>How can you call Hope a misogynist? Dear me, what a label. He was a
>sensualist. And every reader, remember, takes on their own interpretation.
>I highly value the elevation status of women/femaleness that Hope raised in
>his work, esp. in his poem *Australia* that personifies our country as
>female, that juxtaposes the fagility and struggle of our environment with a
>female's struggle with her body.
>
>They call her a young country, but they lie:
>She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
>A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
>Still tender but within the womb is dry.
>
>and again in his poem, The Death of the Bird, I see myself in his words,
>- Alone in the bright host of her companions. I see the parallels of the
>the bird's life with human femaleness vis-a-vis mother/nurturer, in..
>
>And being home, memory becomes a passion
>With which she feeds her brood and straws her nest,
>Aware of ghosts that haunt the heart's possession
>And exiled love mourning within the breast.
>
>If that's not greatness - then what is?
>
Well, it may all be in the reader's eyes, but while I sure wouldn't argue
against the power of such poems, I'm not sure I hera the tone in as
positive a way as you do. 'Australia' is certainly at least an *ambivalent*
poem...
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
People, people -
ten dead ducks' feathers
on beer can litter . . .
Winter
will change all that
Lorine Niedecker
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