Off the Map By David Malouf

David Malouf is an Australian writer who has had a long and successful career. He has published many books and collections of poetry and has also received several awards for his works. One recurring theme in Malouf’s work seems to be soul- searching and finding your place in society. Malouf’s poem, ‘Off the map’, is a poem that explores the imaginative landscape of the protagonists mind. The poem also includes a lot of war imagery that the person is trying to escape from. This creates the protagonists inner landscape.

In the second stanza of ‘Off the Map’, the person seems to identify his surroundings as a type of war zone. ‘Bronze Anzacs’ and ‘at ease between wars’ are lines from the poem that support this. Change in the landscape is seen as the poem continues and the imaginary landscape of the person is explored in more depth. The use of imagery in the poem conveys a change in the journey of the protagonists mind. This is evident from lines such as ‘out into a dream’ and ‘black piers, bright water, silos moonstruck’. It is also evident from these lines that the protagonist does not always feel comfortable in the physical landscape so he explores his mind and imagination. The use of the simile, ‘pointing nowhere, like saint s practicing stillness in a ripple of grain’ suggests that the persona is so lost in his imaginative and inner landscape that he has almost lost touch with the his physical surroundings.

The connotations of war time and battle at the beginning of the poem reinforce the idea that the protagonist is uncomfortable with his physical surroundings. This alludes to the fact that the persona may want to escape the physical landscape and create his own surroundings in his imagination. This reveals more to the responder about the persona and his inner landscape.

More war time imagery is used as the poem progresses with the simile, ‘they thunder across country like the daredevil boys’. This has connotations of brave soldiers running across the land. In the next few stanzas the mood of the poem seems to change as the physical surroundings change from night to day. This is evident from the use of the line, ‘they climb towards dawn’. From this point onwards in the poem, the landscape that is in the poem is neither the persona’s inner or imaginative but their physical surroundings. This suggests that the persona’s imaginative landscape is most active at night and once day breaks the physical surrounding become more real and harsh that he struggles to escape to his imaginative landscape. The final lines of the poem read, ‘nameless, no to be found by any day on any map’. This line connects back to the title of the poem, ‘Off the Map’, as it has connotations of freedom and travel. The persona may feel that he is truly free because he has a whole other world within his inner and imaginative landscape that is active only at night. The line suggests while places in the physical landscape can be found on a map, the landscape of his mind cannot. The protagonist truly lives ‘off the map’.

Malouf’s ‘Off the Map’ differs to Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ as ‘Off the Map’ depicts the persona as being slightly uncomfortable in their physical surroundings and so their enter their minds and create their own world out of their imagination. Whereas, in ‘My Country’ the protagonist is shown as being extremely comfortable with the physical landscape and it is often depicted in the poem that there is no place that persona would rather be.

My annotated version of ‘Off the Map’