DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- Discuss Slessor’s various treatments of time in ‘Five Bells’.
- What do you make of the relationship between the poet and his drowned friend Joe Lynch?
- How do sound and image work in this poem, whether separately, or together?
- In what ways do the settings of this poem come alive?
- What kind of structure does this poem have?
Does it relate to the title, ‘Five Bells’, or does it have some other kind of significance?
- Slessor has sometimes been accused of nihilism.
Do you think this is true of ‘Five Bells’?
