Beach Burial - Kenneth Slessor

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I though that for it to have ANYTHING to do with national identity I would have had to use my creative ability to dissect and warp aspects of the poem that COULD have something to do with national identity if the poet had actually CHOSEN to write about national identity. Basically a lot of windbagging- and as much I was looking forward to see how great my powers of persuasion were I finally realised that they wouldn’t be necessary. I realised that even though Slessor’s Beach Burial doesn’t ramble on about the Australian lifestyles and the Australian landscapes, It is a poem solely based on the importance of national identity… heck- it doesn’t even mention the word ‘Australia’ in it! But what Slessor is trying to say here doesn’t refer just to the Australian identity it refers to the importance of every countries national identity and, in the long run, the unimportance of it.
To give you a bit of a background, Kenneth Slessor was an eminent Australian Journalist for a great ...

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in the line “At night they sway and wander in the waters far under”.
In the sea they are happy because they have their freedom and are far away from the harsh reality of war on the land. As soon as the bodies come on the land the verbs become rougher and impersonal “rolls” and “tread”…the personification of the bodies stops as soon as they are on land - now the bodies are inanimate objects.
Slessor relies on imagery to depict the scene on the beach. From the line “between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire” because the gunfire is described as heavy and muffled the reader deduces that the battle is not on the beach but not too far away. When we think of sobbing, we think of ...

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