Essay - \"Friend\" by Hone Tuwhare PDF

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These revision notes are A* at A Level, providing rich and extensive critical analysis of the poem. These notes go beyond A Level, noting insightful points for different aspects of the poem, namely the language, structure, themes, rhyme and imagery. They cover the whole poem in immense detail and ar...

Description

Explore the ways in which ideas of friendship and the loss of it are presented in the poem “Friend” by Hone Tuwhare. Hone Tuwhare presents the ideas of how friendship slips away over the years through the use of nature metaphors, phonetics and the poem’s architectural construction. Whilst these are the topics brimming at the surface, the underlying problems he also confronts are his battles with the inevitable passing of time, the fragility of life and the overpowering allure of memories. Lost friendship is visible in the poem when the author uses the dead tree metaphorically to convey his faded friendship: the “fort we built out of branches wrenched from the tree is dead wood now.” In literal terms, this shows how they would build castles out of the branches to have their own safe haven – “fort” – from all external and uncontrollable elements of life, perhaps he is wistful for a return of those times when he had a place where he could block out all his woes. The tree carries sentimental value too, it was the treasurer of their memories and with the death of their past in the tree died their future friendship with it. The fact that they themselves actually injured the tree with their games showed their friendship was not sustainable - they did not think of the consequences: the tree is now dead. Saying that the tree is just “dead wood now” can be a graphic illustration of the bond he had with his friend when they were younger. It is simply a pile of old memories like the tree without the branches they had pulled off, ruined. Furthermore, with the use of the aggressive and harsh verb - “wrenched” – it implies they did not just break the tree, they pulled out the very roots that their friendship was seeded in. The way the poet uses an element of nature - a tree – that typically grows and evolves instead as a mark of death shows that friendship blossoms only if you feed and nurture it: the outcome of this friendship shows the contrary, nothing but “dead wood”. The idea of loss in “Friend” is conveyed through the implementation of phonetics and descriptive words. Tuwhare describes how the air, “thick with the whirr of toe toe spear succumbs at last to the grey gull's wheel”. This infers that when they were children the air was charged with excitement of their games playing with their handmade weapons; in other words, the world was alive with their linked and excitable spirits. However, the verb “succumb” implies that their joy and friendship gave into the relentlessness of time and the tides of life separating their two souls. More precisely, one may say that their friendship surrendered to the nature of life,

its circularity – “the grey gull’s wheel”. The noun “wheel” emphasises the repetitiveness and futility of trying even, as no matter in which direction he sets off he always ends up back where he started. Perhaps his frustration stems from his inability to move on from this eroded friendship, it may even be why he writes this poem: to pour out his emotions one last time so that he can finally move past the cylindrical wall he always faces and get on with his life. The onomatopoeic - “toetoe” – sounding spear is harsh and cutting, implying there were quick movements, high adrenaline and exhilarating games when they were together, not a flickering moment of boredom in sight. This stands in stark contrast to the groggy “grey gull's wheel”: the alliteration of “g” is monotonous and dull, and its syntactical positioning after the exciting years of his childhood may denote that this is what his life has become like nowadays. We realise that perhaps he mourns not only the loss of his friend but the loss of the ecclesiastic joy one could experience at a young age, when no barriers of circumstance nor preoccupations could hinder one’s enjoyment of life. In this case, the “gull’s wheel” may be a metaphor for the adult complications – economic, social and political amongst others – preventing the poet from flowing freely and living life to the fullest. The setting of the poem – they are always outdoors playing in nature - may also indicate his yearning for the freedom and stress-free life he led before, relying on nothing more than his and his friend’s imagination. Friendship and the loss of it are evident in the poem when he addresses this issue front on. He directly asks his lost friend for a hand to hold on to: “Friend,” he starts, in this “drear dreamless time I clasp your hand if only to reassure”. This implies he will support this friend through the rough times, manifesting his spiritual support through physical contact, even if they may not be near each other, or even in the same world – perhaps his friend has passed away and this is an elegy. The alliterative phrase - “drear dreamless time” - with the bleak “d” drives home the sentiment of the meaningless and insipid reality of his life. Henceforth the verb “clasp” he uses in his reassurance – or plea for the feeling to be returned? - reflects the urgency and the necessity of how he needs to grab his friend’s hand and hold it tight, more so for his own sake perhaps than for his friend’s. The way he wants his hand “if only to reassure” is heart wrenching as it expresses a deep need, not want, for human contact and comfort of not being alone which may suggest he has no one anymore: he has become the remnants of “the lone tree” with only the “wild stretch of land” surrounding him where once used to be a place of joy but is now devoid of love and happiness. Enjambment is employed to allow us a peek into his perspective: the

memory stretches out like the “wild stretch of land” and is in part due to his desire to grasp onto it and never let go. It may also signify how he is never able to turn over a new leaf, and is therefore locked in a perpetual dream of his past. There is also another take however, depicting how as children they would be the only two people for miles yet be perfectly happy but when the poet grows old and returns to this “lone” tree it depicts the fragility of life and the unceasing passing of time: never will one be able to recreate a memory as the minute it passes, nothing will ever be the same. The idea of loss and ended friendship is transmitted through the poem’s structure. Cut up and uneven, the stanzas vary between having four verses and having seven. This is used to show how mentally unstable the poet possibly is and how fragmented his memories are. He only remembers snippets of his past and the at first disorderly verse distribution suggests he has sporadically written them down so as to cherish them forever and in a way, bring them back to life. In turn, Tuwhare may have purposefully structured his poem like this to express the disharmony within his soul and make it resemble in many ways a song: the stanza written in italics can be like the main chorus “Oyster-studded roots... cooked in a rusty can”. The effect of this is to make it beat in our heads like a serenade, a beautiful but deathly and dementing mantra just as it repeats in his, hammering into his heart how much he misses those lovely times with his friend. The fact that it can be perceived as a song reiterates the circularity of life, going through different stages yet ultimately returning to the same place where one began. Overall, the ideas of loss, broken friendship and the passing of time are shown in Hone Tuwhare’s poem in the aforementioned ways. Another way in which he conveys these ideas is through his shining love of nature: “lone tree” “fresh roots” “branches” “sea snails” “oysters” “silver-bellied eels”. This semantic field portrays his recollections of happy days and childhood innocence – albeit with a negative undertone –, possibly due to his Maori heritage where nature was considered extremely valuable; this is evident when he uses a tree as a metaphor for friendship and how it slowly perishes. By using nature to convey his message he may also communicate an underlying message of being able to start over if you fight the encapsulating current of life but you may only do that through, not forgetting your loss, but moving on from it....