Darwin By Peter Goldsworthy Analysis

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Peter Goldsworthy invites his audience to experience a physical journey with the persona in his poem ‘Darwin’ – about a man who after travelling for 25 years, decides to return to his hometown. When he arrives, he finds that Darwin has dramatically changed after being “redecorated by a famous cyclone” (4th stanza). While travelling through the new Darwin, the man starts to recognise familiar scents of his past and comes across a “stilt-house” that has survived the destruction of the cyclone. It is through this symbol of a house that the persona gets a sense of nostalgia about his life before travel and Goldsworthy uses it as a catalyst for the change in tone. Although the general tone of the poem is negative at first – where the persona feels he has to “drag his body behind” (1st stanza) – as his journey progresses and as he begins to find remnants of his childhood in Darwin, it becomes one of happiness. The free-verse structure allows the composer to express his thoughts about the journey much easier as he is not restricted by the rhyme or to a certain number of syllables per line – just as the persona is not restricted to one place, he travels the world and is limitless.…show more content…
Similarly, the metaphor of a dog is used throughout the poem – “heavy tail, wagged by a thousand scent-trails” (2nd stanza), to give the reader a better sense of what the persona is experiencing and to further define the olfactory themes in the

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