10 Mary Street Essay

339 Words2 Pages
In 10 Mary Street, Peter Skrzynecki adopts a predominantly nostalgic tone in order to reflect on the significance of tightly bound familial relationships, as constituted by the family home. The family home, 10 Mary Street, is the cornerstone upon which those connections to family and culture are built and strengthened. The first stanza presents the home as a secure and reliable place, especially when contrasted against the discomfort and dangerous descriptions of the wider world that exists outside the home. This perspective is common to the migrant experience, as the trepidatious and unsettling experience of fleeing one’s country of origin leaves a profound impact on an individual’s psyche. Hence, the poet deeply cherishes those feelings of comfort and safety that the family home is able to provide. As the poem progresses, the family home develops beyond that base level of security, and becomes a place of nourishment and restoration. The love and care the poet’s parents pour in to the home is returned in kind by the produce that flourishes from the garden. As the poet ravages the fruits of his parents labour, the home gradually grows in to its role as a kind of auxiliary caregiver for the poet, sustaining him throughout his formative years. By the poem’s conclusion, it no longer simply provides for Peter and his immediate family, but is also responsible for the safekeeping and preservation of their cultural heritage. The home is a depository for memories, a meeting place for displaced persons, and the very incarnation of ‘home’ in the truest sense of the word, as all that was lost in leaving Europe; the food and drink, the friendship, the emotionally charged discourse of friends and family; are ultimately restored within this safe and nourishing place. Yet, in the last stanza, the hotbed of positive connotations imbued within that little place on 10 Mary
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