i have to write and essay in responce to the following
"Humans always have and alaways will have a need to belong"

im writing it on "The Colour Bar" by Kath Walker, and "2001" by Geoff Page

my discussion may consider,

common theme
imagery
figures of speech
the poems original context
the relation of the poem to the modern world



i keep going to start it but completly blank out, i dont know where to start!


any help would be great


thankyou

I don't know the poems at all, but I managed to find Page's 2001 on line so here it is.

2001

We will decide
Who comes to this country –
And the circumstances
In which they come.

How like a piece of poetry it was,
the roughening iambics,
those sharpened ‘c’s’, like angled pikes,

the two-beat lines that got us going –
except line 3 which had its extra
fist banged on the table.

Note the subtle half-rhyme, too,
‘country’ matched with ‘come’
and how the preposition ‘in’

assumes its proper place.
Like most great poetry, of course,
it’s mainly made from echoes:

the glorious Three Hundred Greeks
who held Thermopylae
and Winston Churchill roaring still

“We shall fight them on the beaches . . .”
Like all such deathless works of art
it’s shivering with myth:

the golden hordes who spoiled our sleep
across two centuries,
the bard far back with lyre and smoke

declaiming his alliterations,
the ancient battles of his race
with dragons, gods and men.

No wonder, then, that those who might
have shown us something else,
defeated now by poetry,

had nowhere left to turn.


I can't find the text of the Kath Walker poem for comparison.

I would guess a common theme is exclusion.
Gate is also using old images of fear of being over run by an external enemy to illustrate a modern fear. You have the ancient Greeks holding off the Persians, Britain awaiting Nazi invasion, 14thC and 15thC invasions of Europe by the Mongols and Beowulf. Is he in agreement with the comparisons he gives?

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/22/2009 12:33PM by LindaD.