Judith Wright V Oodgeroo Noonuccal

Poetry Assignment

Poetry is a form of creative, written expression that is often utilised for a range of purposes; from evoking emotions to conveying a social or political message. Poets Judith Wright (1915 - 2000) and Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920 - 1993) use the features of a poem for similar effects, however their perspectives and style of poetry is vastly different. Judith Wright was an environmentalist, white Australian, humanitarian and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights. Her poems reflect her views as she wrote poems such as Niggers Leap, New England and Metho Drinker highlight the racism endured by Indigenous Australians and the her views on other topics, such as addiction. Similarly, Oodgeroo Noonuccal was an Indigenous Australian who also campaigned for Aboriginal rights. Her works include we are going and Municipal Gum, poems that expose the unjust treatment of Australia’s true owners. Wright’s poems tend to include more poetic devices than Oodgeroo and her viewpoint is often implicitly stated, unlike Oodgeroo who make her views very clear.

Metho Drinker is a poem written by Judith Wright on the subject of addiction and the unhappiness experienced by a white man. It tells the story of a homeless man addicted to methylated spirits and is dying from it knowingly. He is alone and hides from society with only the drink for warmth. Municipal Gum is an Oodgeroo Noonuccal poem written about a similar topic; the unhappiness of a tree that is out of place in the city. Written in first person, the observer compares the tree to a ‘castrated’ and ‘wronged’ (line 8, S1) cart horse to highlight how ‘dolorous’ (line 12, S1) the tree’s living conditions are. She seems forlorn about how the tree is forced to stay in the city. While Oodgeroo’s perspective is clear: the tree is out of place, she also implicitly relates the tree to Aboriginal people, like they are also out of place in a white man’s city with the use of the apostrophe: ‘O fellow citizen’ (line 15, S1). Likewise, Wright has an implicit viewpoint that ‘metho drinkers’ are weak and the spirit exploits that weakness, which can be seen when the man cries in despair ‘O take from me the weight and waterfall ceaseless time’ (lines 3-4, S1).

Metho Drinker is a 2 stanza poem with equal lines for each (9 lines each). It is written in loose iambic pentameter and has 9 to 11 syllables per line. However, regular use of caesura causes the poem to become disjointed, representing the addict’s life. Contrarily, Municipal Gum is far less structured, written in free verse style with an irregular line length in which syllables vary from 4 to 9. It has only 1 stanza of 16 lines, a structure that seems to imitate the natural flow of speech.

Both Wright’s and Noonuccal’s poems feature a morbid tone, however Metho drinker creates a far darker mood of despair and hopelessness through use of negative, visual imagery such as similes and metaphors. The methylated spirits is said to ‘eat the nerve that tethers him in time’ (line 13, S2). Other metaphors such as ‘melts away the flesh that hides from bone’ (line 12, S2) are used by Wright to illustrate the slow death of the ‘metho drinker’. Oodgeroo also employs the use of imagery regularly to juxtapose the place where the tree should be against the sad conditions it is actually in. Metaphors such as ‘cool world of leafy forest halls’ (line 4, S1) and ‘black grass of bitumen’ (line 14, S1) are used to emphasise the poet’s viewpoint that the tree belongs elsewhere.