A wise man once mused; “Everyone thinks of changing the world but no one
thinks of changing himself.” This man, was Count Leo Tolstoy, who went on
to change his belief structure, values and to convert his religion from
Russian Orthodox to Christianity.
A couple of days ago I was cleaning out my now unused study – recently I
have been finding other places to write, my bed, the bathroom, even in the
bath, as the portability of the laptop proves very convenient – and I
stumbled upon a book, well read, yet discarded in my ‘old age’. Gwen
Harwood’s collection of poems was now sitting in my hand, and after five
minutes of staring blankly at the book I opened it and flicked through the
pages.
If I had remembered rightly her poems said much about the changing self,
concluding that change developed and enriched the soul.
It started me
thinking about change and how many people are frightened of changing
themselves. I reflected that a change in self usually occurs due to the
presence of an external stimulus. Rarely does the individual initiate
change. Reading through the poems I found some of my favourites, which
depicted change effectively. I speculated that changing the self probably
also requires a strong ego!
In Harwood’s pair of poems entitled ”Father and Child”, she explores the
changing relationship between a father and child; the self growing up and
growing old. In both poems, it is the presence of death that has caused
the self to change.
In ”Barn Owl”‘, the child resists and finally accepts change through the
realisation that death is final. Notes in the margin of my book, defacing
the text, made it hard to read, but I could decipher some of my
scribblings outlining the way the change had occurred. The child confronts
the death of the owl as ‘”master of life and death”‘; she sees the death as
final and has no perception of her or the owl’s pain. The images of
blindness, like ”eyes that did not see”, parallel the child’s lack of
understanding of the consequences of death.
The change of self occurs because the child is emotionally disturbed by
the incident. Her sorrow is profound ”I leaned my head upon my father’s
arm, and wept owl-blind in early sun for what I had begun.’ ‘ The external
stimulus of killing the owl brings the child to an awareness of the
complexity of death and the pain and sorrow it causes.
When I first read
this poem I was distressed by the death of the bird; in retrospect I
focused on its impact as a life changing experience.
My notes had become almost indecipherable as I turned to ”Nightfall”. Here
the persona is middle aged and is confronting her father’s age and
mortality ”your marvellous journey’s done”. Her reluctance to accept the
closeness of her father’s death is portrayed through her yearning to
return to the child like state of innocence. The yearning is heightened by
the number of single syllable words in the final stanzas, such as her
realisation that ”your night and day are one”.
Moreover, unlike the child
in ”Barn Owl”, she understands the implications of death, ”what sorrows, in
the end, no words, no tears can mend.’ ‘ The absence of imagery in the final
lines heightens this understanding.
A second poem which had caught my interest was ”The Glass Jar”, which
explores the traumatic experience of growing up. For this child, as for
many, it seems that growing up is the hardest thing to do. The child, by
capturing the sunlight in the jar, hopes to keep the monsters and terrors
away. His confidence is reflected by the long flowing sentences of the
opening two stanzas. The religious imagery, superimposed over the sun,
suggests ambiguously that Christ is the sufferer and the comforter.
The main catalyst for the child’s change of self is the violent image of
the father attacking the mother, with ”gross violence”. The mother, as his
”comforter”, ”would not turn her face”. Through the rejection by the
mother, and the father’s prior claim, the child is left emotionally
isolated. The gentleness of the sun, in the final stanza, which comes to
”wink and laugh”s of tens the harsh reality, but the child does not escape
dealing with his fears alone He has changed from a trusting, innocent
child, into a more cynically experienced one.