Speech_on_Poetry

Good Morning Staff And Students of Year 10. The Poem I chosen is Sanctuary by the famous Australian poet Judith Wright. Sanctuary. The road beneath the giant original trees sweeps on and cannot wait. Varnished by dew, its darkness mimics mirrors and is bright behind the panic eyes the driver sees caught in headlights. Behind his wheels the night takes over: only the road ahead it true. It knows where it is going; we go too. Sanctuary, the sign said. Sanctuary- trees, not house: flat skins pinned to the road of possum and native –cat; and here the old tree stood for how many thousand years' That old gnome-tree some axe-new boy cut down. Sanctuary it said; but only the road has meaning here. It leads into the worlds cities like a long fuse laid. Fuse, nerve, stand of a net, tense bearer of messages, snap-tight violin-string, dangerous knife-edge laid across the dark, what has that sign to do with you' The immense tower of antique forest and cliff, the rock where years accumulate like leaves, the tree where transient bird and mindless insect sing' The word the board holds up is Sanctuary, and the road knows that notice boards make sense, But has not time to pray. Only, up there, morning sets doves upon the power-line. Swung on that fatal voltage like a sign and meaning love, perhaps they are a prayer. Judith Wright wrote this poem to show the destruction of the native world. She is saying that all we really care about is money making, money having, money spending and we have forgotten about the living world around us. In this poem, the author describes an area of habitation as a sanctuary. She uses the heading as an ironic meaning to make a point on the thoughtlessness of human destruction of our environment. The opening stanza sets the scene for this poem. Judith Wright uses the road as a metaphor to stand for the human conflict with nature. This “sanctuary” which by definition means “A place which is safe”, has a road passing through leading to a city, which stops for nothing in its way. The road is used all throughout the poem as symbolic symbol of our actions that can’t be changed, meaning when we chose a road and make a mistake, we can’t go back and change the past. To relate to this, Judith has used lines like ‘ flat skins pinned to the road’. This line also creates imagery in the poem of dead animals lying on a road. She also involves an antique old tree into the poem that has been cut down for no particular reason by a boy and his axe. This gives me the feeling of sadness to the destruction of an old, defenceless tree but I believe Judith Wright used this to immediately grab people’s attention to the destruction we are doing to our environment and how important it is to protect our native forests, plants, and animals . In stanza 3 the lines ‘fuse, nerve, strand of a net, tense bearer of messages, snap-tight violin string, dangerous knife-edge laid across the dark’ is a metaphor that emphasis the differents between survival and destruction of native life and it also creates anxiety and tension to the reader. This is also imagery for the reader suggesting what the road looks like. The rhetorical questions, also in stanza 3 asking the reader “what has that sign to do with you'” I believe this means that the humans don’t bother to care and respect for the environment because they are to busy following progress and have no time to listen and understand what is happening to the real world. In the last stanza, The lines “doves upon the power-line Swung on that fatal voltage like a sign” Usually Doves are used as a symbol of peace but in this poem they are used to show the vulnerability of nature and the exposure that the nature has to the human world. Such as the road mention in the poem power lines are also used to show that some man-made things harm the environment. In conclusion, I believe that Judith wrote this poem in desperation to get her word out to the world about the destruction of our environment and that all other hope is gone and this was her last resort.