English: Supp'y texts: Clancy

Title and Details:
Clancy of The Overflow from “The Man From Snowy River and Other Verses” by A.B. Paterson (1895)
Type of text:
Poem (ballad)
Context and Purpose of text:
Australian bush ballad written at the height of popular ballads in Australia. It tells a story, simple and easy to recognise with.



What ideas of the imaginative journey are conveyed to the responder?
The persona sits in his office and thinks of his old friend Clancy, imagining what he is doing in the bush and contrasting his hurried city life with the simple drover’s life he thinks Clancy is living. The reader is invited to imagine both the persona’s life and join the persona in his imagining of Clancy’s life. The idea is that through imagining, the persona can see a better world, a more ideal life. However these dreams often do not come true.





How are these ideas conveyed to the responder?
Clancy’s world is the ideal one – “pleasures”, “vision splendid”, “wondrous glory” and colloquialisms such as “gone a-drovin” and a slow pace created by long vowels “murmur of the breezes”. The persona’s is not - “dingy”, “stingy”, “foetid air” and hard consonants and short vowels quickens pace and repetition of “hurry”, also alliteration in “gutter children fighting”. However changing places and making real the fantasy is impossible, laughable “But I doubt he’d suit the office”.






Links to poetry of Coleridge and Stimulus Booklet text:
Link to Frost at Midnight in that he contrasts a life in the city with life lived closer to nature. Link to The Road Not Taken in that he thinks of two different lives that stemmed from one meeting. He thinks that they could have switched places, but he has chosen his path now and there is no longer any changing it.