Limestone by Fiona Farrell

We are studying the unfamiliar text in class for the level 3 exam.

Compare and contrast the attitude to departure and arrival presented in each text. Give details from the texts to support your answer.

The text “Limestone” by Fiona Farrell displays contrasting ideas on Clare’s departure from Europe and arrival to their home town in NZ. Clare (the POV Character) seemed to have loved Europe as even when she is leaving she is describing the beauties of the mountains and rivers as well as the forests and hills “a pristine place of forested hills and snow-topped mountains through which wind the rivers that are named for the old goddesses – Rhine and Danube and Volga – legendary and beautiful from 30,0000 feet, shorn of their clutter of rusted cargo boats and effluents and chemical spills and millennia of quarrelsome human history.” The author does this to create imagery of what Europe meant to Clare, however, when Clare is thinking of home the mood shifts a little “She has a sudden longing for home: that dream of primaeval beaches scattered with driftwood, and dark forests, and plains burned to a tawny hide in late summer. That dream she knows to be corrupted by reality: the beach is already threatened with subdivision and the trees with clear-felling, and the tawny plains are bordered by the dry beds of intricate vanished trees.” It seems that Clare has a sour feeling about her home where she doesn’t see the beauty in the beaches or the dry beds and even claims that the “dream of primaeval beaches… is corrupt by reality” However, later on, she acknowledges that perfection isn’t something that can be achieved and the line “we are all just trying for happiness” seems to humble her a little. “she was born on, that funny little semicolon where all the big continental statements finally stutter to silence.” By the end of the poem, Clare doesn’t seem to have a longing for a better place anymore but instead is content with what she is given.