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Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
@stevewhitaker1.bsky.social
1:01 AM 28th January 2025
arts

Poem Of The Week: 'Illuminations II' By Tony Harrison

Illuminations II

We built and bombed Boche stalags on the sands,
or hunted for beached starfish on the rocks
and some days ended up all holding hands
gripping the pier machine that gave you shocks.
The current would connect. We’d feel the buzz
ravel our loosening ties to one tense grip,
the family circle, one continuous US!
That was the first year on my scholarship
and I’d be the one who’d make that circuit short.
I lectured them on neutrons and Ohm’s Law
and other half-baked Physics I’d been taught.
I’m sure my father felt I was a bore!

Two dead, but current still flows through us three
though the circle takes for ever to complete -
eternity, annihilation, me,
that small bright charge of life where they both meet.


Taken from a, now seminal, sequence of poems known collectively as the School of Eloquence, Tony Harrison’s formal Meredithian sonnet (a sonnet of sixteen lines) is an elegy for family set in post-war Blackpool. The poet’s reflective backward-glance, rendered in the kind of accessible language his parents might best understand, is conceived without artifice, that is, beyond the framework of formal considerations – iambic rhythm, rhyme, alliterative flourishes that imitate the blunt unforgiving nature of war.

Finding the perfect metaphor for the ‘charged’ warmth of the family circle, the sense of collective purpose it denotes, and the love that binds the small group, Harrison invests the electric shock machine on the pier with a power that transcends the light-hearted and kitschy comedy of its holiday effect. Sustaining the metaphor throughout the poem, the poet embarks on a journey of reconciliation: implicit within his words is the suggestion of cultural deracination - from poet as working class child, to his incarnation as scholarship boy and later, middle class poet; short-circuiting the close-knit group, the ‘one continuous US!’ of family cohesion is undermined as the son processes between classes.

But not sundered. Harrison’s final quatrain affirms the presence of a ‘current’, the feint hint of a connection, sustaining in the evidence of the poem, and in the figure of the son and poet, whose ‘small bright charge of life’ pulses unto annihilation.



‘Illuminations II’ is taken from Continuous: 50 Sonnets from the School of Eloquence, published by Rex Collings (1981)