Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971) is famous for his poetry, and in such, has become one of Australia’s leading poets. He is known notably for the engagement with modernist influences into Australian poetry and his dismissive attitude towards bush balladists, including the likes of Banjo Patterson. His use of a modernist influence is an attempt to relate life as it is ‘really experienced and to describe the environment as the mind perceives it to be, as opposed to the preexisting ideas of bushland Australia. It is instead aimed to move Australian writing away from the bush and towards the city.
Slessor’s poetry presents a sense of weariness directed towards the world, with his repeated use of themes, comprising: loneliness, death, time and reflections on memory. In saying this, it is possible to suggest that the work of Kenneth Slessor is recognisable through a reappearance of language patterns and overarching concerns. ‘Beach Burial’ and ‘Five Bells’ by Kenneth Slessor, both of which are elegies, are used as a parallel to these recurring thoughts and themes. Slessor is known and celebrated, for his attempts to draw Australian poetry away from the bush and its accompanying old traditions.
To achieve this, he utilised modernist techniques to adopt an unrestricted form of writing to appreciate the evolving Australian city. Slessor had an understanding of the impact of new technology in his world. This included the inclusion of telephones, photography, cinema and the Harbour Bridge. Along with the mesmerizing facade of the city, he was also acutely aware to the obscurer sides of the city – the alienation and solitude. The modern condition is seen as the urbanized life the world has progressed to be.
It is a condition which is responsible for producing feelings of hopelessness, isolation nd dissatisfaction directed at the world around them. It was Slessor’s dreary perspective on life that made his central concern evolve around dilemma of modern humanity. He believed it was directionless and increasingly meaningless. Effectively, as time goes by, it continues to progress into a state of crumbling humanity. It was his partaking in World War II as an Official War Correspondent that opened his eyes to the diminishing world, that resulted in ‘Beach Burial’ and ‘Five Bells’ amongst many, being written.
The repetitive use of emotional language in ‘Five Bells’, can be seen in “rip of darkness, hits and cries against the ports of space,” which continues to reject the transforming world. The poet, Slessor, is confused, yet enraged against the departing simplicity of life. Slessor views the world to be disintegrating at his footsteps. The lives of people are considered nothing amongst the extensiveness of the dissolving world. Slessor, like most, is alienated – they’re is a situation where they feel divorced from life around them. This estrangement is present in many of Slessor’s poems.
Kenneth Slessor’s poems presents his ongoing attitudes concerning war and death, including the uniformity of unnecessary sacrifices. Slessor, having been a participating member in World War II, uses his poems, for instance ‘Beach Burial, to explicitly distinguish the bodies of the dead floating through the water, and the commonality of death. ‘Beach Burial concludes by stating “whether as enemies they fought, or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together. ” This is the persona’s recognition that there are dead soldiers on both sides, yet their humanity is bonded by their common fate of death.
Effectively, the unity between soldiers of all nations, is through death. This is all very ironic, when the attitude of war is considered and the purpose of what soldiers are fighting for. However, the race, country and objectives of each person is no longer important upon the passing from one life to another. The war has ended up being what sentences them to death and essentially joins them as one. Regardless of the fact that ‘Beach Burial was written from an Australian author’s perspective, it has not pledged allegiance to a single country or alliance, nor does it celebrate a victory.
It is instead, a tribute to all who were defeated. Death is an unexpected force that has the ability to change perspective. Kenneth Slessor is best known for his elegiac poems, ‘Beach Burial and ‘Five Bells’ and in turn, his ability to construct “a poem of serious reflection, typically involving the lament for the dead. ” In these, it is the position of the elegist which Slessor inhabits through a persona, but he is truly, exclusively referencing to himself as the poet. ‘Beach Burial is an elegy about the multitude of lost lives through war. Five bells’ along with ‘Beach Burial is written to lament the loss of life.
His poems have a tendency to illustrate the confrontation of death and the misfortunate experience of those who are grieving the remembrance of a dead soul, regardless of the intimacy of the relationships. ‘Beach Burial is mourning the death of all the slain soldiers, whilst ‘Five Bells’ is mourning the death of his friend Joe Lynch. His poems are associated with a sense of failure and loss. Essentially, the recurring theme of the inevitability and finality of death, in Slessor’s poems, is resulting in the futility of life.
Slessor has a reputation of writing on the theme of time, including its beguiling and disparaging aspects, and the effect it has on the memories of people. He uses his poems as a way of listing people being removed from history as time goes on without them. ‘Beach Burial is a reflection of the lives that were lost in the El Alamein war, and the effect it has on eradicating their presence from earth. Each soldier merely becomes a memory. When “the breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions,” it is symbolic of the ability that time has on cleansing memories, through the literary technique of personifying nature.
It is personifying the weather to be a force erasing soldiers from time, as if they were merely written in lead. Through the display of Slessor’s remembrance for Joe Lynch, in ‘Five Bells,’ it is again possible to see the concept of time depreciating the value and strength of memories on an individual. Slessor uses his poems to question the purpose of our existence, as signified in ‘Five Bells’ by, “so dark you bore no body, had no face. ” Although he was close to Joe Lynch, Slessor questions much he truly about him. Strategically, Slessor uses the juxtaposition of human time, as portrayed by the “little et wheels,” with memories, which is symbolic in “the flood that does not flow. ”
This technique is used to emphasise the fact that stagnant memories will soon be relinquished into an endless sense of time. As time progresses, so too does the shrinking evolution of power of memory, as the ability to remember what once was, declines. It is this sense of an impending memory form that is an all-encompassing concern throughout Slessor’s work. The construction of Kenneth Slessor’s poetry is known for his repetition of the overarching concerns and techniques of a modernist construction, death and despair and time and its role in diminishing memory.
His poetry displays his sense of guardedness and hatred towards the world and its destructive forces on people, often applied by people. Kenneth Slessor uses his elegies ‘Beach Burial’ and ‘Five Bells’ to emphasize this loathing. Each of his poems are a presentation of death and its impact on the people around them in addition to the ability to erode one from history, including the memories of them. Additionally, modernist influence, which he has marked by a strong and intentional break with tradition, in the way that the world is created purely by perception.