THE STATE OF POETRY
Outside the whistled gang-call,
Twelfth Street Rag,
then a Tarzan yodel for the kid who's bored,
whose hand's on his liana . .. no ,back
to Labienus and his flaming sword.
Off lalken; then to tfish oil
all the boys
offtartin ', off to t]licks
but on, on , on,
the foldaway card table, the green baize ,
De Bello Gallico
and lexicon.
It's only his jaw muscles that he's tensed
into an enraged
shit
that he can't go;
down with polysyllables, he's against
all pale-face Caesars,
for
Geronimo .
He shoves the frosted attic skylight, shouts:
Ah bloody can't ah've gorra Latin prose.
His bodiless head that's poking out's
like patriarchal Cissy-bleeding - ro's.
-"Me Tarzan"
487
In the deeply affecting sequence that follows this chronicle of an
ill-sorted youth, Harrison narrates the deaths of both his parents.
First, the mother dies, leaving father and son together in an empty
house and bringing on long-deferred kinds of reckoning. Then the
father is gone, too, and the son is forced to search out what belongs
to him, both in his vanishing heritage of class and in his only par–
tially conquered "higher" world of school and literature. Here, too,
Harrison thrusts the spoken idiom up against the standardized,
eliciting humor as well as pathos, holding both in check with rhyme
and meter:
Last meal together , Leeds, the Queen's Hotel,
That grandish pile of swank in City Square.
Too posh for mel
he said (though he dressed well)
If
you weren't wi'me now ah'd nivver dare'
I knew that he'd decided that he'd die
not by the way he lingered in the bar,
nor by the look he'd give with one good eye ,
nor the firmer handshake and the gruff
ta-ra,
but when we browsed the station bookstall sales
he picked up
Poems from the Yorkshire Dales-
