Gwen Harwood was born Gwendoline Nessie Foster on the 8th of June 1920 in Taringa, Brisbane. Early in life she became interested in literature, music and philosophy, and as she came from a musical family and played piano, she originally wanted to be a musician. Gwen was first introduced to poetry by her grandmother, inspiring her to make poetry her passion and lifelong calling. After marrying the linguist Gazzy Garcia in 1945, she moved to Oyster Cove in Tasmania, where she developed an interest in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose theories heavily informed her work. Her first published poem was in Meanjin in 1944, and her first published book of poems in 1963 was titled Poems. She has received various prizes and awards for her work including the Robert Frost Medallion in 1977, Officer of the Order of Australia in 1989 and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in the same year. Gwen Harwood is regarded as one of the finest poets Australia has produced. She has published over 420 works and has The Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize named after her. She is also the mother of author John Harwood.

What is the context of the text?

‘Father and Child’ is a piece made up of two poems that complement each other: Barn Owl and Nightfall. The piece was first published by Angus and Robertson in Sydney in Harwood’s debut collection of poetry, entitled Poems (1963).

What are the purpose and audience of the text?

At the time of publication, Harwood’s audience would have been Australians with an interest in poetry, literature and perhaps also philosophy, due to the philosophical ideas embedded in many of her poems. As Harwood is a well-known Australian poet, her poems continue to resonate with contemporary audiences as she offers a uniquely Australian voice.

What is the text about?

Part 1 begins with ‘Barn Owl’. This part of the poem is about a child of unspecified gender (most likey representing the poet), who steals her father’s gun at sunrise and shoots a barn owl. The child knows the barn owl comes back to the barn everymorning to sleep, and waits for it there. But when she shoots it, it does not die immediately as she expects. Instead, the owl is badly injured. When the father arrives, he instructs the child to finish what she has started and shoot the owl again. The second part, ‘Nightfall’, continues the story from ‘Barn Owl’ forty years later, and is told in the form of an ode. As the father is now close to death, this part of the poem addresses the notion of time and its passing. Whereas the father was described as an ‘old No-sayer’ in the first part, the narrator now views him with great respect as she has matured as a result of their collective life experiences.

How does it engage the responder through ideas, techniques and strategies?

The poem is a bildungsroman, or story of individual development and growth, and is a demonstration of the loss of a child’s innocence through rebellion against her father. ‘Barn Owl’ is told from the perspective of the child who progresses from ‘innocent’, to ‘horny fiend’, then finally ‘afraid.’ The text examines the idea of growing towards maturity, wisdom and understanding and how this connects to conventional ideals of age and youth. The text concludes with the metaphor ‘owl blind’ conveying the sadness of the child’s journey. The underlying theme of the text is rebellion against power and society, as the child seeks some control for herself by experimenting with the constraints of their father’s authority. The child’s disobedience against her father, the ‘old No-sayer’, brings insight and knowledge into the ideas of life and death and the consequences that arise: ‘I leaned my head upon / my father’s arm, and wept, / owl blind in early sun / for what I had begun.’

‘Barn Owl’ is made up of seven stanzas of six lines each, and is a narrative told in the first person. It is written in a combination of exact and slant rhyme. Exact rhyme applies to words that rhyme perfectly, whereas slant rhyme refers to words that are inexact but create a rhyme effect through alliteration or consonance, such as ‘child’ and ‘angel-mind’ in the first stanza, or ‘could’ and ‘blood’ in the sixth stanza. The use of exact rhyme in ‘Barn Owl’ gives the impression of rightness, fulfillment and precision, while the imperfect rhymes give the reader the sense that something is amiss. For example, in the sixth stanza, Harwood’s leap to slant rhyme in the first few lines strikes an off-key note in the reader that matches with the imagery she presents, evoking powerful feelings. The slant rhyme of ‘could’ and ‘blood’ is used when the child has shot the owl and is beginning to understand what she has done: ‘the wrecked thing that could, not bear the light, nor hide, hobbled in its own blood’. This evokes contrary emotions in the reader, who is both horrified by and empathetic with the poem’s narrator.

Harwood also uses figurative language to build tension in her text. For example, the first three stanzas build the complication through imagery of the child at daybreak, stealing her father’s gun. This tension is heightened in the fourth stanza with the syntax of the first line, featuring a short sentence – ‘My first shot struck’ – before the tension is released in a horrifying description of the wounded owl and the child’s realisation of what she has done.

Harwood uses imagery in the fifth stanza. For example, ‘bundle of stuff ’ emphasises the child’s lack of comprehension of the situation and her inability to properly understand and describe it right away. This is then followed by the onomatopoeic ‘dropped’, a sound device to further immerse the reader in the story.

Harwood’s poem is heavy with symbolism. The girl’s father symbolises power and authority, perhaps even society itself. The gun, also a symbol of power, is used to challenge the power of the father. The child is a symbol of innocence and its loss as she rebels against her father, gaining wisdom through the brutal killing of the owl (which is ironic as the owl is itself a symbol of wisdom).

Symbols in the text are bolstered by Harwood’s imagery, which effectively sets the scene for the reader and evokes powerful feelings. The olfactory image of the ‘urine-scented hay’ in the third stanza engages the reader’s senses, while the image of the wounded owl evokes disgust and horror. This feeling is evoked through: ‘the wrecked thing that could / not bear the light, nor hide / hobbled in its own blood’ and the words ‘obscene and dribbled’. Like the child, the reader is confronted by the image of the distressed owl.

The final stanza replaces the image of the cruel child with an awareness of the consequences of her actions. The metaphor of the ‘owl blind’ conveys the child’s sadness as she embarks on a journey towards maturity. The image of her weeping ‘for what I had begun’ symbolises the loss of youth and is a moment that most of us can relate to – the moment we leave part of our innocence behind us as we begin a new life of adult knowledge. This moment of understanding – that life is a journey – is the predominant image of Harwood’s text.

Similarly, ‘Nightfall’ is made up of seven stanzas of six lines each and is a narrative told in the first person. It is now told from the perspective of the child that has grown up. Now the father’s life has become metaphorically ripe, meaning coming to an end. In this way, Harwood uses the stages of life – childhood and old age, to express her views on growing up and living a full life. The concepts of time and death are also explored, through the description of time as being precious now that the father’s life is at an end. Harwood says: ‘we pick our / last fruit of the temporal’, meaning the father and child mindfully cherish the remaining time they spend together. The narrator’s attitude to their father has also changed as a result of maturity. They now view their father as an ‘Old King’, in contrast to the description of him as an ’old no-sayer’ in part I of the poem, showing that although he thwarted his daughter’s childhood desires and temptations, she now respects the wisdom behind such decisions.

The narrator similarly views the life the father has lived as being admirable – ‘your marvellous journey’s done’. It is an attitude that many of us aspire to – to be happy with the life we have lived when old age comes and death approaches. The portrayal of death as being both night and day as one suggests a sense of peace. In saying this, the narrator expresses a sense of loss she will experience when her father does eventually die: ‘what sorrows, in the end, / no word, no tears can mend.’