Bruce Dawe

4 Pages 925 Words

Poetic techniques allow the experience to be represented in an intense and compressed way. Discuss how ‘The Raped Girl’s Father’ in light of this statement.

Subject Matter
The poem ‘the Raped Girls Father’ Bruce Dawe talks about the grief that the father of the victim of a vicious, unprompted rape goes through. The poem also describes the victim’s loneliness and vivid recollection of the rape as she is on her own as her mother tries to console her father.
Purpose/Theme
The theme is as much on the event of the rape but of the damage it causes to the victim and and the people around them. There can also be a gender reading to this play the fathers pride and maybe social standing has been challenged, this, I think the poet is trying to say, and be it very sarcastically, that the condolence should be shown to the father instead of the victim, the daughter.
Emotion
The extreme anger that the father shows is expressed when the poet says,
The buzz-saw whine of righteous anger rose
Murderously in his throat throughout the night,
The metaphor used when he compares his anger to that of a ‘buzz-saw’ gives the poem another dimension when sound or the comparison to sound is introduced. The whine of a buzz-saw is intense, so much so that anyone around it would want to put ear muffs on in fear of becoming deaf. The comparison to this piece of machinery and the fathers rage creates a powerful image of the fathers intense anger.

The loneliness of the victim and her need to be comforted is shown when Bruce Dawe writes,
long after she had watched her mother close
the door to, and the honeyed wedge of light
was eaten by the dark, his voice whirred on,
and in that darker dark in which she lay
she felt rasp on the naked bone
the personification used when Bruce Dawe writes ‘and the honeyed wedge of light/was eaten by the dark and his voice whirred on’ is starts to put an emphasis on the girls loneliness and t...