bruce dawe
...rised as children who wear the same clothes as everyone else. and regulations imposed upon him everywhere he goes. “WALK. DON’T WALK.TURN LEFT. NO PARKING. WAIT HERE. NO SMOKING. KEEP CLEAR/OUT/OFF THE GRASS” These are all instructions that he must abide. Bruce Dawe then satirically mocks these signs by implying that everything about a person is controlled in this world, even their breathing. “NO BREATHING EXCEPT BY ORDER.” The purpose of this stanza was to show that the car journey described in it is a fairly accurate representation of this boy’s life. The first sign of any emotion in the poem is “He enjoyed”, the child’s opinion, in the fourth stanza. He is challenging this world of people with iced-over emotions. The child is still innocent in this stage of his life – he is enthralled by nature, uninfluenced by material things, and not staring into the screen watching people make “incomprehensible and monstrous love” as all of the adults are. Children are innocent until we pollute their minds with the filth of society is what Dawe is saying. Owen describes the sky as “Littered with stars”, ironically, as the stars are pure and not soiled with the filth of mankind. Thus by saying the sky is littered with stars, he is taking the point of view of society – the fact that they would want to bring order and conformity to everything. These stars are scattered across the sky in an unorderly fashion, and “no one had got around to fixing [them] up yet”. He is highlighting that society takes beautiful, unadulterated natural things and pollutes them with their rules and regulations. Moving from childhood to the middle ages in but a few lines, highlighting that it’s not worth mentioning the rest of his childhood, as it was all had too much of a resemblance to what has already been said. There is a quick and noticeable change of tone as the man is described as a “money-hungry”, “back stabbing” and “miserable”, no longer the image of innocence as he was portrayed in the first 4 stanzas. Not guarded by adolescence any more, he enters the real world and is instantly polluted with the filth of society. He says goodbye to the stars – their natural splendour no longer interests him, he is now a part of the materialistic world. He will no longer show any emotion, and he is now ‘realistic’, in other words, fake. The following dialogue is a symbol of the man’s beliefs, what he has been taught and what he now accepts morally. “I’m telling you straight, Jim, it’s Number One every time for this chicken, hit wherever you see a head and kick whoever’s down” The basic message behind this dialog is the fact that you have to get your own way in life – thinking of no-one else but yourself. Use people, backstab, kick them when they’re down – everything is justified as long as you end up on top. Bruce Dawe notices that a large percentage of the population live by these morals, and he is showing through the example of this man how futile such a materialistic life really is. An abrupt change in the dialog and we hear the words of the man thanking a woman, Clare, for a lovely evening. The readers hold their breath, thinking that maybe there still is some humanity left in this man who has just said such harsh words. But in the sixth stanza it is revealed that he was merely being two-faced and fake. He is in the car with his wife. There are no signs of affection, his wife is just like another possession to him. “I’ve had enough for one night, with that Clare Jessup,” Here he reveals the truth – a total opposite of what he told Clare herself. Or perhaps this too is not the truth, and he is also lying to his wife in order to gain sympathy. At the end of the paragraph Dawe abruptly stops the man in mid sentence and leaves only a dash, showing how quickly and suddenly one can lose ones life. In the seventh paragraph the true extent of people’s brainwash is underlined. Such a tragic event has just occurred, and the funeral guests pay attention to only the materialist aspects of his death. They notice that he looks very good, tanned, healthy. This could also be a paradox for the fact that what people look like on the outside can be the opposite of what they are – the insincerity in society. The unsympathetic guests are emotionless and fake, just like he was. Dawe then describes the place the man goes after death as an underground metropolis – underground hinting that due to his dishonest nature and lack of morals he went to hell. “permanent residentials, no parking tickets, no taximeters ticking, no Bobby Dazzlers here, no down payments, nobody grieving over halitosis” It is a place with none of the materialistic beliefs that litter this world. It is imposed that people in our world grieve over halitosis, or bad breath, but as we saw at the funeral, do not grieve over death. He’s six feet down and nobody’s interested – they’re all too busy going about their own selfish, self-centred lives. “Blink, Blink. CEMETERY. Silence.” The last word is not done in block letters, as all of the other signs – because it is not a sign. There is silence in the cemetery already, and there is no-one to hush up there. “Momento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris…” A definition of this epigraph is very important to the moral of this poem. “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” This ties in with the theme of this man’s whole life going past, and having no impact on the world. Having lost his individuality, he fitted in with society only when he gave into mass-conformity and consumerism. The futile cycle of human lives in a materialistic world is portrayed in this poem, underlining all of the shallowness and facades in society. It is clear that Bruce Dawe’s purpose in writing this poem was to challenge this cycle that he observed, and to show people, through only a few moments in a person’s life, the extreme of this problem. Blinded by materialistic things this man sacrificed his morals and ethics, no longer caring for his fellow humans, or for nature. And neither did those around him. Dawe is showing us how lonely and emotionless a person’s life can really be. The other poem, ‘Life-cycle’, is one of his well-known poems that deals with how Victorians are influenced by football. It ridicules the fact that football for people has become like a...