The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever
Read "The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever" by Les Murray, a characteristically unconventional poem that transforms an everyday article of clothing into a meditation on freedom, comfort, social convention, Australian identity, individuality, and resistance to formality.
The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever by Les Murray
To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,
to camp out along the river bends
for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,
a fishing line and matches,
or there where the hills are all down, below the plain,
to sit around in shorts at evening
on the plank verandah -
If the cardinal points of costume
are Robes, Tat, Rig and Scunge,
where are shorts in this compass?
They are never Robes
as other bareleg outfits have been:
the toga, the kilt, the lava-lava
the Mahatma's cotton dhoti;
archbishops and field marshals
at their ceremonies never wear shorts.
The very word
means underpants in North America.
Shorts can be Tat,
Land-Rovering bush-environmental tat,
socio-political ripped-and-metal-stapled tat,
solidarity-with-the-Third World tat tvam asi,
likewise track-and-field shorts worn to parties
and the further humid, modelling negligee
of the Kingdom of Flaunt,
that unchallenged aristocracy.
More plainly climatic, shorts
are farmers' rig, leathery with salt and bonemeal;
are sailors' and branch bankers' rig,
the crisp golfing style
of our youngest male National Costume.
Most loosely, they are Scunge,
ancient Bengal bloomers or moth-eaten hot pants
worn with a former shirt,
feet, beach sand, hair
and a paucity of signals.
Scunge, which is real negligee
housework in a swimsuit, pyjamas worn all day,
is holiday, is freedom from ambition.
Scunge makes you invisible
to the world and yourself.
The entropy of costume,
scunge can get you conquered by more vigorous cultures
and help you notice it less.
To be or to become
is a serious question posed by a work-shorts counter
with its pressed stack, bulk khaki and blue,
reading Yakka or King Gee, crisp with steely warehouse odour.
Satisfied ambition, defeat, true unconcern,
the wish and the knack of self-forgetfulness
all fall within the scunge ambit
wearing board shorts of similar;
it is a kind of weightlessness.
Unlike public nakedness, which in Westerners
is deeply circumstantial, relaxed as exam time,
artless and equal as the corsetry of a hussar regiment,
shorts and their plain like
are an angelic nudity,
spirituality with pockets!
A double updraft as you drop from branch to pool!
Ideal for getting served last
in shops of the temperate zone
they are also ideal for going home, into space,
into time, to farm the mind's Sabine acres
for product and subsistence.
Now that everyone who yearned to wear long pants
has essentially achieved them,
long pants, which have themselves been underwear
repeatedly, and underground more than once,
it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts,
to moderate grim vigour
with the knobble of bare knees,
to cool bareknuckle feet in inland water,
slapping flies with a book on solar wind
or a patient bare hand, beneath the cadjiput trees,
to be walking meditatively
among green timber, through the grassy forest
towards a calm sea
and looking across to more of that great island
and the further tropics.
The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever Summary and Analysis
Les Murray turns a simple item of clothing into a sprawling meditation on place, class, ease, and identity. The poem begins in a relaxed Australian landscape of paddocks, river bends, verandahs, and warm climate, where wearing shorts forever sounds less like fashion than a way of belonging. From there, the poem widens into a comic, highly energetic taxonomy, sorting shorts into categories of dress, social posture, labor, leisure, and self-display.
As the poem unfolds, the playful inventory grows more thoughtful. Shorts become a way to think about freedom from ambition, the temptation of invisibility, and the desire to live lightly in the world. At the same time, Murray keeps a tension alive between comfort and meaning: shorts can signal tat, laziness, humility, practicality, or even a kind of spiritual openness. The ending returns to landscape and movement, suggesting that the dream of shorts is really a dream of ease within country life, where body, climate, and mind can settle into a durable, local form of freedom.
Tone in The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever
Murray's tone is witty, inventive, and lightly argumentative, as if he is teasing readers into taking a humble garment seriously. Beneath the humor, though, the poem carries real affection for country life and for a stripped-down way of being. The mood feels bright, open, and sunlit at first, then increasingly reflective as the poem turns from comic classification toward a quieter praise of simplicity, ease, and self-forgetting.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever
- Australian identity - The poem links shorts to a distinctly Australian way of being, grounded in heat, bush life, verandahs, and outdoor ease rather than formal social display.
- Freedom and informality - Shorts symbolize release from stiffness, status, and ambition, suggesting a life that is more relaxed, practical, and physically unencumbered.
- Class and social performance - Murray treats clothing as a marker of social rank and habit, showing how shorts can range from workwear to stylish casualness to deliberate roughness.
- Body and climate - The poem repeatedly ties dress to weather and landscape, implying that clothing should answer to climate and the body's need for comfort.
- Self-forgetfulness - The poem values the condition in which a person becomes less visible to others and even to themselves, finding relief in the humble plainness of shorts.
- Tradition versus modernity - By comparing shorts with robes, uniforms, and ceremonial dress, the poem contrasts inherited forms of dignity with a more recent, anti-formal culture.
Literary Devices in The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever
- Extended metaphor - The poem builds an elaborate argument in which shorts stand for a whole philosophy of life, not just a garment.
- Cataloguing - Murray piles up examples, types, and social uses of shorts to create comic momentum and to show how widely the symbol can spread.
- Satire - The mock-serious classification of costume styles gently ridicules fashion, status, and ideological self-presentation.
- Wordplay - The poem plays on terminology such as rig, tat, and scunge, giving the clothing system a quasi-scientific but mischievous flavor.
- Imagery - Vivid rural and coastal images, from river bends to grassy forests, anchor the abstract reflections in a lived environment.
- Irony - Shorts are described as lowly, even shabby, yet they are also linked to dignity, spirituality, and freedom.
- Paradox - The poem presents shorts as both modest and exalted, suggesting that a humble object can point toward deeper meaning.
- Hyperbole - Exaggerated language helps make the poem playful and expansive, as if the case for shorts must be argued on a grand scale.
Symbolism in The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever
- Shorts - They symbolize informality, climatic adaptation, and a life that prefers practicality over ceremony.
- Verandah - The plank verandah suggests domestic ease, social openness, and the boundary between house and landscape.
- River bends - The river bends evoke a settling into place, a pastoral freedom, and a natural rhythm for living.
- Work shorts counter - The stacked workwear suggests labor, commerce, and the manufactured side of ordinary life.
- Bare knees - Bare knees stand for plainness and exposure, but also for a healthy refusal of social pretension.
- Pockets - The idea of having pockets in a near-naked garment symbolizes usefulness, readiness, and practical spirituality.
Historical Context of The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever
The poem belongs to a late twentieth-century Australian literary world in which poets often revisited national identity, landscape, speech rhythms, and the tensions between urban sophistication and rural life. Murray is known for writing about Australian culture with a mix of physical detail, argument, humor, and a strong sense of local particularity. That background helps explain why a poem about clothing can become a meditation on climate, class, and national habit.
The poem also fits a broader modern tradition of informal, skeptical poetry that resists elevated poses while still searching for serious meaning in everyday objects. Its attention to the body, workwear, and regional speech reflects a cultural moment interested in ordinary life rather than ceremonial grandeur, even as the poem keeps testing how far that ordinariness can be pushed before it becomes its own kind of style.
Poems Similar to The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T. S. Eliot
- This Is Just To Say - William Carlos Williams
- Sailing to Byzantium - W. B. Yeats
- The Red Wheelbarrow - William Carlos Williams
- Mowing - Robert Frost