Country Towns
...ce and gives the responder an image, somewhat comical, of the lifestyle of country towns. Slessor deliberately uses old terminology to show the country town is old in Australian terms. For example, “…public houses of yellow wood, with ‘1860’ over their doors…” This indicates the age of the buildings. Slessor also talks about the “mysterious race of Hogans, which always keeps General Stores…” Hogan is an Irish surname – many early migrants to Australia were Irish and they always seemed to own General Stores. Slessor uses this phrase to indicate that all country towns are the same as most country towns have a General Store that is called ‘Hogans’. Slessor uses consonance to convey his message in the poem “Country Towns”. The consonance in this case is the repetition of the ‘s’ sound throughout the poem. This gives the poem a sleepy sort of feel and makes the responder feel as if they can actually feel the sleepiness that the people in the poem are feeling. Slessor find the sleepiness seductive – this sensuous poem appeals to all the five senses, emphasised by the sentence/stanza structure, one sentence per stanza. This allows the responder to get a sense of what a typical country town is like and can actually feel like they are standing in the middle of a country town. The detailed images given by Slessor such as “…schooner bees, and locusts burnt in the pepper-trees…” creates an image for the responder. The burnt is referring to the intense chorus that cicadas make in summer. This buzzing intensifies the heat and that there is no movement – stillness of trees as there is not much wind when cicadas call. In the third stanza, Slessor uses a simile to de...