Theme of Identity in “Summer Farm” and “The Bay” Essay Example

reality of it’s true form, linking to the reality of his own identity.The poet is meditative on various aspects of life such as “meaning “ and “loss” ultimately traveling back to “The Bay” of his childhood to metaphorically acknowledge his personal identity. The use of enjambment and the change of tense from “we bathed at times” to “now it is to say” create an image of the transition between youth to adulthood as Baxter recollects his memories up to the present moment.

The poetic voice of Norman MacCaig in “Summer Farm” integrates himself within the external surrounding of the farm. “I lie, not thinking, in the cool, oft grass” parallels the earlier description of the “straws lie about the grass”. The physical act of MacCaig lying in the grass “not thinking” is symbolic of the harmony and unity of man and nature, only achieved when one abandons the state of “thinking” consciousness for meditative observation. Norman MacCaig realizes this and expresses he is “afraid where a thought may take me”, before progressing to describe the grasshopper in minute detail, echoing the earlier detailed descriptions of the other beings on the farm.MacCaig fully integrates himself with the farm when his state of mind and human characteristics is projected on the grasshopper he observes. The grasshopper is personified to have a “plated face” whilst the poet spiritually “finds himself in space” just as the grasshopper achieves this by “unfolding his legs” and physically jumping.

The end rhyme of ‘face’ and ‘space’ slows down the meter and rhythm of the poem, highlighting the effect of how one experiences the slow passing of time in a meditative state of

‘not thinking’. James K.Baxter also attempts to integrate himself with his external surrounding of “The Bay” whilst presenting his journey into the bay as a metaphorical journey of his own self discovery. He “remembers the bay, the carved cliffs and the great outcrying surf” that “a thousand times an hour is torn across and burned for the sake of living”. Similarly, the poet himself is “torn across” between his nostalgic memory of the “bay that never was” and the reality that just like the alley, he is “overgrown” and the bay represents “no meaning now but loss”.

Baxter concludes his poem in isolation, having changed from the personal pronoun of ‘we’ in the first two stanzas to I cannot turn away”, finally making it evident to the reader his inability to fully integrate within himself his own personal insecurities. The reader is left with the image of the poet “standing like stone” still “waiting for the taniwha” just as he had waited in his childhood. The alliteration of “stand like stone” places emphasis on the Baxter’s inability to leave his childhood memory, further presenting an irony in his earlier emphasis on the present ‘now’.The reader realises that James K Baxter is “torn across” when his journey, both to the bay and of his own personal discovery of identity, has drawn to a close. In a similar way, Norman MacCaig is by himself in “Summer Farm” by the end of the poem. His own poetic self becomes the main theme of the last stanza, allowing the reader to appreciate that the farm is able to serve as a metaphor for Norman MacCaig’s identity, the ‘farm within farm’

forming an analogy for ‘self under self’.

As opposed to James K. Baxter in “The Bay”, Norman MacCaig is able to explore the nature of the metaphysical world and see past the confines of time and space. He views himself as a “pile of selves threaded on time” using an image of a tapestry, where each knot is symbolic of his ‘self under self’ which all unite together to become his whole being, concluding the poem by again considering the theme of identity.Through two different approaches to the theme of identity, James K Baxter and Norman MacCaig have presented the theme in appealing manner for the reader. By the end of both poems, the reader is allowed to consider the nature of identity and perception of one’s personal being.

At the end of the poems, the reader is left to further explore the ideas of “lifting” the exterior with a “metaphysic hand” and “burning for the sake of going on living”.