Bruce Dawe: Poetry Literary Elements

The poems are written from a third person subjective point of view.

The poems have no form and meter because the poems are written in a modern style without them.

The term weapons is used the poem Weapons Training as a metaphor to make reference to the people used as weapons during the wars and armed conflicts Australia became involved in.

Because the poems were written in a modern style, there is alliteration or assonance.

Some of the titles of the poems are ironic because they are misleading. The title Homecoming for example, transmits the idea of happiness but in reality the author describes the soldiers killed during the Vietnam War.

Collection of poems

Most of the poems take place in various rooms in unnamed places. These rooms may be inside someone’s house or inside a public building.

The tone used in most of the poems is a tragic and often violent and vulgar one.

There is no clear protagonist but the antagonist is the war and also the violence that was common during the time when the author wrote the poems.

The major conflict in the poems is between the idea of peace and war and also between consumerism and the old ways.

Because this is a collection of poems, it is impossible to determine a common climactic moment.

The fact that the soldiers are dead in the poem Homecoming is foreshadowed in the first lines of the poem when the author mentions how the soldiers return back home in green houses, a reference made to the body bags they were transported in.

The title of the poem Pleasant Sunday Afternoon is an understatement as the poem focuses on the things a low-income family lacked in comparison with other families.

In the poem Pleasant Sunday Afternoon, the poet presents a low-income family. That family is visited by an encyclopedia salesman who tries to sell them some of his books. The family refuses and even treats the salesman in a horrible manner. After the salesman goes away, the father talks to himself and notes how people like him never have time to learn. Through this, the poet wants to suggest that those from lower-income families suffered because they did not had the same possibilities to learn and this made it hard for them to better their lives.

The terms underground parking refers in this case in the poems to the cemetery.

In the first poem, we find the personification "the old automatic smile."

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In the poem Weapons Training we find the line "I want to hear those eyeballs click."