Gwen Harwood’s poems become easier to compare when you follow an idea across different stages of life. These 20 selections bring the collection together through responsibility, memory, care, disappointment and the limits of art. Use them to develop a connected argument rather than a separate mini-essay on every poem.
These quotations are drawn from NST’s study guides and grouped to help you build comparisons across the collection. Slashes mark line breaks; where an entry uses two separate excerpts, they remain separately quoted and labelled. Explain how each technique supports your argument rather than treating a quotation list as a guarantee of a Band 6.
Growing up and discovering responsibility
1. “A horny fiend, I crept / out with my father’s gun.”
Barn Owl. Technique: Demonic imagery and retrospective narration. The adult speaker casts the younger self as a threatening creature, exposing the cruelty beneath the child’s fantasy of independence. The gap between the child’s excitement and the older narrator’s judgement makes growing up an ethical reassessment of earlier behaviour. Read the poem analysis.
2. “a lonely / child who believed death clean / and final, not this obscene”
Barn Owl. Technique: Juxtaposition and disrupted expectation. The child’s imagined neatness of death is contradicted by the owl’s prolonged physical suffering. Explain how that confrontation destroys the fantasy that power over another life can be exercised without emotional or moral consequences. Read the poem analysis.
3. “I leaned my head upon / my father’s arm, and wept”
Barn Owl. Technique: Understatement and narrative reversal. The simple verb replaces the earlier performance of control with an unguarded bodily response. Set within the father’s support, the ending presents vulnerability as part of moral learning: the child must face the harm rather than escape into a heroic self-image. Read the poem analysis.
4. “Love’s proud executants played from a score / no child could read or realize.”
The Glass Jar. Technique: Extended musical metaphor. The parents’ intimacy is represented through a musical performance whose meaning the child cannot interpret. This gap between event and understanding makes exclusion a consequence of limited perspective, showing how unfamiliar adult experience can generate fear rather than reassurance. Read the poem analysis.
Memory and the passage of time
5. “Frail melancholy flowers among / Ashes and loam.”; “those hours of unreturning light” Two separate excerpts from the same poem.
The Violets. Technique: Sensory imagery and temporal contrast. The fragile flowers place decay and continuing growth within the same ordinary scene, while the later description of lost light makes time irreversible. Read these separate moments together to show how memory can renew an emotional attachment without recovering the hours in which it was first formed. Read the poem analysis.
6. “Years cannot move / Nor death’s disorienting scale / distort those lamplit presences”
The Violets. Technique: Visual imagery and symbolic light. The remembered lamplight gives the family scene warmth and emotional coherence. Its survival in the speaker’s imagination allows a nuanced argument about memory: relationships can continue to shape a person without being restored in the physical world. Read the poem analysis.
7. “The next wave, the next wave — / It was only a matter of balance.”
At Mornington. Technique: Repetition, understated irony and biblical resonance. The repeated wave postpones failure into another imagined opportunity, while the casual claim about balance reduces a dangerous impossibility to a practical skill. The adult reader recognises the limits of the child’s confidence, so the memory becomes a way of distinguishing imaginative energy from genuine control. Read the poem analysis.
8. “when our bones begin to wear us”
At Mornington. Technique: Personification and grammatical reversal. Bones become the active subject while the person becomes what they carry or wear, reversing the expected relationship between body and self. That loss of grammatical agency makes ageing unsettling and links physical vulnerability to the limits of childhood confidence. Read the poem analysis.
Care, love and mortality
9. “Link your dry hand in mine, / my stick-thin comforter.”
Nightfall. Technique: Metaphor and juxtaposition. The narrow physical image is placed beside a word of emotional reassurance, holding frailty and strength together. Rather than claiming a complete reversal of parent and child roles, explain how the father remains a source of comfort within an increasingly reciprocal relationship of care. Read the poem analysis.
10. “Let us walk for this hour / as if death had no power”
Nightfall. Technique: Conditional phrasing. The phrase introduces an imagined reprieve, not a declaration that death has been defeated. Its qualification makes the shared walk valuable precisely because the speakers know its limits, presenting companionship as a way of inhabiting finite time. Read the poem analysis.
11. “We have the wholeness of this day / To share as we will between us.”
At Mornington. Technique: Inclusive pronouns and affirmative declaration. The shared pronouns turn the available day into a relationship rather than a private possession. The freedom to decide how to spend it remains real even though its duration cannot be controlled, making companionship a form of agency within mortality rather than an escape from it. Read the poem analysis.
12. “No one could die for him.”; “Nothing could be proved, / but much was hinted.” Two separate excerpts from the same poem.
The Sharpness of Death. Technique: Negative constructions and contrast between knowledge and experience. The first statement makes death impossible to delegate; the second, separate passage qualifies what intellectual discussion can establish. Read together, they show why sharing ideas or affection does not eliminate another person’s individual vulnerability, while leaving room for meanings that cannot be conclusively proved. Read the poem analysis.
Belief, imagination and disappointment
13. “his monstrance stood / ready to bless, to exorcize”
The Glass Jar. Technique: Religious allusion and symbolism. A vessel associated with displaying the consecrated host lends sacred authority to the child’s jar. The allusion reveals how strongly imagination has invested the object with protective power, so its failure becomes a crisis of trust as well as a failed experiment. Read the poem analysis.
14. “Then hope / fell headlong from its eagle height.”
The Glass Jar. Technique: Personification, falling metaphor and enjambment. The line break briefly suspends hope before the downward movement of the next line enacts its collapse. The immense height measures the child’s emotional investment in the jar, explaining why a small material failure becomes a crisis in the imagined security of his world. Read the poem analysis.
15. “Can ghosts die? Yes, old ghosts are summoned / back to their shades of ink.”
A Valediction. Technique: Rhetorical question and metaphor. The question imagines an old literary attachment as a haunting presence whose authority may end. It allows the speaker to reconsider what the past demands of her, presenting change as a revision of attachment rather than a denial that the attachment once mattered. Read the poem analysis.
16. “Today I leave the book unopened. / Strangely, this farewell has left me joyful.”
A Valediction. Technique: Structural turn and tonal contrast. The opening reference to the present day interrupts the speaker’s habitual return to the book. The unexpected joy makes leaving it closed an act of emotional agency: a new farewell can be experienced on its own terms rather than made to repeat earlier suffering. Read the poem analysis.
Art and the limits of expression
17. “They’re like those dreams / you have of irremediable anguish”
Beyond Metaphor. Technique: Simile, emotive diction and direct address. The comparison with dreams distinguishes the intensity of an experience from the ability to recount it. Direct address invites readers to recognise that difficulty themselves, making the limits of expression a shared problem rather than evidence that the speaker’s anguish is unreal. Read the poem analysis.
18. “Only Mozart, perhaps, found the right tone”
Beyond Metaphor. Technique: Musical allusion and qualification. The reference to Mozart proposes music as a possible response to pain, but the qualifying adverb prevents that possibility from becoming a confident solution. Harwood thus makes artistic consolation provisional, preserving the difficulty of what the speaker is trying to express. Read the poem analysis.
19. “What you can’t say / you can’t say, and you can’t whistle it either.”
Beyond Metaphor. Technique: Repetition, colloquial humour and anticlimax. The repeated inability to speak is extended into the ordinary act of whistling, bringing the philosophical discussion down to a familiar human action. That tonal drop checks the hope that music neatly solves language’s failures, while the humour allows the poem to explore those limits without becoming an absolute rejection of art. Read the poem analysis.
20. “Light like a noble visitor / stayed with us briefly and moved on.”
The Sharpness of Death. Technique: Simile, personification and transience. The comparison makes light an honoured guest whose departure is part of the encounter. The brief stay gives the remembered beauty value without making it permanent, allowing an essay to hold gratitude and the awareness of loss together. Read the poem analysis.
Putting the quotations to work
Start with a claim about human experience, then choose two poems that develop or complicate it. For example, compare the child’s failed protection in The Glass Jar with the more conditional comfort of Nightfall. Explain the change in perspective, not just the presence of a shared theme.
For the full set of poem guides, visit our Gwen Harwood poetry resources.
