journey the north coast robert gray

Commentary on Poems set for the HSC and VCE exam

I have written these brief but I hope suggestive notes to ease my conscience, on finding that poems I made many years ago, for my own pleasure, are now a cause of anxiety to students.  

These poems, chosen by the Department of Education, are all earlier work. Except for the last of them, they were written while I was in my twenties. They are a younger person’s experience. Although remaining essentially the same, they have each, over the years, been persistently revised, to make them more informative.

Poems can be read many times because they have been written many times (but this ought not to show).

In my remarks here, I deal mostly with technique, so that the content, the emotive situation in the poems, is not devalued. The emotion that is being suggested opens beyond words, beyond other words, within the reader. You can talk about how the technique implies the emotion. You can point to it.

The theme of the comments that follow has been stated by Seamus Heaney: “Poetry is language that does what it says.”

Good luck. Despite everything that surrounds them this year, in school-life, I hope you will be able to find pleasure in these poems.

That is the point of them – pleasure in what language can do.

• Journey, the North Coast
• The Meatworks
• North Coast Town
• Flames and Dangling Wire

You will notice at once the rhythm of this. It is written in various line-lengths, with shifting emphases that /create a tentative balance  in/balance-out through the line. (This is called ‘free verse’, as opposed to regular metre.) The lines overall in this poem are restrained, they are allowed only a fairly narrow gauge or expanse.limit. They are not nearly as flexible and loose as those in ‘Diptych’, for instance. This gives them a strong rhythm. Also, the syntax of the poem unfolds quickly: the narrative plunges down the page, without the hindrance of stanza-breaks. In these ways the poem simulates its context, which is someone travelling by train.

An influence on the poem was the Australian poet Kenneth Slessor, in ‘The Night Ride.’ But I take an opposite position to him: my poem is about coming into the countryside in the morning, with exhilaration. Slessor’s is about travelling out of the country by night, almost as though fleeing. You feel his journey is meant to represent life generally, as he finds it, being baffling and dark and something to be endured. The two poems emphasise opposed views of nature.

There is in ‘Journey, the North Coast’ an image which catches succinctly something of what it is about. It describes travelling past saplings on a hillside, and their elegance makes the observer think of a nude descending a staircase. If one is slightly aware of art history, one at once recalls Marcel Duchamp’s cubist painting of that title (there are about five slightly differing versions of it). Then, immediately afterwards, on the next line, this sophisticated eye is replaced by an innocent and more sensuous gaze, and the emphasis of the image becomes the trees, their being like slender white nudes. This new, naturalistic impression cancels the other. The image can be experienced as like a tableau, a much smaller performance, within the larger context of a play.

The poem ends with its own brief acknowledgement of despondency – it doesn’t forget the plurality of life. Alongside the satisfaction of the suitcase locks biting home, there is a glimpse of a young person’s isolated life in a furnished room (you feel it is a young person because of a certain innocence in the voice, and the freshness of the enthusiasm in the descriptions).

The image of the latches taking hold in the suitcase is a poetic device that conveys a larger emotion by using a smaller one.

Here is a particularly explicit poem, in contrast to the implication of the previous one. To match the clarity of the content there are the precise modulations of the voice, shown in the shifting line-breaks.

The poem ends with a revelation, and the rhythm of the last line is deliberately harsh and roughed-up, in showing what that is.

Ted Hughes, the English poet, wrote a poem called ‘View of a Pig’ earlier than I wrote about those animals, and it may be that his piece prompted mine. His is about not being able to feel for a slaughtered pig, which is very different to the emotion in ‘The Meatworks.’

This poem starts off as if it were a folksong or a blues; it is like a ballad from the Sixties, accompanied by a big 12-string guitar. But that is only in the first two lines, just long enough to establish the reference to the popular protest music of that time. (I admired Bob Dylan, as  his music was being released, and my favourite pop song would have been ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ by Kris Kristofferson, which is about hitching a lift, as the speaker of this poem is doing.)

The poem doesn’t continue as a song because it’s concerned with the description of a place, which a song doesn’t do well. I wanted to write about the sort of town I had grown up in and what was becoming of it – how it was “progressing”, but not in the most important sense, the human sense.

There is a historical dimension to this poem, which can be seen in the characterization of the two people in the car that pulls over. They are described as having tattoos and ‘greasy Fifties-style’ hair. There was much more social opprobrium about tattoos then – they were only worn by sailors, bikies and criminals. And ‘bodgie’ hairdos, in honour of Elvis Presley, were flaunted by ‘youths’, as the newspapers called them, who were at times antagonistic to the hippies, with whom the speaker of this poem would be identified. Hitch-hiking was, although foolish, common in the Sixties, amongst the young, influenced by the American ‘Beats’ like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder, one of whose poems begins:

We’re on our way

out of town

go hitching down

that highway ninety-nine

My poem asserts a sense of freedom, from a regimented way of life, through its casual-seeming treatment of the traditional folk song’s form. Where such a poem ought to maintain eight or ten syllables to a line, this one rebelliously has as many as fourteen, as few as six. It has some perfect rhymes, but also some like ‘chrome’ and ‘town’ which barely acknowledge each other.

We experience a revelation at the end of this poem, too. There is a transformation of attitude in the speaker, between his thinking of the word ‘Abo’, a slightly dismissive term, and of the phrase ‘not attempting to hitch’. Something happens there, very fast, all within the space of one line – empathy occurs.

In this poem, the plodding passage of an old-fashioned wooden ferry, as it’s moving across Sydney Harbour, late at night, is conveyed through the expressive use of a seemingly-arbitrary  four-line stanza (or ‘quatrain’). This stanza is used to break open a sentence and spread it across a verse-space, like a vista, or it can slow down, with its tight lines, the progress of the description.

The tactics of other art-forms are drawn on here. In the first stanza, we read that the ferry ‘goes up onto/ the huge dark harbour,’ which is reminiscent of the way, in a naive or ‘primitive’ painting, things are often shown as distant by being depicted higher up on the painting’s surface. This ‘innocence’ permeates the poem. There is also a cinematic technique in ‘Late Ferry’– the boat’s fairly brief journey is given in a series of filmic ‘takes’, cut and montaged together, as in the editing of a film.

The poem is seen from the foreshores of Sydney Harbour, at Lavender Bay, a little ‘upstream’ from the Harbour Bridge and Luna Park. The ferry is moving diagonally across the Harbour, into the light of the city and Circular Quay. This is the viewpoint of many paintings, set in daylight, by the artist Brett Whiteley.

The poem speaks of a ‘tuberous// shaped bay’, meaning a bay that is like a socket (in the shoreline of the Harbour) from which a tuber, a potato, has been pulled. Plain nature, in which the artist has to make his stand, is not always as glamorous as it ends up being in his depiction of it.

The poem also speaks of the Harbour Bridge as lit-up, its lights ‘swarming’ on the water below, and of the water as spangled like a ‘Busby Berkeley spectacular’. At the time the poem was written, the Bridge was fully lit at night, but that is no longer done. Busby Berkeley was a Hollywood film director who boasted ‘a cast of thousands’ in his all-girl chorus line-ups, his tap-dancing black and white films, like ‘Gold Diggers of 1933’ and ‘Babes on Broadway’ (1941).

The ending of the poem depends on a pun. The last line, ‘filled as it is with its yellow light,’ means the windows of the ferry are filled with their old-fashioned, warm light, as the cells of a honeycomb are filled with honey, and it also means that the speaker is himself filled with this light – with a visual pleasure that is like sweetness. (Such an image is called synaesthesia, the combining of the experience of one sense with that of another – as, for instance, in our literally experiencing a sound as green, which some people are naturally able to do.)

A poem that is set in a great urban rubbish dump. (This subject has also been made ‘historical’, the incineration of garbage in such places having been largely converted, since the latter part of the twentieth century, to landfill).

The poem involves itself with hell, but it is clear from its description that this is not the Christian or Islamic place of torment after death. In classical Greek mythology, hades, which has often been translated as hell, was a realm of gloom and attenuated existence, but not of active punishment and torture (except in one part of it, Tartarus, according to some accounts).

That this is the faded Greek underworld which is being spoken of is indicated by the mention of Charon, who ferries the dead across the River Styx, into hades, and by the use of an extended or ‘Homeric simile’ in describing the place. My poem looks further than the obvious aspect and finds that everywhere in existence, even in the most ‘spiritual’ experience, there is transience, wasting/passing away, ot constant loss. Which is to say that all things are treated by existence as ‘rubbish.’

In the last stanza, ‘horse-laughs’ refers to the staccato pre-recorded laughter that accompanies sit-coms on TV; which is contrasted here with Chopin’s rarefied music. Both kinds of experience are equally lost, the vulgar and the ethereal, the poem says, because they are dependent on our encountering them at particular moments in time, and are never experienced in the same way again.

One of those particular moments is mentioned at the end of the poem. A person is listening to Chopin, on the radio, and the music is likened to the curtains in the room billowing outwards into the light. The word ‘lifting’ is used, which evokes sails, and it seems that the listener is being carried towards ‘a coast of light.’ But that experience is now lost.

This is a dark poem, but it ends with the word ‘light.’ Where is that light?

The longest poem in the selection, but the one least in need of commentary. I should perhaps draw attention to the length of the first sentence: this conveys, if the reader is susceptible to it, the suspense, or discomfort, that accompanied my parents’ lives.

I had wanted to write this poem for a long time but couldn’t discover an expressive form for it; then I thought of the diptych, a scene or a double portrait painted on two panels which are always separate.

Journey the North Coast #

A journey embarked upon is often intertwined with numerous issues of self discovery such as the personal, inner and mental journeys of the mind. The notion of learning or being taught along the way is neither new nor alien to anyone who has experienced mainstream stories of a hero undergoing trials and hardships to come out the better for it in the end. The archetypal hero undergoes many ordeals and faces many obstacles before realising their destiny, defeating their enemy or, simply, becoming a better person. These exaggerated stories are magnified versions of the day to day choices we face as individuals in our lives and the considerations required in fulfilling our desires for our life quest/journey.

Journeys are a Quest for knowledge; to discover who we are. Karl Jung, a student of Freud, examined the archetypal journey of the hero who proves his valour on a long journey performing impossible tasks, battling monsters, solving unanswerable riddles and overcoming insurmountable obstacles to save the kingdom and perhaps marry the princess. The hero, in passing from innocence (ignorance) to adulthood (maturity) goes through three stages, separation, transformation and return. Journeys can enlighten us.

The term journey originates from middle English, the distance travelled in one day.

Synonyms include, trip, voyage, excursion, expedition, tour, peregrination, ramble, pilgrimage, trek, march, walk, promenade, drive, travel, walkabout odyssey…

The journey described in this poem is a return to home after a year away in the city. There is a distinct air of anticipation of meeting loved ones again.

We start in media res with the poet waking up in a swaying bunk – the first metaphor comparing the train to a small ship on the sea. The noise of “booms and cracks” is a mechanical locomotive tearing nature apart.

The poet describes the interior of the “Red rattler” in deprecating terms, such as “ rattle up the sash”, “drab carpet”, “water sways solidly”. Outside it is a bright crockery day” of his childhood, the train passes scenes of blue and silver paddocks, fences split from stone (hard wood?), a red clay bank (Wauchope?), through slopes of trees ( Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase ) until the train finally bursts out on the sea (Coffs Harbour?) and he is finally home.

http://www.galleryintell.com/nude-descending-a-staircase-the-armory-show-2013/

The wide range of colour of the silver basin, bright crockery, shadow, blue and silver paddocks, red clay, blackened tree trunks, white gum trees, and finally a calico beach all help us visualise the scenes.

The aural senses are noisy with booms and cracks, rattle, bursts, unfurling, whirl, shuttered, helping to create a realistic atmosphere.

The ending of the poem suggests the poet has spent 12 months away nostalgically longing for this day.

• Robert Gray: Poems Summary

by Robert Gray

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by Timothy Sexton

“Flames and Dangling Wires”

The speaker begins on the way to a garbage dump or landfill. Smoke from incineration fires rise on one side all around there is that strange optical effect of wobbling vision. Shadowy figures who almost seem to be picking over actual dead bodies are instead attending to the refuse which is a testimony to how the present and future is dependent upon the castaways of the past.

This is an impressionistic poem which posits a truth about twilight as a unique time of day, and supports the argument with evidence suggesting that the dramatic confrontation between light and dark is beyond Shakespeare’s pen and Fellini’s camera. As a mockingbird impersonates a nightingale and blackbird, the speaker thinks of finding meaning in god, but failing.

“Journey, the North Coast”

The speaker awakes in a hammock as if on a ship, but reveals instead he is traveling by train. There was a man occupying the swinging bunk below, but he’s now gone. The final images are of the speaker packing a suitcase and the setting of the train is juxtaposed with a year of living out of that suitcase ensconced in a furnished room.

“Annotation”

This poem begins as an exultation of the newly apprehended awareness that the things we consider neutral in life—those which enact no clearly delineated positive or negative impact—are the things which not only endure, but flourish. What does not endure, much less flourish, are the lives of people which is really just a series of routine sacrifices thought to be of significance, but which all eventually are cast away into some dark corner of memory.

“The Meat Works”

This is a first-person dramatic monologue about a man describing his first day on the job at a slaughterhouse. The bulk of the poem is graphic description of the minutiae of that job as he tells of making a big mistake, but avoiding being fired due to being his first day. He also admits that though the workers were give bags of meat drowning in blood to take home, he comes to eschew the perk. The poem closes with an uneasy and not entirely resonating justification for the blood money.

“Harbour Dusk”

The speaker tells of how he and a woman he was came upon a fading harbor wall by way of an empty park. The imagery tells the story: “overcast sky,” yachts seen across the way on “empty fields of water,” the ships whispering among themselves “as though were resolve were ill.” It is a dark, unhappy place of “melancholy” and “evening confessionals.” The story of the poem, registering symbolically and almost subliminally, is that of a relationship sadly coming to an end.

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Robert Gray: Poems Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Robert Gray: Poems is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for Robert Gray: Poems

Robert Gray: Poems study guide contains a biography of Robert Gray, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Robert Gray: Poems
• Character List

Essays for Robert Gray: Poems

Robert Gray: Poems essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Robert Gray: Poems.

• Discovery and Reassessment in the Poetry of Robert Gray
• Perspectives and Discovery
• Discovering Morality through texts
• Discovery in Robert Gray's Poetry & Katherine Mansfield's The Garden
• An intellectual insight to discovery in Gray's poetry anthology 'Coast Road' and Kate Chopin's short narrative

Precarious images: Cumulus: Collected Poems by Robert Gray

• Cumulus: Collected Poems by Robert Gray John Leonard Press 348pp $32.95 AU ISBN 9 780980 852356

Critics often remark upon the Asian influence in Robert Gray’s poetry. True, Gray includes in every collection a sequence of short poems, which sometimes have the form of haiku, and they are often perfect in their way. In this, he has gone back to one source of modernism: the Imagists, with their desire for an unencumbered line, and for that clarity of thought and image they found in Chinese and Japanese poetry. In poetry, the Asian Century started more than a hundred years ago.

But there is more to Gray’s poetry than that. His images concentrate a votive sense of place and memory, which derives far more from William Wordsworth and the Romantic poets. In fact, it is the meeting of these two influences that makes his imagery so memorable: at once cool and rapturous. Yes, his short poems are often perfect in their way. Nevertheless, his reputation should rest on his longer and more entire poems: ‘Journey: the North Coast’, ‘Flames and Dangling Wire’, ‘Memories of the Coast’, ‘In Departing Light’, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, ‘Joan Eardley in Catterline’, ‘Sansouci’. As this list suggests, Gray is still underrated in Australian poetry.

The selection in Cumulus , good though it is, leaves out many of those studies of bare places, of place itself, which are at least as essential to Gray’s achievement as the shorter poems. It includes poems from eight collections: nearly four decades of work. Coming more than a decade after his New and Selected Poems (1998), it includes poems from his two most recent collections, Afterimages (2002) and Nameless Earth (2006), along with drawings from Ingres’ Violin . In an author’s note, Gray explains: ‘The free verse line in my poems I see as analogous to the spontaneous line in drawing. This written line is a gesture, also, although for the voice.’ Anyone who reads Robert Gray will want Cumulus . Yet Cumulus omits poems which, if not everywhere likeable, are nevertheless – or as a consequence – some of his most memorable: ‘Poem to Kristina’; ‘Greyhounds’, ‘Poem to My Father’, ‘The Swallows’, ‘A Country Town’, ‘Emptying the Desk’, ‘A Garden Shed’, ‘Ritual’. Many of these excluded poems arise out of Gray’s interest in country towns: their rituals, their poverty, the lives of their women and children, their overlooked places. Few Australian poets have noticed them or written of them so well, with such a combination of tenderness and rancour.

Leaving home, returning home, catching trains and ferries, watching the weather from the window of a hospital or hotel room, renewal and self-betrayal: these are the starting places of Gray’s poetry. If there are two influences at work in his poetry, there is a similar conflict built into his apprehension of place. The rooms that Gray sees whole are those rooms that he remembers: rooms he has left behind and rooms he is coming home to after too long away. In the same way, his images, for all their precision, are often troubling in some way.

Gray’s imagery is the first thing a reader notices. Individual, surprising, evocative – his images have more in common with Amy Lowell’s imagism than with the hard objectivism of Ezra Pound. Like Gray, Lowell wrote versions of Japanese poems and her interest in what she called polyphonic prose probably lies somewhere behind Gray’s prose poems, such as ‘In the Bus’ and ‘Damp Evening’. His images are not austere but complex and affecting, partly because they seem in the same instant true and precarious. Take an image from ‘Journey: the North Coast’, the poem that opened his second collection, Creekwater Journal (1974): ‘Down these slopes move, as a nude descends a staircase / slender white gum trees.’ It is unforgettable because it makes the mind work between stillness and movement. It is a downward stepping, pictured step by step and all at once. The image captures not only the look of the landscape from a train window when the movement of the train can make the land appear to move; it also captures the way in which memory holds a run of time in a single image. In this way, the image shows like a hairline crack the difference between something held in memory and something seen in an instant from a passing train.

Gray’s poetry is too often criticised for its remoteness. His poetry is solitary, certainly, and polished, but his images are almost everywhere sharp with feeling and often sensuous: ‘The slow effervescence of wind-lifted rain / on knuckle and cheekbone / a sweet / occasional prickling / that is met while I walk.’ Images exist in poetry because of how memory works in experience: they make some place or fact the votive of lost years and build in us the habit of involving ourselves in what we see. All this is to suggest that an image is never simply visual, and that precision itself may be a register of feeling truer than effusion. This is nowhere more evident than in Gray’s poem ‘In Departing Light’, which is everywhere vivid with painful intimacy:

Her mouth is full of chaos. My mother revolves her loose dentures like marbles ground upon each other, or idly clatters them, broken and chipped. Since they won’t stay on her gums she spits them free with a sudden blurting cough …

Gray’s images typically draw on his feeling for place, particularly for the North Coast of New South Wales where he grew up. This sense of the place of childhood is what connects Gray with Wordsworth, whose The Prelude (1850) is a study of the making of imagination: a ‘spiritual autobiography’. Gray’s ‘Memories of the Coast’, ‘A Day at Bellingen’, ‘Curriculum Vitae’: these all draw on it. ‘A Day at Bellingen’, for instance, describes a night rowing-trip so alive with the recollection of Wordsworth’s night rowing-trip in The Prelude that it serves as a meditation on it. Here is part of The Prelude :

Nor without the voice Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on; Leaving behind her still, on either side, Small circles glittering idly in the moon, Until they melted all into one track Of sparkling light …

Like an answer, returned from a different place – like a return of those echoes the child in The Prelude sets loose – Gray writes:

and there’s a daylight moon among the shabby trees, above the scratchy swamp oaks and through the wrecked houses of the paperbarks; a half moon drifting up beside me like a jellyfish. Now the reflected shapes are fading in the darkened rooms of the water. And the water becomes, momentarily, white – magnesium burning.

This is not to suggest the poem is derivative. What Gray takes from Wordsworth is the setting of an encounter – in this case, between the solitary rower and the moon’s reflection in water. From there, the perceptions, the images, the conclusions are his own. It seems to me Gray’s poem traces how the memory of a poem can enter into the perception of a place: ‘reflected shapes … fading in the darkened rooms of the water.’ Here are more of those rooms we cannot go back to. In this way, the poem also questions how a Romantic sense of place might work in Australia now, ‘among the shabby trees … and through the wrecked houses of the paperbarks.’ In Gray’s poem, there is a rapturous involvement with place, built up through the list: ‘and … among, above … and through.’ Yet that involvement is undercut by the haiku-like clarity and surprise of his images. Wordsworth’s circles of light on water melt ‘all into one track’. Gray’s images are sudden perceptions; they don’t last long enough to melt, and even in memory keep that quality of surprise. In Gray’s poem, ‘the water becomes, momentarily, white – magnesium burning’. Momentarily : Gray’s images almost always appear, in this way, at once exact and precarious. He takes up the Romantic poets’ interest in the nature of imagination, in how we form out of some place a landscape of memory. But the precariousness of his images suggests that he would rather discover, not his mind in things, but things in themselves. As he puts it in ‘Minima’: ‘What we love about nature / is its unresponsiveness – / it is precisely / that it does not “care or know”.’

This is what makes Gray so interested in motel rooms, which illustrate how quickly and even helplessly we manufacture familiarity with places, and take possession of what we do not own. Gray’s attentive descriptions of the natural world have a similar restlessness built into them. He is always leaving behind the images that he makes, just as he is always leaving the rooms that he has inhabited. ‘I realize I am in the future,’ he writes in ‘Flames and Dangling Wire’.

Wordsworth revised The Prelude throughout his life. Taking that as a model, perhaps, Gray revises a number of the poems that he includes in Cumulus . A poet has the right to rewrite work. In the main, Gray’s revisions make different versions of the poems: not always better, and not always worse. He does nothing so radical as Marianne Moore’s revision of ‘Poetry’, in which she cut a poem of several pages back to four lines starting: ‘I too dislike it’. His revisions work more with prepositions and line breaks, titles and word changes. Take the first poem in both Creekwater Journal and Cumulus , ‘Journey: the North Coast’. In Cumulus , Gray changes the title to ‘Journey, the North Coast’. In the first version, the poem starts:

Next thing, I wake up in a swaying bunk, as though on board a clipper lying in the sea, and it’s the train, that booms and cracks, it tears the wind apart …

The version in Cumulus starts:

Next thing, I wake-up in a swaying bunk as if on board a clipper clambering at sea, and it’s the train that booms and cracks, it tears the wind apart …

That is to say, in just four lines he adds a hyphen, changes ‘as though’ to ‘as if’, changes ‘lying in’ to ‘clambering at’, and cuts two commas. Later in that poem, he cuts a reference to pyjamas. As this might suggest, in general his revisions clean up punctuation and cut prepositions. Subtly, this changes the rhythm of some lines, making it cleaner but sometimes less various.

Cleaner but sometimes less various: that is also how Cumulus stands in comparison to Gray’s New Selected Poems . In his author’s note Gray writes: ‘The latest version of my poems are the only ones I acknowledge, and only those that appear in this book.’ What T. S. Eliot said about tradition and the individual talent could equally describe a poet’s relationship to all the poems he has written before: ‘What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.’ Gray is writing poems as good as any he has written. Possibly the poems that he is writing now draw most upon the poems collected here and he has for that reason modified this selection. Possibly he or his editor have looked askance at something domestic and awkward in the poems he has left out – much as he has cut a reference to pyjamas from ‘Journey, the North Coast’. Unacknowledged or not, a number of the excluded poems will persist: poems of bare, poor places. That is to say, Cumulus is not a complete picture of Gray’s achievement and does not replace his New Selected Poems . Still, a number of the poems that it includes from Afterimages and Nameless Earth – ‘After Heraclitus’, ‘In Departing Light’, ‘In the Mallee’, ‘Flying Foxes’, ‘Joan Eardley in Catterline’, ‘Sanssouci’ – are among his best, and that is saying something.

Lisa Gorton is a poet whose first collection Press Release won the Victorian Premier’s...

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Close reading notes - analysis of Robert Gray, 'Journey - the North Coast'

Subject: English

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Other

Last updated

21 September 2021

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Journey - the North Coast’, by the Australian poet Robert Gray, has been set for HSC study since 2015. This set of notes gives a full analysis of the poem with a relevant image and a handy grab-box explaining the Discovery element, poetic techniques, and related texts which complement the poem for students who must study it in concert with one other text. Important points are in red.

A simple, one-stop analysis of this complex poem which students can work through in class or take home for private study.

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'Robert Gray: Coast Road Student Book engages students in an enjoyable and detailed study of the prescribed poems of Robert Gray for the NSW Stage 6 English Year 12 Standard Module B: Close Study of Literature . It has been designed to improve detailed and informed knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of the poems as literary texts.

'In order to develop their own considered personal response to the prescribed poems, students will engage in a variety of activities that require them to respond to the poems in both critical and creative ways. This includes tasks that require students to compose in the imaginative, persuasive, and discursive styles of writing. By working their way through the different activities in this student book, students will improve their understanding of: the content of the poems, the ideas and issues Robert Gray encourages readers to think about, the language the poems use, and the way they have been structured. Students will also learn how to support their judgements about the poems using detailed knowledge of language features and textual form.

'The poems covered in this student book include:

‘Journey, the North Coast’

‘Flames and Dangling Wire’

‘Harbour Dusk’

‘Byron Bay: Winter’

‘Description of a Walk’

’24 Poems’

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“Journey, North Coast” by Robert Gray

• Word count: 979
• Category: Discovery Film Analysis Journeys

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Question: “Discoveries can be new and refreshing or challenging and confronting”

The self discovery of an unknown or veiled environment can be new and reinvigorate or denouncing and encountering. Self discovery involves the process of an individual, which inaugurate’s new features of an certain status. Robert Gray and Christo Erasmus, both explore the concept of self discovery but alter the discovery to being either new and refreshing or challenging and confronting. “Journey, North Coast” written by poet Robert Gray, demonstrates the self discovery of a concealed environment. This influences the persona’s demeanour to an undulate and stimulating psyche. However, the poem “The meatworks” by Robert Gray, and short film “The Pencil” (TROPFEST) directed by Christo Erasmus, exposes the threats of a discovery. The persona in both text feel challenged and confronted by these discoveries. Therefore discoveries can be new and refreshing or challenging and confronting.

“Journey, North Coast” by Robert Gray, describes the journey of the persona from the city to a country location. The intriguing self discovery brings a refreshing feeling towards the persona who had the country surroundings concealed whilst living in the city. “it’s the train that booms and cracks,/ it tears the wind apart” sets the mood of the poem, as the viewer senses the excitement of the persona towards discovering the country side. The savage primal power of the engine that “tears the wind apart” matches his vitality and vigour. He can’t wait to let in the abundant light now that they have symbolically left the darkness of the night and twelve unhappy months spent in the city behind.

The refreshing discovery can also be seen through the use of aural imagery. The aural imagery created in the onomatopoeia of the words ‘booms’ and the ‘cracks’ and the verb ‘tears’ creates a sense of powerful energy and capture the excitement and celebration of this emotional journey. The recapturing of the country side can be seen through the symbolism in the poem of re-birth/re-discovering. “Where logs are fallen,/and blackened tree trunks”. The symbol of rebirth can be linked towards the rediscovery of an unconcealed environment. When “logs” and “tree trunks” are burnt, they go from the process of re-growths. Therefore, “Journey, North Coast” involves a discovery which is new and refreshing.

“The meatworks” by Robert Gray, exposes an discovery which becomes challenging and confronting as the persona realises the nature of his job. The slaughtering of the animals puts an immoral burden not just on the individual but the facility at which it occurs upon. In the poem synesthesia is frequently used to demonstrate why the persona is so repelled by the meatworks and chooses to be the “furthest end from the bellowing sloppy yards”. This technique helps demonstrate the power of imagery by using such powerful words and phrases to impede with 5of the readers senses. “Arm-thick corkscrew, grinding around inside it, meat or not”. This is an example of the cacophonous phrases used in the poem to create the explicit imagery it holds.

The guiltiness of the persona is seen through the use of present tense, “you found, around the nails, there was still blood”. Blood is often used as an image of people’s sin and guilt, and the judgment which follows. Blood-guilt is ascribed to those who are responsible for the shedding of innocent blood. The persona finds his guiltiness, confronting as he tries to wash it away from his bloody hands. “The meatworks” shows discovery which, beholds the challenges and confrontation that an individual has to face.

“THE PENCIL”, directed by Christo Erasmus, is a short film which features in the Tropfest,New York. It expresses the story of an unfulfilled school cleaner feels he doesn’t fit in society. The motif in the film which is a pencil, allows the audience to realise the challenges the character faces with his discovery. The audience is able to notice a defiant discovery, through the close up of the persona, whilst he is cleaning the room. This shows his facial expressions which are dampened, dispirited and dull.

When the persona discovers the desk he starts calligraphy his expressions onto it. The director uses a fast paced tempo. The fast paced tempo of the non-diegetic sound creates a sense of urgency, importance, panic, hysteric and defence. The use of the tempo tells the viewer that a discovery to a degree of uncertainty is about to commence.

The climax of the film is when the persona discovers the portal, to an unknown world. A dramatic pause is used at this time which causes tension and gives an indication that something profound may be about to happen. For the entrance of the unknown world, the director uses colour palette. The limited colours of the scene when the cleaner enters the ‘unknown’ world, allows the viewers to discern the link between the two. The character is befuddled, perturbed and perplexed when he enters the room. The character faces the challenge of understanding why this has occurred, and is confronted by the people he meets. A lady in a white robe, which symbolises peace, addresses the character and starts to kiss him. This also challenges and confronts the character as he is confused to why such events have occurred. “The PENCIL” shows discovery which, the character is confronted and challenged by the environment in which he discovers.

Discoveries can be new and refreshing or challenging and confronting. “Journey, North Coast” written by poet Robert Gray, demonstrates the self discovery of a concealed environment. This influences the persona’s demeanour to an undulate and stimulating psyche. However, the poem “The meatworks” by Robert Gray, and short film “The Pencil” (TROPFEST) directed by Christo Erasmus, exposes the threats of a discovery. The persona in both text feel challenged and confronted by these discoveries. Therefore discoveries can be new and refreshing or challenging and confronting.

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