241. ADVENTURES IN LITERATURE - Poetry
Group Leader: Virginia DeWolfe
Review written by: David Smeeton
For their final session of the year the Literature Group chose to enjoy poetry, with members invited to bring their own poems, or examples of their favourite verse.
Kath Dean, who regularly composes her own verse, came up with a lively description of the activities of U3A Mandurah, and Norma Vaughan gave a neatly rhymed memory of HER. ‘Her’, being the ‘third’ sister of two when Norma's daughters were growing up, as in “Not me! It was her who did it”.
Jim Barns chose 'The Burial of Sir John Moore' as one of his favourite poems. Read by June Barns, it is a poem that captures an heroic moment in British history with unusual colour and empathy, rather than imperial boasting. Discussion of Banjo Paterson’s poem 'Waltzing Matilda' revealed that in the original the swagman does not say "You’ll never take me alive". Paterson actually wrote "Up sprang the swagman and jumped into the waterhole, Drowning himself by the Coolibah tree."
Discussion of poetic styles ranged widely with a look at the Sonnet form. It is often thought that sonnets always rhyme AB, AB, CD, CD, and so on for twelve lines, with a final two rhyming lines, as in the Shakespearean sonnets. However it was pointed out that poets used variations of this, though the final two lines always rhyme. For example the sonnets of John Keats display varying rhymes.
But overall, most of the discussion centered on the work of Judith Wright, the Australian poet born in 1915. The group has been studying her Collected Poems during this past semester. An activist for human rights and aboriginal reconciliation, Judith Wright founded the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, and her poetry reflects the Australian environment, and what has been described as her ‘sorrowing gaze on the damage done, and being done to the world’. At the same time she could be humorous, and delighting in nature, and human relationships.
Members emphasised that she is very much a poet for our times, and well worth reading.