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...e child’s personality. The setting is the terrain of nightmares and dreams, where conscious will is suppressed and the reigns are handed to the subconscious mind. By making subtle changes in the ways dreams are portrayed, she shows us that the boy has been changed by his experiences. Before "the betrayals" the dreams are quite indefinite, relying on incomplete images of pincers, claws and fangs to represent the horror. The lines, "His sidelong violence summoned/ fiends whose mosaic vision saw/ his heart entire" are literal indications of his incapability to comprehend what is happening to him. Then he wakes and attempts to seek comfort from the monstrance. His hopes for a miracle, brought on by his innocence, "fell headlong from its eagle height." Then he runs to the "final [forbidden] clearing that he dared not cross," forgetting in his desperate fear, all the inhibitions placed upon him. It is here that he is again reminded that "his rival" and contender for the love of his mother, has been taken preference on, and his plight is ignored. The readers will now clearly see through his "secret hate," even if there is no evidence that the boy himself has realised consciously that it is directed towards his father. Defeated and in anguish he returns to his nightmares. This time round the dreams become more definitive. The father appears, conducting the dance of death and actually directing the monsters that haunt him. This shows that his subliminal self has learned, to some extent, the cause of his pain, even if he is still hasn’t managed to consciously comprehend the events. The early learning processes of the young are potrayed more adequately in the poem Father and Child where an older child, this time a girl at a rebellious age, experiments with the constraints of authority in an attempt to seek control for herself. This experimentation leads to an important discovery in her life; death is real and unclean. Just like The Glass Jar, the allusions to nature show the certainly of change and setting the tone for the events. "Daybreak; the household slept. I rose... I crept out with my father’s gun. Let him dream..." Using such highly narrative fast paced (an illusion created by delivering it in pulses) and confident language to show the single mindedness of the young, Harwood describes the actions of the girl as she creeps out at daybreak to the barnyard. There she was to prove to herself that she and not her father is in command of her own actions. Possibly not realising the effects of death at such a young age she fires a bullet into the owl’s body. The pace of the poem changes as two or more verses dwell on the horrible death: bundle of stuff that dropped, and dribbled through loose straw tangling in bowels, and hopped blindly closer. I saw those eyes that did not see mirror my cruelty Her father comes to her side and makes her carry the responsibility she had assumed to the end by asking her to kill the animal. In contrast to innocence of the young, Gwen Harwood also attempts to understand death and how it changes the personality of the people experiencing its influence. In the second part of Father and Child we see a middle aged woman, a completely different person from "the child once quick to mischief," attempting to cope with her father’s imminent death. Set appropriately in the t...