Tony Harrison free essay sample

The second paragraph envisions Harrison’s recalling to the northern accent he used to speak, coinciding with the recovery of his identity. The poem opens with a comparison of Harrison with Demosthenes (ll. 1-2). It is necessary to know the following facts about the greatest of the Greek orators, to understand the allegory: Demosthenes suffered from a speech impediment in his youth which earned him the disrespect and mockery of his vicinity. Nobody ever believed that he would be able to compose and recite stirring speeches. Only through sheer willpower, Demosthenes endured the contempt of his environment until he finally succeeded and gained acknowledgement. The irregular rhythm of the first stanza illustrates the stuttering of the Greek orator. In addition to that, the frequent use of plosive and hissing sounds like in â€Å"stutterer† or in â€Å"outshouting seas† develops aggressive tension. Harrison continues to enhance piquant passages by using onomatopoeia throughout the entire poem. We will write a custom essay sample on Tony Harrison or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page But back to Demosthenes: Within the following stanzas, the recipient discerns that Harrison also saw himself confronted with the condescension of his vicinity. In the second stanza, the focus shifts on the author himself declaiming a passage out of Shakespeare’s Mac Beth (ll. 3-5). After a few words he is interrupted harshly. He is told that, due to his northern accent, he is unworthy to play an important role in the drama. The producer insists that the only language worth reciting poetry is RP. Harrison is told that his unconventional pronunciation is a plague for the â€Å"cultural heritage† (l. 5). He is defamed as T. W. , the barbarian who is at most allowed to play the drunken porter, a role written in prose. In the Elizabethan Age prose was employed as the language of the common and uncultivated people. Within the plays of Shakespeare or other Elizabethan playwrights, prose characters merely functioned as comic elements. In the present, the RP-speaking class still conserves this convention at their advantage by determining Received Pronunciation as the speech of the educated class and therefore the only speech worth declaiming poetry. Conclusively, a man with a northern accent like Anthony Harrison is predetermined to play the drunken porter albeit he may have the actuarial talent to play Duncan. Harrison has to realise, that his â€Å"speech is in the hand of the Receivers† (l. 12). The ambiguity of the word ‘Receivers’ caricatures the process of dubbing poetry into RP. On the one hand, ‘Receivers’ naturally refers to the RP-speaking people. On the other hand, Receivers may also refer to those officials that wind up a company that ceased trading. The allegory becomes evident: As the officials wind up a company, the Receivers wind up poetry. Harrison is impotent against this rigid convention or as it is euphemistically named this â€Å"cultural heritage† (l. ) and adopts RP to increase his chances for an actuarial career. It is striking that Harrison employs an interesting technique to depict the sound of his accent by codifying it just as faithfully as possible, for instance in line three where he recites: â€Å"mi ‘art aches†. As a result, the recipient is able to imagine remarkably exactly how Harrison’s pronuncia tion sounds. One nearly hears his voice in one’s head. In addition, two stereotypes of the northern accent are revealed: the elision of ‘h’ and the pronunciation of ‘y’ rather as ‘i’. Moreover, a leitmotif in the poem is the different pronunciation of the ‘u’ in ‘us’. The R. P. -speaking population rather pronounces it [a], whereas the people living north of the river Humber pronounce it [u]. It is no chance that Harrison epitomises this difference by the word ‘us’. [uz] encloses all the people speaking Harrison’s accent. In the moment, Harrison doffs his flat ‘a’ and pronounces us as [as] (ll. 13), he is no longer himself but rather one of ‘them’ â€Å"them and us†, as it is said in the title. The trap is shut (l. 13). The word ‘trap’ is also ambivalent. On the one hand ‘trap’ is a vulgarism for ‘mouth’. In this respect, trap means that Harrison ceases to speak his accent which the RP-speaking vicinity considers to be vulgar. On the other hand, he is also caught in the trap of prejudiced conventions which force him to deny his identity against his will to reach the position he strives for. Again, Harrison’s indignation is nearly audible through the accumulation of hissing and plosive sounds. Words like ‘stuffed’, ‘glottals’, ‘lumps’ ,‘ hawk’ or ‘spit’ (ll. 15/16) load up the passage with striking aggression. Finally, the exaggerated way of spelling the word â€Å"enunciate† as â€Å"e-nun-ciate† (l. 16) connotes it with a rather schoolmasterly aura. The reader may envision a teacher or possibly a parent with a raised index-finger forcing a child to ‘e-nun-ciate’. Obviously, Harrison is no more a child but an adult man, well able to decide individually on the form of expressing himself. Therefore, Harrison illustrates the process of returning to his language roots within the second part of the poem. Certain strands are reversed, indicating the turning point. For instance, Harrison who was defamed as a barbarian in the first part now himself devalues the RP-speaking people as ‘buggers’ (l. 17) and their dubbed poetry as ‘leasehold Poetry’ (l. 18). It is obvious that employs the word ‘leasehold’ to display that the ‘Receivers’ merely have an art at their disposal that does not belong to them. Moreover, he treats the pronunciation with the same contemptuous irony that his accent was treated before by spelling the word literature as it would sound in RP: Litterchewer (l. 19), a word reminding of a dustbin. It is also conspicuous that the words ‘Poetry’ and ‘Litterchewer’ are linked, as they are both capitalised. Farther, Harrison spits the bones of Litterchewer â€Å"into the lap of dozing Daniel Jones† (ll. 19-20). This metaphor might indicate two things: Firstly, the alliteration ‘dozing Daniel’ might enfold that the importance of the slight difference of the cardinal vowels is as dead and buried as their discoverer. Secondly Harrison’s rude language discloses how much he detests Jones’ achievement, since with the discovery of the cardinal vowels the theoretical division of accents began. It is prominent that Harrison more and more rediscovers his identity. He drops the unemotional and impersonal initials T. W. he had been â€Å"harried as† (l. 21) and uses his own name and voice again (l. 22). The triple repetition of [ z] strengthens his returning self-assurance. Finally, the face to face position of the abbreviations RP and his initials T. W. wholly reveals the close semantic connection between personality and speech. Consequently, Harrison ceases with both of them simultaneously: his false identity perforates within the moment he stops speaking the false accent which is not him. He is Tony Harrison again, no longer one of them (l. 23). Fitting to that, the rhyme scheme alters as well in this stanza. Throughout the entire first part of the poem, Harrison continuously used pair rhymes. Within the fifth stanza he mixes real pair rhymes with mere eye-rhymes and while emphasising that he uses his own voice again, the lines do not rhyme at all (ll. 21/22). This coincidence obviously enhances that Harrison has completely ‘doffed’ the high-flown style which he had formerly adopted. Harrison even uses his natural language explicitly by saying: ‘yer buggers’ (l. 17). On top of that, he cements his argumentation by referring to Wordsworth’s eye-rhymes (ll. 26/27). He postulates that once one fully acknowledges those rhymes that only rhyme on the paper one also has to accept the use of accents as a rhetorical means which dyes a passage in a new colour. At the end of the poem, Harrison illustrates how his first mention in the Times let him gain official acceptance. , as the nickname ‘Tony’ which rather implies a rebellious child whose obscenities may be tolerated but by no means respected transforms into ‘Anthony’ the name of a fully acknowledged adult.