Tony Harrison's Poetry And His Relationship With His Parents

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his role as the father. Harrison’s father had great love for him, however Harrison resented the way that he put him down, however the father was proud of the son but had no way of conveying this emotion. In later life Harrison did not think of his father as an illiterate wreck, who had no chance of glory. The father could not keep the same social ground as the son and this was what divided them, he could understand the beauty of literature. The fathers emotions on the lose of the mother were great and life could not continue in the Harrison household without her. The mother was in a no mans land when she was alive, she was the one that kept the bond between the poet and father alive. She was wedged in the middle between ignorance and literature.

“You’re like book ends, the pair of you, she’d say,
Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare…”

Harrison and his father were dissimilar and were only able to achieve small talk, there was no general ground or common interests, ...

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made them drift apart. He no longer has no reason to go home, there is no pleasure in going home, and there is a responsibility, yet no love.

“You said you’d always been a clumsy talker
and you couldn’t find another shorter word
for ‘beloved’ or for ‘wife’ in the inscription,”

This is from ‘Book Ends II’, where both father and son are discussing what to put on the mothers grave stone. Again they have resorted to drink, the eternal remedy, helping them to bear each others presence. Again the death has brought them together again, if only for a short, they began to talk to each other and admit things to each other. Harrison, the educated poet cannot think of what to put on his ...

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