Hello i was just wondering if anyone could help me with some questions that I am having trouble with in regards to postcards?

1. How has your study of this poem contributed to your understanding of physical journeys?

2.How does Skrzynecki use personal pronouns in this poem to describe the impact of physical journeys?

3. Explain how the theme of identity is treated in this poem

4.How effective are Immigrants at central station and Postcards in conveying the impact of physical journeys? Give reasons with reference to both poems.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Here's the text of 'Post card', by Peter Skrzynecki, according to the community.boredofstudies.org site which Hugh posted a link to in the thread about Crossing the Red Sea:

Post card

1
A post card sent by a friend
Haunts me
Since its arrival –
Warsaw: Panorama of the Old Town
He requests I show it
To my parents.

Red buses on a bridge
Emerging from a corner –
High-rise flats and something
Like a park borders
The river with its concrete pylons.
The sky’s the brightest shade.

2
Warsaw, Old Town,
I never knew you
Except in the third person –
Great city
That bombs destroyed,
Its people massacred
Or exiled – You survived
In the minds
Of a dying generation
Half a world away.
They shelter you
And defend the patterns
Of your remaking,
Condemn your politics,
Cherish your old religion
And drink to freedom
Under the White Eagle’s flag.

For the moment,
I repeat, I never knew you,
Let me be.
I’ve seen red buses
Elsewhere
And all rivers have
An obstinate glare.
My father
Will be proud
Of your domes and towers,
My mother
Will speak of her
Beloved Ukraine.
What’s my choice
To be?

I can give you
The recognition
Of eyesight and praise.
What more
Do you want
Besides
The gift of despair?

3
I stare
At the photograph
And refuse to answer
The voices
Of red gables
And a cloudless sky.

On the river’s bank
A lone tree
Whispers:
“We will meet
Before you die.”


Edited to correct the typos ['ypur' and 'galre'] in lines 14 and 24 of part 2.




Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/28/2005 06:39AM by IanB.

And here's the text of 'Immigrants at Central Station, 1951' by Peter Skrzynecki, according to the same site:

Immigrants at Central Station, 1951.

It was sad to hear
The train's whistle this morning
At the railway station.
All night it had rained.
The air was crowded
With a dampness that slowly
Sank into our thoughts-
But we ate it all:
The silence, the cold, the benevolence
Of empty streets.

Time waited anxiously with us
Behind upturned collars
And space hemmed us
Against each other
Like cattle bought for slaughter.

Families stood
With blankets and packed cases-
Keeping children by their sides,
Watching pigeons
That watched them.

But it was sad to hear
The train’s whistle so suddenly-
To the right of our shoulders
Like a word of command.
The signal at the platform's end
Turned red and dropped
Like a guillotine-
Cutting us off from the space of eyesight

While time ran ahead
Along glistening tracks of steel.



Edited to capitalise 'Station' in the title, and to insert the missing apostrophes in lines 2 and 25.




Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/28/2005 06:44AM by IanB.

I can certainly sympathise with the difficulties posed by this type of assigment. It is tempting to say bullshit assignment, but I am far too refined for such language.

I admit I am recalling from memory, but it seems to me that Mr S (prolly pronounced scruzneckey?) immigrated (emigrated?) from Poland to Australia, and this particular set of poems concerns that experience. Snapshots of his departure, the journey and the arrival, that is. The Australian schools have decided to use themes of imaginative journey and physical journey for works to be studied in their system. Peter's journey was an actual one, hence that theme for this assignment.

>1. How has your study of this poem contributed to your understanding of physical journeys?

Give me a break. Like the students need help in understanding what a physical journey is. Still, one must respond, mustn't one? Journeys consistently bring new sights, sounds, tastes and the like. They are also consistently adventures of some type. Plus, they bring back memories of similar or different sights, etc. that one left behind. What examples of such phenomena does Skruz offer for your reading pleasure?

>2.How does Skrzynecki use personal pronouns in this poem to describe the impact of physical journeys?

Pronouns are demonstrative (this, that, etc.), indefinite (each, everybody, etc.), reflexive (myself, yourself, etc.), interrogative (what, who, which), relative (who and which stuff again), or personal (I, you, we, his, her, etc).

I can only speculate what is desired here, but I suspect the needed response is that those pronouns add a personal aspect to the descriptions provided by the author, putting the reader drectly into the experience itself.

>3. Explain how the theme of identity is treated in this poem.

Again, I have to guess what is required by this query. Identity would seem to be the particular personality/makeup of the speaker of the poem. He is whimsical about the land (Warsaw) left behind, I suspect. Is the author successful in portraying this emotion? Or, if you feel something else is being offered, go for it and support or deny that PS was successful.

>4.How effective are (the poems) in conveying the impact of physical journeys?

This I will leave for you. Did you get such a message from the author? If so, what specifically did you find of interest? If not, how could things have been better communicated?

Did I write whimsical? No, not whimsical. Melancholic, mebbe.

Wistful! That's the word. Last post on this, sorry.

Thankyou very much for your help.

I am doing these questions also could it be possible if more people could do these questions?

They are poorly worded questions, ptba. Not surprising you are having trouble with them. Here are some suggestions, which you should treat with due caution because my ideas may not accord at all with those of your teacher or assessor.

1. How has your study of this poem contributed to your understanding of physical journeys?

You are evidently meant to speak for yourself in answering this one. An honest answer might be ‘It hasn’t’, but I guess that wouldn’t gain you good marks.

Perhaps start by clarifying what you take ‘physical journey’ to mean. Obviously it is something that involves moving from place to place, but a moment’s thought will tell you that not every such movement qualifies. The word ‘journey’ normally means travel undertaken deliberately and over a substantial distance.

The wording of the question seems to assume that ‘physical journeys’ form a branch of learning susceptible to greater or lesser ‘understanding’. A dubious assumption IMO. There are so many different kinds of journeys, undertaken by different kinds of travellers, to and from different places, over different distances, with different amounts and kinds of baggage, and with different aims, purposes and results, that generalising about them is scarcely possible. That in itself may be a point worth understanding about physical journeys, however it’s not a point made by the poem 'Post card'. To make better sense of the question, you need to relate it to the journeys referred to in the poem, or at least to journeys of the kind referred to.

The poem contains no direct description of any physical journey. The nearest it gets to the subject is to mention the arrival of a post card, presumably sent by a traveller, and to make a theme of the fact that some people now old (including the poet’s father) who migrated to Australia from Warsaw retain vivid and proud memories of that city as it used to be (the ‘Old Town’), even though its fabric was destroyed in the second World War, and has not been restored to its former style.

I imagine you didn’t need to be told by the poem that people who have migrated from one country to another, and who have not made a return visit, often retain fixed, romanticised memories of their old country which become out-of-date. Nevertheless, to earn marks, you might have to play dumb and say something to the effect that the poem really highlighted that aspect for you.

You could perhaps add (speculatively) that it may be because the people referred to in the poem made a journey half way round the world that they preserve so strongly their memories of their Warsaw Old Town heritage. Had they stayed at home and survived there to witness the city’s destruction by the Nazis and its rebuilding in colourless Communist cell-block style, they might have let those memories go sooner.

Then, if you are prepared to take a risk to go for gold, you could develop that idea by pointing out that in the poem it is not just people who have journeyed half way round the world. A meme [look it up in a dictionary, e.g. using [www.onelook.com]], namely the image of the Old Town, has travelled with them, thereby prolonging the meme’s survival. And now that meme has made the journey again by hitching a ride with another carrier, a post card. I’m not suggesting you should devote much of your answer to the theory of memes (especially if you are unfamiliar with it!) but you might make some comment about the importance of focusing not just on the people who make migratory journeys, but on the cultural ideas and mindsets they bring with them.

2. How does Skrzynecki use personal pronouns in this poem to describe the impact of physical journeys?

Again this question only makes sense if confined to the particular physical journeys to which the poem relates.

With regard to pronouns, the first thing to notice is that (except in the last five lines, which I am ignoring because I can’t see the sense in them, and they seem superfluous) the poem is written in the first person, i.e. in the voice of the poet, or at least in the voice of a persona who is the speaker. So, as you would expect, it contains a fair number of first person pronouns. ‘I’, ‘my’ and ‘me’ are used six times, four times and once, respectively. Nothing particularly unusual about that, in a first person poem of this length.

More unusual, and probably part of what the question is getting at, is that the speaker, who declares that, before the arrival of the post card, he (I’m assuming that the speaker’s gender is the same as the poet’s) never knew the Old Town of Warsaw except ‘in the third person’ (meaning only as an ‘it’ described to him by others), is so haunted by its depiction in the post card that he begins personifying it and addressing it in the second person. The second person pronouns ‘you’ and ‘your’ are used that way six times and twice respectively.

How to relate that back to the ‘impact’ of the physical journeys the subject of the poem i.e. the migration of the speaker’s parents, and – if you go with the meme idea – the journeys of the meme? The word ‘impact’ can be understood as broadly synonymous with ‘consequence’.

The way the speaker addresses the Old Town directly as ‘you’ shows that he feels it to be a ghostly presence strong enough to be addressed that way. Moreover he feels that its ‘voices’ are demanding something of him, though exactly what is not made clear. After some rhetorical mental protest, he chooses to refuse to answer them.

All this implies a description of the ‘impact’ in terms of both what it amounts to and what it falls short of.

Thus on the one hand, the speaker’s surprisingly strong emotional response to the Old Town depicted on the post card suggests that he has been in some way predisposed to respond that way. You can speculate that the speaker’s predisposition is due to the speaker having been raised by a migrant father who held dear his memory of the Old Town, and whose attitude has been unwittingly absorbed by the speaker, or is due to the speaker having been heritage-deprived by an upbringing in the young country Australia, and so having an unrealized hunger for ancestral heritage; or perhaps due to a bit of both.

On the other hand, the fact that the speaker ends up rejecting the ‘voices’ is evidence of a limit to this impact of the journeys. The speaker recognises that continuing nostalgia for a vanished Old Town, or pretence that it still exists, is a recipe for ‘despair’. He chooses instead to look forward. The meme proves unable to extend its impact to the next generation. Its survival is only ‘in the minds of a dying generation’, and it is destined to die with them.

3. Explain how the theme of identity is treated in this poem

It appears to me that ‘the theme of identity’ is one of those high sounding but woolly phrases pseudo-intellectuals use when they want to impress without putting any real effort into thinking or making clear what they mean. Searching it on Google shows that it covers a wide range of loosely related issues, ideas and theories, including the identification of a person’s self-image, any problems arising from confusion over that, the way one’s self-image has been formed or may be changed, the effect of that on one’s behaviour, the loyalties that people have and the roles that people see themselves playing or being meant to play, and the way people are influenced or categorised, rightly or wrongly, by other people, and any conflicts arising from that. These notions are applied to groups as well as individuals, and even to nations.

I don’t know whether it’s an article of faith in modern lit.crit. that every text says something, expressly or implicitly or by omission, about this supposedly grand-unified ‘theme’. How else to explain a question that assumes it is treated in this poem?

It shouldn’t be difficult for you to cite parts of the poem that involve identity issues of the kind mentioned above. For instance: the loyalties still felt by the old migrants from Warsaw to the old Polish religion and flag; the comparable affection felt by the speaker’s mother for her home country of the Ukraine; and the speaker’s choice not to be bound by those attitudes.

4. How effective are immigrants at central station and Postcards in conveying the impact of physical journeys? Give reasons with reference to both poems.

Must say, it’s depressing when whoever sets the questions can’t even get the poem titles right. Or are the errors yours in transcription?

You should by now have enough of an appreciation of ‘Post card’ to answer this one yourself, with regard to that poem.

I find ‘Immigrants at Central Station, 1951’ a difficult poem to understand completely. It’s not clear to me whether the immigrants have disembarked at the station from a train which then whistles and leaves, or have boarded the train to travel somewhere. The word immigrants suggests arrivals, but the closing metaphor about time running ahead on the railway tracks suggests that these people are headed somewhere else on those tracks and are thinking ahead. There are descriptions and similes conveying their mindset and mood. They are accepting of the damp and cold. They find the emptiness of the streets ‘benevolent’. They are anxious. They are taking care not to become separated from their children. They are sad when the train whistles and gets underway. The comparisons of them to ‘cattle bought for slaughter’, and of the whistle to a word of command, and of the signal to a guillotine, suggest that they are used to being ordered around and harshly treated. I cannot however find anything in the poem that conveys any ‘impact’ of any physical journey, unless the emotions like anxiety, etc, are regarded as impacts.

You ought however to be able to express your own opinion with regard to ‘Immigrants at Central Station, 1951', so I leave that to you.

Ian




Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/01/2022 02:51AM by IanB.

Good stuff. Note also pt (if I may be so familiar), the originating IP address is shown along with your name(s), so pretending to be different posters has failed, at least in this case (192.168.128.---).

[tinyurl.com]

uh, that's still an error in the forum. You come up with the same Ip address....

thanks for your post Ian!

< sheepish grin, scuffs heel of shoe >





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2022 12:40PM by Hugh Clary.

lol u were wrong hugh clary

>hugh clary's enemy

Take a number.

>lol u were wrong hugh clary

Shucks - happens so often I don't even take notice any more. A little self flagellation with sticks of birch or briars while wearing sackcloth and ashes, and I am good as new. Still, in this particular case, I have been corrected repeatedly, so it is even more embarrassing. Does that mean I will remember it in the future? Nuh-uh.

hey id just like to say thanks heaps i just read all of your ideas and im doing the same poems for my journeys assignment and its been very helpful
Thankyou very much