DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- The ghazal is traditionally concerned with love and loss. Discuss Judith Wright’s ‘Rockpool’ as a poetic expression of loss.
- Judith Wright is quoted as having said that: ‘my interest is man in nature, man as part of nature’. (‘IOU: Judith Wright’, ABC Television, 22/6/08, 4.35p.m.)
Comment on ‘Rockpool’ in the light of this quotation. Please ignore the generic use of ‘man’ rather than, perhaps, ‘human’, which would have included both genders.
- Discuss Judith Wright’s use of humour in ‘Rockpool’.
- What is the significance of the last line of ‘Rockpool’ in relation to the whole poem and its concerns?
- Read the sequence ‘The Shadow of Fire: Ghazals’ in Judith Wright, A Human Pattern: Selected Poems, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1990. Comment on the way ‘Rockpool’ fits into and illuminates the series
