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Tree In The City Thomas Shapcott Summary

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Good afternoon and welcome to Poetry Week. Today I will be talking to you about the topic of urban life in Australian poetry. During this presentation, I will discuss the poem Tree in the City by Thomas Shapcott and its representation of urban life. This will then be followed by how the poetic devices of metaphor and imagery are used in the poem and finally, I will compare it to the taught poem Phasing Out the Mangroves. I will start by looking at the poem called Tree in the City by Thomas Shapcott and what is revealed about suburban life by it. Initially, the poem appears to be depicting a positive outlook on suburban life, and its integration with nature, and having not lost the connection to it that children have had for years. While remaining ambiguous in its ideas, upon closer inspection, there are numerous occasions where the poet is insinuating how nature is fading out as the buildings of urban life take over. As can be seen here (the screen) by the highlighted words, the poem focuses on the restrictions and changes that urban life has made to nature, as well as how important this fading element is. For example, “small span” refers to how the city branches of …show more content…

Although done in different ways, it can be seen clearly that both poems focus on the rapidly increasing disappearance of nature in urban life. Shapcott’s Tree in the City gives an ambiguous approach to this topic, stating that however small, nature is still present and a prominent factor of childhood, by giving examples of how children spend their time with the tree. On the other hand, Adamson’s Phasing Out the Mangroves paints a purely negative representation of the mangroves being taken over by the “concrete geometries” of the city, replacing nature with the modern technologies that we have come to live with today. Despite these differences, both poems are equally as effective in producing a sense of guilt in the

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