'Morse' - Les Murray

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Mariam Karhiy 12AO ENGLISH 2.4 PRACTICE POETRY ESSAY Analyse how the writer uses language techniques for a particular purpose in a written text you have studied. “Poetry makes things real, restoring their life and our perception of it.” The poem ‘Morse’ written by Australian poet Les Murray is about an ordinary Australian soldier named Bill Tuckett, a telegraph operator who carries out a life saving and courageous operation on another man, when in a remote and desert part of the Australian Outback. To analyse is to scrutinise and to scrutinise in this essay will mean to examine closely. In this poem, Murray highlights the telephone operator’s surgical achievements using these poetic language techniques onomatopoeia, listing and rhyme. Firstly, Murray uses the language technique onomatopoeia, which is the formation of a word by imitation of a sound in ‘Morse’. SOS (Save Our Souls) is the Morse code distress signal which it represented by “· · · — — — · · ·”. The Morse code is a method of transmitting text-information in a series of tones and is emphasized by onomatopoeia in this poem. The first three dots in the symbol mean ‘Save’. “- With a man needing surgery right on the spot a lot, /would have done their dashes. It looked hopeless (dot dot dot).” Using this language technique to convey the Morse code in this poem and specifically in line nine, emphasized how Bill Tucket was to be saving the dying man’s soul. It also shows the reader that the time this poem was written, there were still telephone transmitters in the area and that is how the message was put across that he (Tuckett) needed instruction to save the man’s life. The ‘dot dot dot’ was also cleverly used by Murray in order to form an ellipses, to show the uncertainty of the situation with the ‘…’. The Australian poet has also used the language technique listing in his poem ‘Morse’. Its purpose
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