Selected Poems (Gwen Harwood)

New syllabus (first HSC 2027). This text is prescribed for the 2027 to 2030 HSC under the English Advanced and English Standard 11-12 (2024) syllabuses (focus area: Texts and human experiences). The NESA edition is Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 2001), with seven set poems. Only one Harwood poem, Father and Child, was on the 2019 to 2026 list (as a short text for Advanced Module C: The Craft of Writing), so this is a new prescription. Sitting the 2026 HSC? See the 2019 to 2026 text list.

Why this text suits Texts and human experiences

Harwood writes about the ordinary materials of a life: a child, a parent, a house, a garden, a piano, a death. Her poems treat these as the places where people discover what they value, fear and cannot say. That makes the collection a natural fit for a focus area about how texts represent the qualities and complexities of human experiences, and about how individual experience connects to shared ones such as love, memory and loss.

What distinguishes her work is control. The feeling is usually strong, but the voice stays measured, often wry, and the form (regular stanzas, rhyme, a careful metre) holds the feeling in place. A strong response notices that tension between what is felt and how tightly it is shaped.

The book and the seven set poems

The prescribed edition is Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 2001), a selection from a career that began with her first collection, Poems, in 1963. The year shown for this page is the year of the 2001 edition, not of the individual poems. Seven poems are set for 2027 to 2030: The Glass Jar, The Violets, At Mornington, Father and Child (parts I and II), A Valediction, Beyond Metaphor and The Sharpness of Death.

Build your essays from those seven. This page describes Harwood's characteristic methods so that you can apply them to the poems, and it does not paraphrase any of them. Check every point against the poem in your copy.

A map of the set poems

• Father and Child, I and II. This is the poem that also appeared on the 2019 to 2026 list, but as a single short text for a different module, so check that your notes address the focus area on human experience. It is in two parts, which Harwood's collections title Barn Owl and Nightfall. Ask how two parts let the poem hold a child's experience and an adult's understanding in the same text.
• The Glass Jar. The title names an everyday object, and the first job is to see what the object holds or keeps in view. Ask how the poem moves from the thing to a feeling, whose point of view frames it, and what the final stanza does to the object.
• The Violets. The title names a flower, which in a poem usually arrives with its own associations of modesty, memory or mourning. Ask which of those associations the poem takes up, which it resists, and where the speaker's tone changes.
• At Mornington. The title names a place, so ask how setting works as more than backdrop: what the speaker sees there, what the place calls up from the past, and how the poem leaves it.
• A Valediction. A valediction is a farewell. Ask who is saying goodbye, to what, and how the form manages the leave-taking, since a controlled stanza can hold back or release the feeling.
• Beyond Metaphor. The title points to a limit, the place where figurative language stops working. Ask what the poem tries to say that images cannot carry, and how its own images behave under that pressure.
• The Sharpness of Death. The title joins a physical word to a final event. Ask what mortality does to the speaker's voice, how the poem balances restraint against feeling, and what the last lines refuse to say.

Method one: the shaped voice

Harwood often builds a speaker who is knowing, humorous or detached, and then lets the poem's pressure show through that surface. Ask of each poem who is speaking, to whom, and from what distance in time. A poem that looks like a quiet domestic scene can turn on one change of tone, one image that is slightly too exact, or a final stanza that reframes everything before it.

Method two: form as argument

Rhyme, regular stanzas and metre are not decoration here. A tightly rhymed stanza about something painful creates a gap between the order of the form and the disorder of the experience. When a rhyme lands with a small click, or a line breaks the pattern, ask what the poem gains. Comment on form only when you can say what it does to meaning.

Method three: parents, children and time

Many of Harwood's best known poems look at relationships across generations, where a parent sees a child, or an adult looks back at being a child. Father and Child is set for 2027 to 2030, so use it here: notice how the two parts treat the child's point of view and the adult's retrospective understanding, and how the two are held in the same text. In these poems, human experience is shown as layered: what happened, what it felt like then, and what it means now.

Method four: art, music and knowledge

Harwood was trained as a musician, and music, poetry and the visual arts recur as ways of understanding experience. Where a poem uses a musical image or an artwork, ask what that frame lets the speaker see that plain statement would not.

Context as a driver of argument

Harwood lived much of her life in Tasmania, wrote as a woman publishing in a literary world that did not always welcome her, and used several pseudonyms across her career. Use this only when it explains a choice in a poem. For example, the habit of the masked or ironic speaker connects to a poet who often wrote through assumed voices. Do not retell her life: show how the poem's construction reflects a concern with how a self is presented and what stays hidden.

Common pitfalls

• Summarising each poem in turn instead of arguing a thesis about human experience.
• Naming techniques (metaphor, enjambment, rhyme) without saying what each does.
• Treating the speaker as Harwood herself.
• Writing about one poem only. Use at least two, and for a longer response three or more, from the seven set poems.
• Ignoring the last stanza. Harwood's endings usually carry the turn.

Essay scaffold

Introduction. State a thesis that uses the language of the question, for example that Harwood shows human experiences as shaped by memory, so that the past is never finished. Name the poems you will use.

Body 1. A poem where voice and tone carry the experience, such as The Glass Jar or At Mornington. Track one shift of register and explain its effect.

Body 2. A poem where form sets order against feeling, such as A Valediction or Beyond Metaphor (rhyme, stanza, metre).

Body 3. A poem that connects an individual moment to something shared, such as Father and Child, I and II (generations and time) or The Sharpness of Death (mortality).

Conclusion. Argue that Harwood's measured forms hold feeling rather than hide it, so that the poems you studied show memory, family and mortality as things to be lived with and not solved. Say which of your poems makes that most clear and why.

Read the text

Selected Poems is in copyright, and this page quotes none of it. The prescribed edition is Selected Poems by Gwen Harwood (Penguin Books, 2001, ISBN 9780141006680). Borrow it from your school or local library, or buy it from an Australian bookseller. Use the Penguin edition NESA sets so that titles and page references match the exam.

The NESA details on this page were checked against its published HSC English prescriptions and the English Advanced Year 12 Texts and human experiences page on 7 October 2026.