to keep…this pulse of light beside his bed.” – light symbolises early childhood innocence, glass jar becomes an enclosure for it
• “Pincer and claw,/trident and vampire fang…” – brutal images of violence that disrupt childlike peace
• “Then hope/fell headlong from its eagle height.” – hyperbole of “eagle height” captures the failure of the glass jar to contain his childhood
• “...would not turn her face/from the gross violence done to her./Love’s proud executants played from a score no child could read or realize.” – subtle sexual allusion marks the child’s forced psychological transition into adult maturity, musical expression of “score” 

P2: Father and Child (I & II)

• “Daybreak: the household slept.” – establishes initial symbol of youth and innocence at being “blessed by the sun” 
• “I watched…a lonely/child who believed death clean/and final, not this obscene/bundle of stuff that dropped,/and dribbled…” – visceral images of “tangling in bowels” captures the loss of childhood innocence in a growing understanding of the ugly bitterness of death
• “Father and child, we stand/in time’s long-promised land.” – diptych form contrasts the crisp, urgent tetrameter of Part I with the heavy enjambment and slow vowels of Part II
• “Nightfall…birds crowd in flowering trees,/sunset exalts its known symbols of transience.” – child matures to older recognition of death in the temporal shift of the poem, echoed with peaceful images of nature in acceptance

P3: Violets

• “I kneel to pick/frail melancholy flowers among/ashes and loam.” – establishes the extended symbol of violets amidst the speaker’s initial grief
• “...our blackbird frets and strops his beak/indifferent to Scarlatti’s song” – the intricate rhythm and meter of the poem is built upon a Scarlatti fugue, reflecting the initial “indifference” of the natural world to music/art
• “...used my tears to scold/the thing that I could not grasp or name/that, while I slept, had stolen from me/those hours of unreturning light.” – the day and night becomes a symbol for life and death
• “Years cannot move/nor death’s disorienting scale/distort those lamplit presences…” – lamp becomes an evocative representation within this vignette of the beauty of childhood memories, which refuse the destruction of the onward march of time

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Exam question breakdowns

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Common Module questions will frequently invite students to interpret the text through the conceptual lenses noted in the rubric, which can be broken down into the following:

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• Representations of the emotions and qualities associated with individual and collective experiences
• Insights into emotional, intellectual, physical, cultural and lived experiences
• Representations of identity, culture, acceptance and growth
• Representations of the tension between agency and conformity
• Paradoxes of motivation and behaviour

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Students will often be asked to interpret these lenses through: 

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• How they are invited to see the world differently
• How they have reflected personally
• How they have challenged their assumptions about the nature of human experience

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We have already begun to consider how we may interpret Harwood’s body of work through these conceptual lenses, but it is important to continue to practise adapting your argument towards a range of Common Module-style questions to ensure that you can respond under timed conditions. 

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Here is a step-by-step process to navigating Common Module exam questions: 

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1. Identify the key terms of the question that need to be addressed in your essay - look for rubric terms such as “emotions and qualities”, but also any salient terms that should draw focus in your argument. 
2. Tie these key terms together with your overall thesis regarding Harwood’s poetry and your selected poems. 
3. Plan out how each of your paragraphs will build progressively towards your thesis, and thus, to answer the question. 
4. Write your essay, referring back continuously to the question terms and ideas throughout your analysis, and in key signposting areas, including your introduction and topic sentences. 

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Below is an example of a possible Common Module question. Let’s consider how we would navigate it in relation to Harwood. 

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“Composers depict unique human experiences that invite us to reflect personally on ideas of acceptance and growth.” 

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Evaluate the extent to which you agree with the statement, referring closely to your prescribed text.

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First, we can identify the key terms of the question as “unique human experiences”, “reflecting personally”, and “acceptance and growth”. 

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Second, we can think about how each of these terms apply to our understanding of Harwood’s purpose, and begin to connect them together:

• Harwood depicts unique and specific human experiences grounded in the real and personal, rather than focusing on abstract theories of philosophy
• This prompts us as readers to view her poetry through a personal lens as well, relating her work to our own experiences and memories
• The particular experiences that Harwood urges us to return back to and understand deeply allow us to grow in the face of our inevitable mortality to accept death
  
  • This could be tuned depending on the specific focus of your essay - for example, an essay focused on womanhood could argue that Harwood urges us to reflect on personal experiences to force us to grow beyond patriarchal ideologies and accept the complex realities of female selfhood

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Third, we can plan out how this interpretation would be sustained across our paragraphs. For example:

1. Violets: By immersing us within the unique experiences of childhood, Harwood invites us to personally reflect upon our fears of the inevitable passage of time, and begin to grow and accept our mortality.
2. At Mornington: Harwood layers together numerous unique, personal references towards interpersonal relationships to sustain our continued personal reflection upon the value of growing to accept death.
3. The Sharpness of Death: Harwood connects philosophical interpretations towards unique, lived experiences of mourning to personally urge us to reach our final stage of growth and acceptance of mortality. 

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Fourth, we can write our essay, making continuous references back to the question as planned here! 

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Parting comments

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My final piece of advice regarding understanding and writing about Harwood’s poetry for the Common Module is never lose focus on two key factors: form and context. Through your study, continue developing your sophisticated understanding of each. Although it is possible for any student to superficially comment that Harwood “talks about growing up” or “uses symbols of nature”, the rich intricacy of Harwood’s work is best understood when you recognise what underpins these conceptual interests - from her contextual interest in Wittgenstein’s philosophy to her careful poetic precision in meter that is reminiscent of her musical mind. 

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With these in mind, I hope this has laid a strong foundation for your navigation of Harwood’s poetry for the Common Module!

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