What are the themes explored and the specific stylistic devices used to explore these themes in the poem "South of My Days" by Judith Wright?

The
poem South of My Days bystarts as a reminiscence about a particular landscape, which the
narrator describes as part of my bloods country - that is, their homeland. The first stanza
paints a picture of this landscape in winter. The vocabulary leaves no doubt about the harshness
of the winter land - it is described as wincing€¦clean, lean, hungry country. This description
acts as a springboard to the other major themes of the poem. The first of these is memory and
stories; the second is old age and death.

The second stanza shifts from
description of the winter to memory of summer. The language used in this stanza conveys a sense
of disbelief - in the face of the harshness of winter, it is hard for the narrator to imagine
the return of summer, that it will one day thrust its hot face€¦to tell another yarn. This 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 ofcattle 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 Dans stories. The tone
again is as bleak and wintery as in the first two stanzas. The old mans stories are described as
conjurers 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 a winter 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.