Essay: Bruce Dawe's "Enter Without So Much as Knocking"

The journey of life often is useless and creates no change. This idea of stagnation and a lack of development is prevalent in Bruce Dawe’s Enter Without So Much as Knocking.  The poem starts with “Blink, blink. Hospital. Silence.”, similarly at the end of the poem “Blink, blink. Cemetery. Silence.” The repetition shows how the people have not changed even though they have embarked on the journey of life. This unchanging nature can be seen in the title “Enter Without So Much as Knocking”. Dawe suggests that people do not create an impact through their journeys, that they will not even be noticed. This is developed through the second last line “Six feet down nobody interested”. Dawe highlights how journeys do not have to be beneficial, how they can be useless with a lack of change.


Journeys can often force people to forget their values and morals. Such is so in Enter Without So Much as Knocking, where the persona is shown to lose his values along the way “pretty soon he was old enough to be realistic like every other godless money-hungry back-stabbing miserable so-and-so”. Dawe suggests that throughout a journey people can lose their core values and their beliefs, with “god” representing values and morals. This idea of a loss of values can be seen through the sarcasm of the persona “well thanks for a lovely evening Clare”. The sarcasm indicates the artificial and ‘fake’ attitude that he shows towards other people, losing his values of respect and kindness as he progresses through the journey. This is emphasised by “Probity & Sons, Morticians, did a really first-class job on his face”. Probity & Sons are a business, using the dead to make a profit, showing the loss of respect towards the dead. The lack of care towards the dead persona, rather care being put on his face job, indicates the loss of morals and ethics in relation to the standards and respect toward the dead. Dawe suggests that as we progress along our journeys we can possibly lose our values and morals.


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