Hunting Snake and Storyteller Analysis

A clear PDF on ‘Hunting Snake’ and ‘Storyteller’, with close analysis of language, structure, form and context.

This resource gives students a much clearer way into both poems by breaking them into manageable sections without flattening them into simple summary. The ‘Hunting Snake’ pages track the poem through the opening encounter, the snake in motion, the moment where human thought falls away, and the restrained ending. The focus stays on the snake’s power, beauty and authority, and on the way Judith Wright presents nature as something that unsettles people without ever becoming melodramatic.

The ‘Storyteller’ pages then shift into a very different world: kitchens, labour, memory, oral culture and the value of women’s work. The resource works stanza by stanza, looking at domestic imagery, the defence of storytelling, the spinning metaphor, and the final sense that stories survive through children and return rather than disappear. It is useful because it keeps showing students how meaning is built through specific methods - metaphor, listing, sound, contrast, enjambment, cyclical structure - instead of just giving them themes and hoping they work it out from there.