is the first explicit mention of storytelling in the poem, and serves as an introduction to Dan, an old man who tells stories against the “black-frost night” of the winter.

After this, the voice of the poem shifts from that of the narrator to that of Dan, caught up in stories of cattle drives and old companions. Wright conveys this shift in tone both with vocabulary and narrative style. Phrases like “nineteen-one it was” and “it was the flies we seen first” are descriptive and informal in a manner befitting an old-timer spinning a yarn to distract from the cold night.

The last stanza returns to the old cottage and the winter, and the voice shifts back to the narrator as they listen to Dan’s stories. The tone again is as bleak and wintery as in the first two stanzas. The old man’s stories are described as “conjurer’s cards” that may not even be true, and as the cold settles further in, the narrator admonishes the old man to “wake” from his story-telling.

It is clear that the mythology of the land is of great importance to the narrator. Just as important, but more subtlety conveyed, is a preoccupation with encroaching death. The poem is set in winter and at night, two settings that are often symbolically attached to death, and the language throughout is unrelenting in its description of the harshness of the season. The stories Dan tells are filled with death, from that of the “yellow boy” attracting flies to the water-starved cattle driven to a dead river, and the musing that it is “cruel to keep them alive.”

The line that most conveys this theme, however, is in the last stanza:

Wake, old man. This is winter, and the yarns are over.

One may understand winter as the end of a life and yarns as the adventures of the past long since left behind. It is the following line that really hammers in this point. Only three words long, it echoes the chill and bleakness of the rest of the poem:

No-one is listening.

Yet even after saying this, the narrator is compelled to acknowledge the stories. The final line of the poem states that the country is “full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.” While this does not lift the melancholy tone of the poem, it does offer a shred of comfort. After all, telling stories is a way to keep memories from dying. Even though old Dan must surely be gone, his stories remain.

The main theme in Judith Wright's poem "South Of My Days" is the indifference and hostility of the natural world towards human beings. Wright uses figurative language techniques to convey this indifference and hostility. For example, she describes "the frost on the roof / [cracking] like a whip." This simile connotes the seeming aggressiveness of the frost. Elsewhere, Wright uses another simile when she says that the mud "hardened like iron." This simile emphasizes how hard and cold the mud was. Images like these, of whips and iron, also suggest that the natural world is almost like a slave master or a jailer, and the speaker like a slave or prisoner.

In terms of the structure of the poem, there is no regular syllabic meter and no regular rhyme scheme. The stanzas are also all of different lengths. The poem thus reads more like prose, and in this way Wright manages to emphasize the speaker's everyday, unextraordinary struggle against the harsh natural world. The life of the speaker, because of the natural world and its elements, lacks rhythm and flow, and thus so does the poem itself. In terms of the form of the poem, Wright has chosen a first person narrator, which perhaps makes the speaker's feelings more personal, and thus easier to empathize with.

The tone of the poem is anguished and mournful, and this tone is created in part by diction like "wincing under the winter," "willow choked," "the river was dust," and "the high lean country." Phrases like these all connote lifelessness and discomfort, reflecting the speaker's experiences of the inhospitable natural world.