Five Bells Kenneth Slessor Awesome Essay

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‘Five Bells’ continues to engage readers through its poetic treatment of mortality and mourning. Does this resonate with your own interpretation? Kenneth Slessor was the poet of time, of “the cold fact of time”, as he said in describing the genesis of his wondrous poem “Five Bells”. This poem is strongly engaging through its poetic treatment of mourning, as it is notably encompasses obvious elegy elements, directed towards his dear artistic friend Joe Lynch, but as Slessor mentioned, and from what can be observed, the poem is as much about the compression of memory in time, in relation to symbolic and literal mortality. The poem offers not answers, but questions towards the meaning of existence, and is toned with a sense of failure, loss and desolation, as it seems that neither Lynch's art, nor the art of the poem, can defy death. Within the poem itself, there are many pieces of Slessor’s mourning scattered throughout, as the whole of Joe’s life moves through the mind of Kenneth Slessor, in the tolling of the five strokes of the bell, “this one life of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.” Mourning presents itself as being a solid thematic concern, as we are engaged by the integrated imagery, “the night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark, so dark you bore no body, had no face”, and the fitting diction, which bond together to form an essential part of the coherent structure of poetic meaning. As a meditation on a dead colleague, the background scenery of “Five Bells” revolves around darkness, isolated glittering lights, and emptiness, “deep and dissolving verticals of light, ferry the falls of moonshine down”, and the darkness with its scattered lights presents us with poetic resonance of symbolism, denoting the loneliness of men whose contacts are so transitory and far apart. This imagery combined with symbolism work together to engage and to evoke
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