[In the following essay, Haberkamm provides an in-depth analysis of Harrison's V. and describes it as “a contemporary elegy, a public poem, which opens up to its social context without dispensing with private grief and ruminations.”]

Articulation is the tongue-tied's fighting.¹

Although he began as a Tyneside poet, publishing his first collection The Loiners,² as early as 1970, Tony Harrison's present popularity is based on his achievements as a playwright （The Misanthrope, The Oresteia, The Mysteries）, mainly for the National Theatre,³ as a librettist for the Metropolitan Opera in New York （The Bartered Bride and Medea : a sex-war opera）, as a translator of classical texts and French plays, and as the narrator on TV of his own works.⁴ In the autumn of 1987 his name hit the newspaper headlines after a film version of his long poem V. was broadcast on Channel Four, arousing a wave of criticism over his use of abusive vocabulary. Right from the start, Harrison has been an eminently political and socially committed writer.⁵ In the aftermath of the ban on Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses Harrison set out to defend his friend and his novel, and the fundamental human right of free speech.⁶ The Penguin publication of both his Theatre Works 1973-1985 and his Selected Poems have confirmed Harrison's public stature as poet and writer.

Born in 1937 in Leeds and graduating in classics from Leeds University, Harrison is a north-countryman proud of his inherited working-class background. The inevitable tensions for the scholarship-boy with low-brow roots and high-brow learning have determined his personality, and his poetry, which focuses on speechlessness, social divisiveness and displacement.⁷ He has never lost his particular sense of belonging, even though he has taught English literature in Nigeria and Prague, has translated many foreign texts, and works and lives in Newcastle, London, Florida and New York. As he admitted in an interview:

I had a very loving upbringing; without question, a very loving, rooted upbringing. Education and poetry came in to disrupt that loving group, and I've been trying to create new wholes out of that disruption ever since.⁸

This combination of his sense of place and open-mindedness and the underlying tension between his upbringing and alienation give contour and significance to his poem V., written during the Miners’ Strike （1984-85） and published in 1985.⁹

It can be considered to be a contemporary elegy, a public poem, which opens up to its social context without dispensing with private grief and ruminations. The speaker's autobiographical sincerity is maintained, since there is no difficulty in identifying the poem's persona with the author's real self: his age （then 47 years old）, his family name and his profession are revealed.¹⁰ This personal identity is related to social conditions in present-day England, underlining Harrison's poetic creed that every writer has to be aware of, and answerable to, public issues.

The poem's setting, its structure running from the grave to the final epitaph, and its stanzaic and metrical form, recall Thomas Gray's famous Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which helped to create graveyard poetry as a genre in the middle of the eighteenth century.¹¹ Quite obviously, Harrison refers to this classic of sentimental melancholy in the shaping form of the cross-rhymed iambic pentameter quatrain.¹² His subject, language, attitude and intention, however, are markedly different, since this contemporary version is set in a completely changed social context. Harrison's modern churchyard has turned into a place of political dichotomies, social friction, emotional and verbal degradation. Visiting his parents’ grave in Leeds, the poet is swept out of any self-indulgent mood of mournful memory by the sight of offensive Skinhead graffiti and beer cans desecrating the cemetery. He is suddenly confronted with certain deplorable aspects of society. Consequently, a dialogue starts with an imaginary Skinhead to reveal his background and attitudes.

The poem must be read as a moving elegy of the decline of the North and the end of a national consensus in Thatcherite England. Economic, social, moral and communicative aspects are introduced, such as closed pits, unemployment, violence, crime, alcoholism and immigration. The Skinhead's vulgar vocabulary, his beer cans and scrawlings show growing inarticulateness and brutalization. Initially, the topographical poem describes a private visit to an actual graveyard （“Flying visits once or twice a year”, “an hour between trains”）, but very soon its range widens to a social panorama. Tipped off by a graffiti sign （“V”） the poet turns to the “versuses of life” within contemporary English society. The title motif （V.） broadens its field of meaning and association. Primarily, it signifies the abbreviation sandwiched between two football teams: “LEEDS v./the opponent” （ll. 49-50）. Afterwards, gaining more general meaning, it carries the notion of “against! against! against!” （l. 184）:

these Vs are all the versuses of life
from LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White
and （as I've known to my cost） man v. wife,
Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,
class v. class as bitter as before,
the unending violence of US and THEM,
personified in 1984
by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM,
Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind,
East/West, male/female, and the ground
these fixtures are fought out on's Man, resigned
to hope from his future what his past has never found.
The prospects for the present aren't too grand
when a swastika with NF （National Front）'s
sprayed on a grave, to which another hand
has added, in a reddish colour, CUNTS.

（ll. 65-80）

This telling “V” sign takes on yet further meaning, thus becoming the absolutely reduced yet resourceful symbol of the poem's content. Stanza 16 recalls the unique feeling of belonging to one nation during the Second World War, a collectivist ethos of solidarity long replaced by the split between the North and the South, those with a job and those without:

Half this skinhead's age but with approval
I helped whitewash a V on a brick wall.
No one clamoured in the press for its removal
or thought the sign, in wartime, rude at all.

（ll. 61-64）

Autobiographical and historical reminiscences intertwine, feelings are unearthed and memories return. The former sign of victory and peace has become the outcry and gesture of antagonisms. Furthermore, “V” figures as the graphic representation of a female vulva denoting crude sexual connotations: “Then as if I'd egged him on to be obscene / he added a middle slit to one daubed V” （ll. 263-64）. If our use of sexual vocabulary corresponds to our attitude and deep-rooted emotions, this poem bitterly pinpoints our shortcomings.

The word “UNITED” appears as the antithesis to this idea of “v.” both in concrete and symbolic terms. Of course this grave graffiti refers to the Leeds United football team yet it casts a wider net on to “higher things, and to the nation” （l. 132）. Thus it signifies the religious concept of life and reunion after death, and the social notion of solidarity within a community. But there are still more dimensions to it. “UNITED” also contains the idea of fulfilled partnership, communication and sexuality, tinged with “homely joys”, warmth and tenderness. Being an agnostic Harrison pleads for the immanent utopia of love and privacy, momentarily putting aside contrast and friction:

Home, home to my woman, home to bed
where opposites seem sometimes unified

（ll. 331-32）

Turning to love, and sleep's oblivion, I know
what the UNITED that the skin sprayed has
to mean.

（ll. 399-400）

The ones we choose to love become our anchor
when the hawser of the blood-tie's hacked, or frays.

（ll. 409-10）

Leaving the cemetery after his disillusioning confrontation with the skinhead, the speaker is made to concede resignedly that his utopian hopes must be regarded as futile:

That UNITED that I'd wished onto the nation
or as reunion for dead parents soon recedes.
The word's once more a mindless desecration
by some HARPoholic yob supporting Leeds.

（ll. 289-92）

Even the momentary idyll of intimacy is gate-crashed by social antagonisms. Every individual's personal life, referring and correlating to general conditions, can be threatened by social events and human mortality. The world breaks into one's private retreat, mediated by television bringing “shots” of far-away bloodshed and familiar battles. The poem gradually focuses on the on-going miners’ strike and its underlying oppositions. And there can be no switching off:

This world, with far too many people in,
starts on the TV logo as a taw,
then ping-pong, tennis, football; then one spin
to show us all, then shots of the Gulf War.
As the coal with the reddish dust cools in the grate
on the late-night national news we see
police v. pickets at a coke-plant gate,
old violence and old disunity.
The map that's colour-coded Ulster/Eire's
flashed on again as almost every night.
Behind a tiny coffin with two bearers
men in masks with arms show off their might.
The day's last images recede to first a glow
and then a ball that shrinks back to blank screen.

（ll. 385-98）

Thinking of the skinhead, the speaker retains some last hope of solidarity amongst individuals and generations. In the end the reader himself is asked the following rhetorical question:

I doubt if 30 years of bleak Leeds weather
and 30 falls of apple and of may
will erode the UNITED binding us together.
And now it's your decision: does it stay?

（ll. 417-20）

The interrelation of various times, social forces, private and public matters is clearly mirrored in the structure of this poem. The Roman numeral “V” represents the figure 5 and correspondingly V. consists of five major parts.¹³ “Next millenium” opens the poem and starts its final sequence. The first seven stanzas introduce the setting, its mood and its protagonist. A future point of time is imagined, two poet “peers” are ironically mentioned, and the speaker addresses the reader directly （“you”）. “This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit“, starts the poem's second part （l. 29） centring on the “language of this graveyard” and “all the versuses of life”. The visible graffiti make the protagonist ponder violence and vandalism, and who is to blame for such a drab development （“It isn't all his fault though. Much is ours”: l. 104）.

Cardinal to this passage is the sprayed opposition of V and “UNITED”. The speaker himself reveals his own convictions regarding art （“This pen's all I have of magic wand”: 1. 121） and “afterlife” （l. 125）. A sequence of questions （ll. 149-67） functions as a bridge towards the central clash with the jobless skinhead “yob” speaking a rudimentary abrasive “aerosol vocab”: “This is a language of cultural decline: the graveyard of a nation.”¹⁴ In the course of this argument the protagonist's own stance, and his thoughts on his art, are questioned, if not shattered.

By flashing back to his own “bits of mindless aggro” in his childhood, in order to justify the solidarity implied in his own style of writing/speaking, and by gradually falling back upon similar offensive language （“Listen, cunt!”） the speaker strives to approach the skinhead on equal ground. He fails. The latter does not fancy getting chummy and shows no interest in making friends at all, and lashes back:

don't talk to me of fucking representing
the class yer were born into any more.
Yer going to get 'urt and start resenting
it's not poetry we need in this class war.
Yer've given yerself toffee, cunt.
Who needs
yer fucking poufy words. Ah write mi own.
Ah've got mi work on show all ovver Leeds
like this UNITED 'ere on some sod's
stone.

（ll. 265-72）¹⁵

Undoubtedly this is a heavy blow to the poet-speaker's understanding of himself as a mouth-piece of the underprivileged （“yobs like you who do the dirt on death”）: “the reason why I want this in a book / 's to give ungrateful cunts like you a hearing” （ll. 206-207）. His intention of gaining “higher meaning” out of simple people's inarticulacy is to counteract the criticism of art being pointless self-indulgent luxury （“toffee”, “poufy words”）. Thus the poem is meant to serve as a means to achieve representativeness and publicity on behalf of this non-reading “artless” youth. Increasingly the protagonist recognizes the skinhead as being his own “alter ego”, a sort of doppelänger,¹⁶ one generation younger, deprived of many qualifications and chances, but nonetheless from the very same background and region, and with the same language:

You piss-artist skinhead cunt, you wouldn't know
and it doesn't fucking matter if you do,
the skin and poet united fucking Rimbaud
but the autre that je est is fucking you.

（ll. 213-16）

The two of them share a “lust for status and self-publicity”¹⁷ that makes them write their individual messages. The debate's climax and final punchline brings this process of approaching a common denominator. As a response to the speaker's plea the skinhead starts signing the stone graffiti with his name: “He aerosolled his name. And it was mine” （l. 280）. The recurrent motif （ll. 105 ff.） of the “boy footballers” bawling Richard Wagner's Here Comes the Bride initiates （ll. 281 ff.） and closes （ll. 313 ff.） a passage of transition （ll. 281-320） leading to the poem's fourth section （ll. 321-420）.

The argument's main impact on the speaker becomes apparent. He seems to be divided, half way between “versus” and “united”:

One half of me's alive but one half died
when the skin half sprayed my name among the dead.
Half versus half, the enemies within
the heart that can't be whole till they unite.
As I stoop to grab the crushed HARP lager tin
the day's already dusk, half dark, half light.

（ll. 283-88）

John Kerrigan rightly asserts that “elegiacs lament the living”.¹⁸ The protagonist is occupied by intimations of his own mortality, his own life half-lived, his own roots lost and his local past long buried. It is a moment of serious self-revelation stimulated by the encounter with this inarticulate yob. The poem's central theme of dividedness touches upon the speaker's own biography and situation. The passage is tinged with a melancholy different from Gray's, marked by inner separation and alienation.

This sense of disappearance, both literally and figuratively, shows itself concretely. The visitor to the parental grave first leaves the churchyard, then his former home town Leeds. The bus ride across the half familiar, half estranged cityscape offers room enough for reflections on transitoriness and death, for views of the inner city, changed as it is by unemployment, chain stores, immigration and dereliction. This moving passage casts a gloomy light on the decreasing quality of life, communal values, familiarity and personal allegiances. It is embodied by his dead father, an obsessive figure in Tony Harrison's poetry, who represents a reticent yet reliable authority and often the poet's lost self.

“Home, home, home, to my woman“, this line sets the wistful tone of longing in the fourth part of the poem after the speaker's departure from Leeds （“then go, / with not one glance behind, away from Leeds”）. Love appears to be the only escape and resort, yet even this is “wobbly on its pins”, still dependent on socio-political events reaching far into private lives. Not only does one's personal homely comfort depend upon other people's misfortune, but, moreover, one's warm and cosy nest is heated （“as brief flame”） by prehistoric seams and resources that have grown over hundreds of millions of years. There is no closing one's mind to facts, conditions, and bad news. Just as the dead in the churchyard lie above a worked-out pit, present life rests upon “perished vegetation”, “the foetid forest”, and the achievements of the dead （Lohengrin, Lulu）.

The last part of the poem starts by repeating its initial line （“Next millennium You'll have to search quite hard”） and works as a sort of a condensing coda （ll. 421-48）. A large number of previously mentioned details are repeated. A preview of future times is provided and the speaker appeals to the reader directly. The name of the place is given and the ironic use of well-known family names echoes the introductory passage of the poem. Beer cans and graffiti remind us of this elegy's backdrop of public and private experience. Most reminiscent of Gray's model, however, is the concluding epitaph. This final quatrain unites art （“poet”, “poem”） and its social foundations （“pit”, “SHIT”）, private and public spheres, poetry and football （“Poetry supporter”）. The very last line refers not only to the jobs of the “family dead”, but also, as a secularized carpe diem motto, to the full enjoyment of life in general. There are three meanings to the closing imperative （“then look behind”）. Primarily, it captures the view from the Beeston Hill graveyard down onto Leeds. In addition, it signifies the recap of the “family dead” and one's background. And finally it propagates a concept of poetry that is based on memory and history. The long poem's frame is completed, its cyclical structure comes to a close, the present is embedded in the past.

Of course Harrison's modern elegy draws on Gray's famous model and makes ironic use of certain features. Harrison's poem starts off with: “Wordsworth built church organs, Byron tanned / luggage cowhide in the age of steam” （ll. 13-14）. It transfers “the distinguished dead” as “two peers” to an urban cemetery, and rediscovers Wordsworth's familiar daffodils as “dad's dead daffodils”¹⁹ on the family tomb desecrated by sprayed graffiti and Harp lager cans. Harrison's anti-romantic sobriety is also shown when he ironically calls the spraying skinhead a “master of his flourished tool” （58）, “Wordsworth's opposite”. In fact, Harrison's poetry owes a good deal both to Wordsworth's Northern wordiness and Byron's biting wit.

But there is not only the ironic name-dropping （Richardson, Hamlet）. Rimbaud's memorable remark “Je est un autre” was intended to pinpoint the problematic nature of modern minds facing the disintegration of traditional values, conceptions and certainties. Harrison surely is serious when he transforms this quotation into a demotic word of solidarity with the young skinhead, his alter ego “the autre that je est is fucking you”. This confession is intended to bridge the gap between two generations, two different backgrounds of education, position and consciousness—they are one and the same skin.

A characteristic feature of the poem is its language, the variety of which and its many-layered meanings mirror the poem's social panorama. A great number of words and texts taken from the scene is cited: grave inscriptions, trademarks and graffiti. The poem is marked by slang expressions, hooligan jargon and colloquial speech coloured with a North-Eastern accent. Harrison does not make use of expletives to achieve cheap effects, but he quotes them straight from the horse's mouth to guarantee the authenticity and immediacy of his diction and message.²⁰The social conditions of division and desolation thus find their linguistic correlative and poetic mouth-piece. The obscenities are attributable to reality; the language is intrinsic to the poem. The bovver-booted skinhead's “aerosol vocab” is contrasted with traditional poetic diction,²¹ ceremonial tombstone vocabulary, religious phrases （“prayer”, “saw the light”, “save mi soul”）, and the intellectual speaker's hard words （“cri-de-coeur”）. Furthermore, the degradation of sexual issues to the battlefield of swear-words plays off their origin of tenderness against general brutalization. Terry Eagleton asserts with justice:

No modern English poet has shown more finely how the sign is a terrain of struggle where opposing accents intersect, how in a class-divided society language is cultural warfare and every nuance a political valuation.²²

Tony Harrison is a surprisingly versatile poet. His long occupation with classical Latin and Greek texts has refined his style and range of rhetorical and metrical means. A good example is the collocation of parallelism and chiasm at the beginning of the poem: “… butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard / adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread.” Throughout the poem we can find alliterations and assonances that keep the traditional quatrains from becoming stale.²³

Ironic yet revealing puns are a characteristic of Harrison's poetry. This poem's title V. combines diverse meanings and hints, ranging from “versus“, “victory”, “vulva” and “verses” to “we“. The local features of “pits”, “props” and “galleries” not only signify the mine under the graveyard, that is industry as the basis of people's lives and deaths, but hint also at the many-layered social hierarchy and the theatre of human life.

The damaged sign “above West Yorkshire mines” （“PRI CE O WALES”） can be seen as an emblem of industrial decline and, in 1984-85, of political confrontation （ll. 135 ff.）. The colloquial phrase in parenthesis—“（no prizes for who nicked the missing letters!）“—is a subtle witty allusion to another meaning of this detail because the very two letters missing are exactly the initials of the racist National Front: NF （or, “an F”?）. Harrison's puns leave a bitter taste since they relate to home truths and deplorable social conditions. When the skinhead mistakes the speaker's French quotations for “Greek” （“it's all Greek to me”）, the latter's language reveals its condescending, intimidating nature as a means of power, referring back to the poem's epigraph provided by NUM leader Arthur Scargill: “My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.”

Harrison does not shy away from self-criticism. The skinhead mockingly discards the poet as “a crude four-letter word” （l. 204）. The poem contains a lot of these ironic twists and slants. Leeds do not “lead” but lose, and disappoint “their fans week after week“. The nihilistic skinhead is “incensed”. The “most liberal label” of the protagonist's late father reappears in the following stanza as the label on a can. The TV “shots of the Gulf War” are a bloody reality. The talk of “some solution” not only means cleaning the tombstone's crude graffiti, but also points to unsolved social conflicts. The neologism “HARPoholic” reminds us of eighteenth-century ideas of harp, lyre and bard as found in Gray. It refers, also, however, to a lager, drunk by “lager louts” and, hence, has a pejorative connotation, too.

The most touching accompanying motif in the poem is the group of children playing football. Whenever they make blossoms fall and start humming Wagner's “Here Comes the Bride”, the poem shifts to another nuance and level. Their appearance （ll. 105 ff.; ll. 281 ff.） frames the protagonist's encounter with the skinhead, thus stressing the contrast between innocence and brutalization, good prospects of life and hopelessly fallow resources. Flowers denote beauty, loving memory and vanity. The blossoms falling are a constant reminder of weddings and a wistful image of prematurely frustrated potential. This recurrent motif （ll. 313 ff.; ll. 401 ff.; ll. 437 ff.） is capable of conveying memories of the speaker's own childhood days （“the flood / of feelings their first falling had released”）, gives a glimpse of a region in decline, yet also provides the hopeful preview of personal happiness and treasured togetherness （“my bride is coming / into the bedroom, naked, to my side”）.²⁴ Finally, this anticipatory dimension of the motif is fulfilled. Equally, the constant presence of flowers comes to an end in the “brief flame” of the coal fire warming the home. Repeatedly we can find “petals“, “rose-roots”, “daffodils” and “white roses“; the “perished vegetation” and “the foetid forest” signal the after-life of archaic flora and fauna. “Home, home to my woman”, this elegiac refrain is given as the undertone of unity, momentarily realized in privacy.

It is self-evident that Harrison's long poem contains many hints and elements referring back to Gray's elegy. This process of transposing and updating traditional material creates an ironic change of meaning and nuance. There are obvious parallels such as genre, atmosphere and setting （“many a mouldering heap”） with headstones and obelisks askew, an epitaph with parenthesis and imaginative outlook. The time of day is the same—“parting day” （in Gray）, “the day's already dusk, half dark, half light” （in Harrison）. The former's “weary way” is found again in V.: “Though I've a train to catch my step is slow. / I walk on the grass and graves with weary tread.” Gray's rural landscape of the melancholy mind is replaced by a townscape whose decline （“threats of pain and ruin”） Harrison watches with literal down-to-earthness. Leeds's “Town Hall / with the great white clock face” corresponds to Gray's picturesque “ivy-mantled tower” which is reminiscent of distinguished tower poets such as H”lderlin, Rilke, Yeats, or Jeffers, and their idiosyncratic, rather esoteric, concepts of poetry. The “useful toil” of Gray's countrymen is diametrically opposed to urban youths who are made to waste their jobless days. “How jocund did they drive their team afield!”, Gray's speaker enthusedly exclaims. Leeds United's drunk and disappointed hooligans taking their shortcut through the churchyard （“the lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea”） after they have cheered their team on, are worlds and centuries apart from Gray's solitary brooder, “Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife”. He, “mindful of the unhonoured dead”, would have never imagined someone spraying offensive messages on the tombstones, “spelt by the unlettered muse”. Indeed, the two poems are based on two opposing concepts of poetry. The romantic idea of the vates （who “waked to ecstasy the living lyre”, “muttering his wayward fancies”） is echoed by Harrison initially calling himself “bard”. In the course of the poem, however, this archaism is dispensed with in favour of a notion of the “poet” as a socially responsive and responsible contemporary.

Gray's noble “incense” returns when the skinhead is simply “incensed”. Family names and metaphors of flowers （“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen”） play an important part in both poems. Gray's “one longing lingering look behind” forms Harrison's final gesture. The former's “homely joys” constitute the latter's remaining concrete utopia. Faced with traditional symbols of vanitas mundi （“blazoning my name”）, Harrison's agnostic speaker takes Gray at his word: “On some fond breast the parting soul relies.” Parted soul, as we would say today. “Even from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, / Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.” These two lines from Gray's elegy find their literal realization in Harrison's calm nonchalance:

Further underneath's that cavernous hollow
that makes the gravestones lean towards the town.
A matter of mere time and it will swallow
this place of rest and all the resters down.
I tell myself I've got, say, 30 years.
At 75 this place will suit me fine.
I've never feared the grave but what I fear's
that great worked-out black hollow under mine.

（ll. 301-308）

Here the concrete meaning, that is the coal pit with its “300 million-year-old plant debris” （l. 312） which is to escape “insubstantial up the flue”, and references to “higher things” （eternity or nothing） are held in the balance. “Though I don't believe in afterlife at all / and know it's cheating”, the protagonist announces with aplomb （ll. 125-26）. Wholeheartedly he turns towards the immanent human potential and problems of social life. The “lonely contemplation” of Gray's melancholy sentimentalist recedes in favour of dialogue, partnership, and an effort to cope with concrete political conditions.

There have been literary critics championing a native English tradition characterized by its realism of lived experience, its common speech and technical conservatism, and its appeal to the ordinary reading public. This “English line” mainly coming from Wordsworth and exemplified by Hardy, Betjeman and Larkin, has been termed a poetry of “Englishness”, of “sanity”, or of “equipoise”, as outlined by Geoffrey Harvey who discovered in these poets

a profoundly sensitive and complex response to the muddle and the drama of ordinary, everyday human life—a deliberately chosen poetic stance which focuses tenaciously on the mundane, the intransigent and sometimes frightening features of daily existence, and yet testifies with equal fidelity to those moments of transcending freedom which give life meaning—a response which includes both an affirmation of life's worthwhileness and a stubborn refusal to be deceived.²⁵

Undoubtedly, this position has tended to neglect the importance of history, politics and international literature. Much has been said about the Movement poetics tending towards complacent Little-Englandism and narrow-minded anti-Modernism. It is a matter of common observation that British poetry has been greatly invigorated by writers from the provinces and regions, be it from Liverpool, the North-East,²⁶ Ulster or the Celtic Fringe. In spite of his nostalgia for a profitable past, homogeneous communities and well-kept churchyards, Harrison succeeds in using his sense of locality as a source of authenticity and strength without sounding parochial. His poignant poem convinces its readers by its conflicting verbal registers, by yoking together disreputable vernacular, strident working-class voices, and respectable, crafty metrical formality, tradition and topicality, public address and private remorse. Indeed his moral aesthetic meets “the necessity of a clear, unambiguous and trustworthy relation between the poet, his audience and reality”.²⁷ In spite of some mawkish, over-insistent and long-drawn-out passages V. is a truly challenging public poem, a grave emotional narrative with a biting political edge, accessibly recording both individual biography and the state of the nation. This eloquent yet disciplined poet responds to social concerns as if the ambivalent tube announcements and the resonant words of the homeless and dispossessed keep reverberating in his ears: “Mind the gap!”—“Some change, please?”

Notes

1. “On Not Being Milton”, in Tony Harrison, Selected Poems, Penguin, 2nd edn 1987, 112.

2. The title draws on the name for the inhabitants of Leeds, on lions, loin, loners, and loneliness.

3. His intriguing play The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus （based on a Sophoclean fragment）, which he directed himself, opened at the National Theatre in March 1990.

4. In 1984 Harrison wrote a children's Christmas play for the BBC, The Big H, published in his Theatre Works 1973-1985, Penguin, 1985; in 1987 he wrote and narrated Loving Memory, a BBC series on death and burial customs in which he repeatedly quoted Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. It is difficult exactly to describe Harrison's role in the performance of the unique works that he has created for television （for further titles, see n.6）, in which he is presenter, narrator and actor. If the term were not too whimsical, he should be considered the first television laureate or bard.

5. For a year Tony Harrison was co-editor of Jon Silkin's very important literary magazine Stand. After his time as a lecturer at the University of Prague, he produced a Czechoslovakian issue of Stand （X/2）. His powerful poem The Nuptial Torches, a monologue by Queen Isabella on the Inquisition, was chosen by Jon Silkin for his anthology Poetry of the Committed Individual, London, 1973.

6. In his controversial BBC broadcast The Blasphemers’ Banquet （1989）, Harrison gathers such absent friends as Voltaire, Byron and Omar Khayyam to ruminate on the Rushdie affair, religion and art. The text was published in a resourceful collection of reviews and critical essays on his works: Neil Astley, ed., Tony Harrison, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1991, 395-406. Harrison has produced two further “verse-documentaries” for BBC TV: The Gaze of the Gorgon （“a verse commentary on the unspeakable horrors of the 20th century”） and Black Daisies for the Bride （“a tribute to sufferers of Alzheimer's disease”）—the descriptions of the programmes are quoted from The Radio Times for the day of the transmissions, respectively 3 October 1992 and 30 June 1993.

7. See, for instance, his sequence of Meredithian 16-line-sonnets, The School of Eloquence, particularly poems such as “Background Material“, “Lines to my Grandfather”, “Bringing Up“, “Book Ends”. In his poem “Self Justification” he talks about his family, especially his uncle with a stammer, and his “lads”: “Their aggro towards me, my need of them's / what keeps my would-be mobile tongue still tied—” （Selected Poems, 172）.

8. Tony Harrison in an interview with John Haffenden （1983）: see Astley, 246.

9. All quotations in this essay are taken from Tony Harrison, v., Newcastle upon Tyne, 1989. This is Bloodaxe's second edition including photographs by Graham Sykes, and valuable press articles, letters, reviews. The poem first appeared in the London Review of Books; and was reprinted by The Independent. The film version won the Royal Television Society's Best Original Programme Award. All in all, the poem has reached several million “common readers”.

10. Nonetheless the fundamental distinction between the writer of a literary work and the fictional figure within the text has to be maintained. The lyrical “I” is always a mediated construct functioning on the page. Therefore the expressions “speaker” and “protagonist” are used although the writer of the text may be clearly visible.

11. Gray's poem, first published in 1751, had been anticipated by Young's Night Thoughts （1742-1746）, Blair's The Grave （1743） and James Hervey's Meditations among the Tombs （1746）, although there always has been much dispute about its date of composition: see The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale, London, 1969, 103-109.

12. The classic elegiac metre and rhyme scheme can be traced back to Dryden's urban long poem Annus Mirabilis （1667）. Its “heroic stanza” has a “fine laconic gravity”, a “leisurely authority” which its noble “cumulative” pentameter supports: see Hugh Kenner, A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers, New York, 1988, 187.

13. Additionally, Bloodaxe's second edition has five stanzas printed on each page.

14. John Kerrigan, “Knowing the Dead …”, Essays in Criticism, XXXVII/1 （January 1987）, 11.

15. Italics are used by Harrison for the skinhead's dialogue.

16. John Kerrigan even interprets “the spectral skinhead” as a death figure: “At first a villainous interlocutor, familiar from Graveyard Poems like Young's Night Thoughts, this yob becomes the poet's alter ego.” After the speaker recognized his name written on the parental tombstone “the ghostly vandal, his hair cropped back to the lines of a skull, begins to recall that grinning figure with scythe and spraycan encountered in churchyard ballads” （Kerrigan, 12 ff.）.

17. Kerrigan, 13.

18. Ibid.

19. Harrison previously used this locution （“dead daffodils”） in his elegy, “Loving Memory” （Selected Poems, 185）.

20. Cf., for instance, Philip Larkin's poems “Sunny Prestatyn“, “High Windows”, “Vers de Société” with their poignant explicitness, and their lack of political force.

21. Cf. for example ll. 173 ff., ll. 297 ff., ll. 433 ff. with Wordsworth's “diurnal courses”.

22. Astley, 349.

23. As the film version shows, the poem's rhythmical and linguistic potential becomes more apparent in performance. Reading it aloud to a pub audience Harrison succeeds in making its traditional metre and rhymes surprisingly flexible.

24. This can be seen as an obvious allusion to Wagner's Lohengrin, III, i, set in the bridal chamber, where the bridal procession and chorus sing “Treulich geführt, ziehet dahin …”, and “Faithfully guided”, Elsa and Lohengrin, escorted by the King, “draw near” to experience “Love's blessing” and “highest bliss”.

25. Geoffrey Harvey, The Romantic Tradition in Modern English Poetry, London, 1986, 5.

26. For example, Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, Basil Bunting's Briggflatts, and Jon Silkin's American Cemetery Poems, all of which can be considered to be elegiac, basically autobiographical long poems which rely on a common native past revisited, modernist achievements and international influences.

27. Harvey, 7.