Gulliver

Gulliver

“Gulliver” is written in a dramatic monologue form, and uses an allusion and extended metaphor of the narrator as the protagonist of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and imagery of imprisonment to dwell on the pain and discomfort of human experience.

Slessor compares being human to being incarcerated – using paradoxical imagery of prisons to give insight into the pains of human existence. He says that even if a person is free, they are trapped by the very materials that constitute the body – the visceral imagery of “sinews” and “nerve” and “bone” introduces this idea.

The idea of human experience being inherently a prison is further evoked through the imagery of incarceration. The symbols of “walls”, “dungeon”, “tyranny”, “dock” and “manacles” represents things that restrict physical movement and personal autonomy. The word “tyranny” is used in the phrase “tyranny of sinews” and “rope” is used with the phrase “hundred ropes of nerve and bone” – a reference to Gulliver being tied down by the tiny Lilliputian people in the book Gulliver’s Travels. Which is perhaps a clever way of saying that we are prisoners to the tiny versions of ourselves in our minds that make us obsess over our insecurities and frailties.

The uncommon connection between the figurative meaning evoked by imagery of the body and imagery of incarceration is an effective way of Slessor to push his point that no one, individually or collectively, is free from the mind-forged manacles of our psychology and physiology.

The dramatic monologue – shown using the word “I” and the focus on the persona’s subjective experience – is a way for Slessor to put the reader into the perspective of the narrator, making the feelings of pain and visceral imagery of “I’ll kick your walls to bits, I’ll die scratching a tunnel” more immediate.

The changing emphasis and irregularity of the rhyme throughout the poem creates a sense of urgency, giving the dramatic monologue the quality of an unhinged rant, which parallels the imagery of idea of the chaos and fear and pain of embodied human experience

The repetition of “too” in “stuff too cheap, and strings too many” emphasizes the disdain and the frustration of the persona who seems overcome by the physical and psychic pain of existing as a human.

The many prisons of human experience are highlighted explicitly through the use of cumulation in “Love, hunger, drunkenness, neuralgia, debt, Cold weather, hot weather, sleep and age” – as he begins to try to encapsulate the many, varied things that Slessor claims causes pain.

The rhetorical question of “but what can you do with the hairs?” is then indirectly answered by the jarring, paradoxical statement of “for God’s sake, call the hangman” suggesting that the only freedom from the many pains of human existence is death.