Welcome to the Poetry Hour, a semi-regular column where we (and guest posters) share a short analysis of a favourite poem.
It there were a vacancy for a poet of post-war suburbia, it would surely be filled by Bruce Dawe (1930 – 2020). A native of Victoria, a convert to Catholicism in 1956, and the only one in his family to complete primary school, Dawe’s poetry focuses on the commonplace experience of modern Australia.
Much of his verse exhibits a deep sympathy for ordinary men and women. His poem “Homo Suburbiensis”, for instance, takes as its subject matter an unnamed man standing in his vegetable patch at dusk. Yet this ordinary moment is elevated wherein the poem’s subject offers, in a moment of religiously inspired transcendence, that which only an ordinary man can, “Not much but as much as any man can offer, — time, pain, love, hate, age, ware, death, laughter, fever.”
But Dawe also played the part of Jeremiah in many of his poems, offering a sharp critique of a society he perceived as lacking any sense of true meaning or purpose; a representation of Australian post-war culture as thin layer of banal consumerism masking a nihilistic core. Thus in “Enter Without so Much as Knocking” he depicts a life and death portrait of an average man, a man “like every other godless, money-hungry back-stabbing miserable so-and-so”, possessing an “automatic smile with nothing behind it” and destined to a grave, “Six feet down nobody interested.”
Dawe’s poem, and the focus of this Poetry Hour, “Up the Wall” straddles these two aspects of his poetry, the poetry of the ordinary and the poetry of the social critic.
Up the Wall
The kettle’s plainsong rises to a shriek,
The saucepan milk is always on the boil,
No weekend comes to mark off any week
From any other – something’s sure to spoil
The cloudless day. The talk-back oracle’s suave
Spiel, like the horizon, closes in,
Palming a hidden menace, children carve
The mind up with the scalpels of their din.
She says, ‘They nearly drove me up the wall!’
She says, ‘I could have screamed, and then the phone – !’
She says, ‘There’s no one round here I can call
If something should go wrong. I’m so alone!’
‘It’s a quiet neighbourhood,’ he tells his friends.
‘Too quiet, almost!’ They laugh. The matter ends.
The poem represents the suburban experience along gendered lines with the perspective of wife and mother contrasted with that of husband and father.
Sound plays a pivotal role in the poem’s language. The kettle’s ‘shriek’, the talk-back ‘spiel’ and the ‘din’ of the children that ‘carve the mind up’ present a simultaneously claustrophobic and isolating representation of the suburban house.
The psychological impact of this claustrophobia, alongside the repetition of the duties for which “No weekend comes to mark off any week”, is emphasised with the poem’s repetition of “She says” with the voice of the beleaguered housewife approaching some form of breakdown finishing in the devastating conclusion ‘I am so alone’. This last conclusion is immediately, unwittingly, and ironically, ratified by the husband’s own voice. He too perceives the separation of the home from the noise and activity of a wider social life, but the perspective he offers to his friends, underlines the gulf separating his experience of a ‘quiet neighbourhood’ from the noise and isolation experienced by his wife.
The poem challenges modes of living that became normalised for post-war Australian families. And certainly, the dormitory suburb with its car-centric design and strict separation of the places of work, recreation, and eating and sleeping, is deserving of critical attention. This is especially so when, as the poem makes clear, this mode of living has been adopted to suit the experience of those who work outside the home – for whom the isolation and quiet of the traditional quarter acre block offer respite from the demands of the workplace.
Yet, for my money, the poem’s most potent criticism is directed towards the complete lack of awareness of his wife’s life exhibited by the husband. Focusing only upon the poem’s social critique of post-war design, unequal gendered roles, or lack of societal support for mothers (however insightful or well directed) can also conveniently mask the personal failings of the husband shown in the poem’s final two lines. Thus, the wife’s cry, ‘I am so alone’ is more than an observation of her geographic isolation, she is also alone inside her own marriage. Indeed, her cry is brutally paired with the poem’s final lines, ‘the matter ends’ as her experience of her home is dismissed without hearing.
