Enumerate the gloomy imagery and figure of speech in the poem old prison

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.