Les Murray Ordinary Into Extraordinary

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How does les Murray take ordinary and make it extraordinary? Composers often manipulate everyday ordinary scenarios and make them extraordinary in order to didactically influence their audiences to ask themselves the quintessential human questions. Les Murray is a poet of 1938, contextually, he has experiences of the Great Depression, World War II and it’s repercussions, as well as the fear of diverse cultures impeding on ours, with numerous immigration and religious debates at the time. It was a time when many people questioned ‘what is life?’ and sought something that was diverse to the ordinary. Murray crystalizes these concerns within his poems “An absolutely ordinary rainbow”, and “Spring Hail”, where he perceptively expresses notions of the true purity behind the trivial, mundane things in life, whether it be through spiritual or personal enlightenment. The us of hyperboles is seen frequently throughout the poem as a whole, it is done to further emphasize the way that trivial, ordinary things can have an extraordinary impact upon responders, an effectual use of this is seen in the 3rd stanza of the poem, spring hail, in this line Murray turns a typically conventional hail storm, into “beaded violence”, this hyperbole is used to escalate the little boys distress, and how we perceive the common storm, it turns an ordinary cyclical event, into something extraordinary and ferocious, but this technique is not only commonplace in “spring hail”, but also seen quite frequently throughout “An absolutely ordinary rainbow” in the 5th and 6th stanza of this poem, there is a definitive sequence of hyperboles, “fiercest manhood”, “slickest wit among us” the effect almost similar to the last, over exaggerates the truth, but turns ordinary emotions none the less into extraordinary ones, allowing us to respond with greater levels of empathy and awe of the scenario.

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