Hone Tuwhare shows that grief can be expressed in many different ways in his poems Heemi and Girl in the Park. Heemi talks of grief through reverence; that a person can grieve for someone by showing how much they revere or respect them. However in Girl in the Park, it was shown that a person can go mad with grief.
The first person narrative point of view expressed grief through reverence in the poem Heemi. This was through the voice of Hone Tuwhare who grieved for James K. Baxter by remembering the depth of their friendship, "Your mana holds, Heemi. Your mana is love..." This showed that a person doesn't have to be sad to grieve for someone; a person can grieve by respecting the person who had passed away. Hone Tuwhare had grieved for James K. Baxter by holding him in high esteem, showing reverence by remembering Heemi in a good light. This was unlike Girl in the Park, which showed that a person could grieve by wanting to join the person in the after life and by going mad.
The third person narrative expressed how you can go mad with grief in Girl in the Park. The narrator told the reader what the Girl was doing at the park, as if they were watching her as she moved. Grief was expressed through the way the narrator described the Girl, "How huge it seems, and the trees are big she said," which showed how she viewed her surroundings. The Girl saw everything as bigger than they actually were because she felt vulnerable and weak. This was because she had lost her lover and therefore felt smaller in comparison to everything else. Hone Tuwhare showed two different ways of grieving using narrative point of views. In Heemi grief was expressed through reverence while in Girl in the Park it was expressed through madness.
In the poem Heemi, allusion was used to express grief through reverence. This technique was used to indirectly reference the birth of Christ and compare it to Heemi's death. This effect was reinforced by biblical jargon - "Knowing that they were not called on to witness some mysterious phenomenon of birth on a dung-littered floor," showed that Heemi was like Jesus, without being disrespectful to Christ. Tuwhare expressed grief by honouring Heemi's memory, like how many others honour the memory of Christ.
In the poem Girl in the Park, extended metaphors were used to express grief through madness. This technique was showed throughout the poem - "The girl in the park saw the moon glide into a dead tree's arms," where the 'moon' represented the girl and the tree's symbolised her dead lover. This reinforced the pain and madness that the girl was going through as everything reminded her of her lover, and also how she wanted to join him. The park, with a mass quantity of trees surrounding it, was a place filled with the memories of her lover which drove her more pain. This was reinforced by the poetic technique of alliteration, "moonrise and madness," which was used as a sound technique to show how crazy mad she was becoming.
Hone Tuwhare portrays grief in his two poems, Girl in the Park and Heemi. They showed two different ways of expressing grief, Heemi showed it through revering a friend by honouring their memory. However Girl in the Park expressed it through becoming mad and wanting to join the person who had passed away in death.
