The Old Prison

loss isolation rhymed verse dark

The Old Prison - meaning Summary

Wind and Sea as Witnesses

Judith Wright's 'The Old Prison' depicts a ruined jail opened to wind and sea, which speak like mourners. The poem treats the landscape as a kind of voicebox: empty cells become flutes, waves and wind sing a bitter, bone-like song. Its focus is on absence and isolation; the human occupants are gone and remembered through elemental sounds. The plain, elegiac images suggest loss and the failure of the prison to sustain human warmth.

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The rows of cells are unroofed, a flute for the wind's mouth, who comes with a breath of ice from the blue caves of the south. O dark and fierce day: the wind like an angry bee hunts for the black honey in the pits of the hollow sea. Waves of shadow wash the empty shell bone-bare, and like a bone it sings a bitter song of air. Who built and laboured here? The wind and the sea say -Their cold nest is broken and they are blown away- They did not breed nor love, each in his cell alone cried as the wind now cries through this flute of stone.