In the Park (poem)

"In the Park" is a 1961 poem by Australian author Gwen Harwood.

It was first published in The Bulletin on 8 March 1961 as by "Walter Lehmann", a pseudonym of Harwood's, and was subsequently reprinted in the author's collections and other poetry anthologies. Later publications carried Harwood's name as the author.

Synopsis

An unnamed woman sits in a park with three children playing around her. She is unexpectedly joined by an ex-lover. As they chat about the children she visualises a cartoon-like speech balloon above his head in which is written "...but for the grace of God."

Critical reception

In his book Reading Australian Poetry Andrew Taylor set out to discuss Harwood's "poetry in relation to questions of identity." He decided to use this poem as a starting point. "Suburban monotony and tedium, the niggardly penny-pinching that often comes from having children, the disharmony, the aimlessness: they are all economically conveyed...What we have here is not a muddled poem, but a subtle demonstration of the textuality of identity, its characteristic, if you like, of not being itself."

Writing about the poem's final line ("They have eaten me alive.") Ann-Marie Priest commented: "The sentiment was profoundly challenging for its time. The idea that a woman's children could consume her very being was entirely antithetical to the dominant discourse of motherhood, in which a woman was supposed to find her only true fulfillment in bearing and raising children. Even worse was the suggestion that a mother might resent this unthinking consumption of herself by her offspring."

Publication history

After the poem's initial publication in The Bulletin it was reprinted as follows:

• Poems by Gwen Harwood, Angus and Robertson, 1963
• New Impulses in Australian Poetry edited by Rodney Hall and Thomas Shapcott, University of Queensland Press, 1968
• The Land's Meaning edited by L. M. Hannan and B. A. Breen, Macmillan, 1973
• Selected Poems by Gwen Harwood, Angus and Robertson, 1975
• The Collins Book of Australian Poetry edited by Rodney Hall, Collins, 1981
• ' edited by John Barnes and Brian MacFarlane, Heinemann, 1984
• Two Centuries of Australian Poetry edited by Mark O’Connor, Oxford University Press, 1988
• The Faber Book of Modern Australian Verse edited by Vincent Buckley, Faber, 1991
• The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry edited by John Tranter and Philip Mead, Penguin, 1991
• 50 Years of Queensland Poetry : 1940s to 1990s edited by Philip Neilsen and Helen Horton, Central Queensland University Press, 1998
• Australian Verse : An Oxford Anthology edited by John Leonard, Oxford University Press, 1998
• Selected Poems : A New Edition by Gwen Harwood, Angus and Robertson, 2001
• The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets edited by Geoff Page, Indigo, 2003
• Motherlode : Australian Women's Poetry 1986 - 2008 edited by Jennifer Harrison and Kate Waterhouse, Puncher and Wattmann, 2009
• Mappings of the Plane : New Selected Poems by Gwen Harwood, edited by Gregory Kratzmann and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Fyfield Books, 2009
• The Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry edited by John Leonard, Puncher & Wattmann, 2009
• Australian Poetry Journal, Vol 2 No 1, 2012
• The Best 100 Poems of Gwen Harwood, Black Inc., 2014
• Love is Strong as Death edited by Paul Kelly, Hamish Hamilton, 2019