Belonging - Peter Skrynecki

323 Words2 Pages
Finding your place in the world can be extremely overwhelming especially as n adolescent like we are. Feeling like you don’t belong can be a day-to-day struggle with life. In the poems ‘St Patrick’s College’ and ‘Feliks Skrynecki’ by Peter Skrynecki, the persona of both poems struggles to over come many barriers. The persona tries to find his place where he within the school and family. This is similar to the novel ‘Looking for Alaska’ by John Green. The person in this novel is searching for acceptance within a new school and his family. Before I talk about these texts, what is belonging? Belonging is to have a proper place within the world or a social structure. These three texts help us explore the desire to belong to anything especially family or school. The poem ‘St Patrick’s College’ by Peter Skrynecki is about a young boy in high school and the problems he faces. A search for belonging is seen throughout the entire poem but especially in the second stanza where the persona says, “I stuck pine needles into the motto”, with the representation of first person this statement reinforces the persona’s lack of understanding for religion and education. Being adolescents we all should understand the frustration of feeling like education doesn’t signify you as a person. Again in the second stanza we see the persona feeling unwanted and unneeded, within his school. This is seen when the poem states, “Her face overshadowed by clouds” this use of metaphor helps foreshadow the persona’s school experience. The poem ‘Feliks Skrynecki’ also by Peter Skrynecki, is about the lost of connection between father and son. In the second stanza “From cement fingers with cracks like the sods he broke”, this simile clearly underlines the cracks in the relationship between father and son just like the cracks in the persona’s fingers. With being an adolescent cracks also come to

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