Provide a critical appreciation of Judith Wright's "Bora Ring."
There is a mournful assonance in the opening words of the poem, with the long "o" sounds of "song" and "gone" emphasizing a sense of loss. The tribal dances, rituals and stories are "useless" and finally "lost." The dance, which was always hidden from interlopers in any case, is now a permanent secret: the dancers are now "in the earth." This is a grim reminder of legal and moral disputes about the ownership of land: stealing the earth in which these dancers are interred will do nothing to reveal their secret.
The second stanza continues to express the tribe's connection to the landscape, with grass still standing up to mark the dancing ring and apple-gums swaying in time to the rhythm of a past corroboree (tribal gathering), the wind in their branches mimicking a chant. The place is eerily quiet, however. These people—perfectly attuned to their environment—are no longer there...
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to harmonize with it. The beginning of the third stanza echoes the first. The hunter is gone, along with the song. The nomads have stopped their wandering at last.
In the final stanza, the first line echoes the beginning of the second stanza. An important difference is that the outsider, and onlooker, is finally acknowledged (they are outsider and onlooker because they exist outside the poem and are excluded from the symbolic circle it describes). The role of this outsider, however, is to be alarmed by the fear of an "ancient curse," which they can only understand in Biblical terms. The final lines emphasize how entirely excluded they are from the bora ring and the lost world of the tribe.
How does Judith Wright express mourning for lost culture in "Bora Ring"?
Judith Wright mourns the loss of culture in her poem "Bora Ring" by focusing on the intangible aspects of the Australian cultural heritage, such as song and dance. The poem depicts the trees and grass on the site of the Bora ring showing respect for the rituals they witnessed and sadness at their passing.
The title of "Bora Ring" refers to a place where Aboriginal ceremonies are, or were, held in Australia. However, Wright points out that this site is useless without the things that once animated it and gave it purpose: the song, the dance, the ritual, and "the tribal story."
These elements of Aboriginal culture are gone forever, along with the hunter who appears in the third stanza with his splintered spear. To emphasize the momentous nature of the loss, Wright employs the pathetic fallacy. The apple-gums around the Bora ring "mime a past corroboree" and "murmur a broken chant," as though they are lamenting the end of a culture more attuned to nature than the one that has succeeded it.