Life is unfair. It has always been. It has been unfair in the beginning and it will be unfair in the end. You won't always get what you want and you won't always get what you need. That is the sad truth we cannot avoid. The poems “The Justice of the Peace”, “The Flower-Fed Buffaloes” and “Those Winter Sundays ” all have the same idea in them, that life is unfair. I will be discussing mainly the meaning, imagery and effect of these poems and I would also be linking them to the main idea, which is that life is unfair.
The first poem I will be talking about is the justice of the peace. The person speaking in this poem appears to be a very important person that has a big role in his country or city, a king or prince perhaps, we know of his importance from the following sentences “I am the lord Benign of fifty hundred acres of fat land.” I highly doubt that he is a king due to his childish behaviour, but he might just be a king with no respect or honor whatsoever. In this poem the ‘prince’ as I will call him is showing off to what seems to be a civilian. The prince keeps pointing out the things he has and the things the civilian doesn't “This is thing yours, that other thing is mine.” The prince then tells him that he has a right and that the civilian doesn’t, he was speaking to him in the utmost lack of respect as if he was nothing to him. He tells the civilian to remember his low rank and to not fight against the goad, and that it is fearfully illogical of him to even try to do anything like fight with economic force and fate because in the end the prince will always have the upper hand. After reading this poem I realised that life was unfair, not something I didn’t know of but also that we cannot compete with people of this high rank.
The second poem i will be talking about is The Flower-Fed Buffaloes. I the beginning of this poem the speaker gives us an image of how things were before the buffaloes left. The locomotives also known as trains nowadays would sing, the priarie flowers would lay low, the tossing and blooming of the perfumed grass and how it was swept away by the wheat, the train’s wheels would spin by in the spring that was once still sweet. The speaker then tells us that the buffaloes left them long ago. They bellow no more, they trundle around the hills no more, they are gone. The second stanza lacks imagery, most probably because it’s been so long that the speaker doesn’t even remember their appearance. The speaker does not mention why the buffaloes left, or even why and how, but with some common sense we can figure it out. The making of the tracks for the train most probably ruined their habitat and shortened or even destroyed their food supply, or maybe the train was so loud it scared them off. On top of all this us humans were obviously also hunting them down, us humans would hunt down anything for just a little bit of money. After reading this poem it made me realise that life is unfair not just for us humans, but for animals too and the wildlife in general. It also made me realise that us humans can be very cruel at times, and have no mercy.
The final poem i will be writing about in this essay is Those Winter Sundays. This is the shortest of the three poems and it is the one that effected me the most since it is sad. In this poem we have what appears to be a son to be the speaker. The son is telling us of his father’s suffering, how he wakes up early in the cold morning and puts on his work clothes in the blueback cold, He would even work on sundays which is supposed to be the day of resting. The father would even help out around the house and do things like polish his son’s shoes, and after all this no one thanks him, no one appreciates him nor his work. The son then tells us how he would wake up and dress when he heard his father call and that he would even speak indifferently to him, gives him the wrong attitude and disrespects him. He then says “What did i know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices.” Throughout reading this poem I realised that the poet added a comma at the end of almost every sentence, I think this was done on purpose to show small pauses that would show that the son is feeling sad and is talking slowly, perhaps because he is feeling some remorse for his father and that he regrets his actions. This poem makes me realise again how cruel us humans can be, not just to strangers but to the people that are the closest to you. Even on the father’s side, life isn’t fair, people won’t always treat you the way you want to be treated and even the way you deserve to be treated, the father here for example deserved to be treated in a good way since he does all these good things for the family and no one appreciates it.
Throughout reading these three poems i have focused on one idea, that life is unfair. It isn’t fair for us, the animals and even the wildlife. From these poems we can see that us humans are mainly the reason for the unfairness in the world and i have been thinking. If we set aside our differences and focus on the things we all share and have, we could work together as a species and make the world a better place for everyone. We breathe the same air, walk the same land and drink the same water, we are not so different to each other as people may think. I truly do hope we achieve this level in our world today because that is the only way we could make the world a better place, a world that is fair for all.
