Techniques of Feliks Skrzynecki Poem

Feliks Skrzynecki

Stanza 1:

• Attribute to Felik’s dignity and stoicism in the face of loss and hardship.

• Personal/Possessive pronoun “my”-final relationship

• “Gentle”-tender adjective

• (warm feelings, loving affection)

• ‘Kept pace only with the Joneses of his own mind’s making’

• Colloquialism

• Alliteration of ‘M’-‘Mind’s making’

(Has his own values, individual-sets his own standards)

• Initial picture of a man detached from the world that surrounds him-shows immigrant isolation but also Feliks strength of character.

• ‘Loved his garden like an only child’-Simile

• Ambiguous-loved it like it was an only child then it mean he showed the garden a lot of attention, loved it.

• If he loved it like he was an only child then it demonstrates Felik’s loneliness and isolation.

• It could demonstrate the composer’s bitterness that Felik’s loved the garden more than his son.

• ‘Walking its perimeter’-shows that he’s on the edge; not a part of it isolated.

• ‘Alert, brisk and silent’-adjective listing; reinforces the time. Feliks spent sweeping as well as the sense that this is a childhood vision. It could also suggest that Feliks is reliving his journey across the world.

Stanza2:

• Manual Images-‘Hand darkened from cement, finger with cracks’- father is hardworking, stoic, a good provider. Powerful images of hard physical labour.

• ‘Like the sods he broke’-simile

- Broke, existed, fall, turned, rolled-inversion of sentence order emphasizes Feliks actions.

- Real admiration and owe in son’s attitude to his father.

• ‘Why his arm didn’t fall off’-child like-superhuman strength to the child.

Stanza3:

• ‘His Polish Friends’-identify the nationality

• ‘Too violently I thought’-implied judgment-son feels excluded in this stanza. Dissociation from the distant, ‘Alien’ culture.

• ‘Feliks Skrzynecki’-direct speech-odds dramatic immediacy.

• ‘Reminisced’-positive connotations-immigrant experience, fond memories.

‘About farms where paddocks flowers, with corn and wheat, Horses they bred, pigs’-peasant agricultural background.

• Words suggest action+hardwork/robust and physical life they used to live.

• Duality of Feliks character

-The man who helped the “paddocks flower”

-The man “skilled in slaughtering”

• Garden in Australia a way of reproducing old pastoral life.

• ‘I never once heard’-hagiographical(reverently celebratory)

‘I never’-emphatic-reiterates the son’s admiration of his father’s stoicism.

‘Dug’-reflects