1/ Discuss the significance of the last line of John Shaw Neilson’s “The Orange Tree”
This week, we explored early 20th-century Australian poetry and prose. This included the works of poet John Shaw Neilson. Specifically, I wanted to examine Neilson’s beautiful poem “The Orange Tree”. This extremely sensitive poem involves considerable educational enquiry into the perceptions of a child and an adult. The poem is a dialogue between a child, who is a symbolic representation of youth, and an adult, who is a symbolic representation of sophistication. In this poem, Neil criticises the “sophisticated” adult mind and its need to identify, categorise and evaluate essentially everything in life. His depiction of the “sophisticated” mind is juxtaposed with the child through alternating stanzas. For example, the poem begins with the “sophisticated” adult’s perspective of the Orange Tree:
THE young girl stood beside me. I
Saw not what her young eyes could see:
—A light, she said, not of the sky
Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.
Neil then follows up with two additional stanzas to convey the “sophisticated” mind’s need to identify, categorise and evaluate “everything”.
—Is it, I said, of east or west?
The heartbeat of a luminous boy
Who with his faltering flute confessed
Only the edges of his joy?
Was he, I said, borne to the blue
In a mad escapade of Spring
Ere he could make a fond adieu To his love in the blossoming?
To his love in the blossoming?
The “sophisticated” mind’s attempt to analyse and evaluate the child and what the child was referring to. This action ultimately drives the child into a state of frustration and as a consequence, the child emphatically utters the words “–Listen!”. This can be interpreted as the child’s frustration at adults to unnecessarily complicate things in life and just observe (or in this case, listen.)
Plague me no longer now, for I Am listening like the Orange Tree.
Hence, we can argue that the last line’s the poem (shown above) is significant in the sense that it encourages people, specifically adults, to free themselves from their own self-restrictions and in doing so, they are able to understand and feel something beyond what can ever be understood from identifying, catergorising and evaluating.
LOST IN LITERATURE 
