On Theme and Form

Margaret O’Brien places Tony Harrison’s ‘Study’ (From ‘The School of Eloquence’ and Other Poems, London: Rex Collings, 1978) under the microscope to examine the relation between theme and form in poetry.

While the very category of literature or poetry can seem overly elevated or exclusive, Leeds-born Tony Harrison’s poetic collection The School of Eloquence approaches poetry from a working-class perspective. Although technically a sonnet, Harrison’s poem ‘Study’ takes an atypical form, consisting of sixteen, rather than fourteen, lines and broken up irregularly as opposed to the Shakespearean (three quatrains and a rhyming couplet) or Petrarchan (one octet and one sestet) forms. The poem remembers the deaths of two of Harrison’s family members within the study and explores how they inform his relationship with the room. Through its manipulation of conventional form and its use of poetic devices, Tony Harrison’s ‘Study’ explores the relationship between painful experiences and specific locale, painting a deeply personal portrait of grief, confusion, and innocence.

            Harrison begins the poem with a deceptively cheerful line, before moving into darker subject matter. The anaphora in the first line, ‘Best clock. Best carpet. Best three chairs’ (1), seems to establish a positive mood, despite the caesuras creating a jarring rhythm. However, the next lines switch to a more sombre tone, explaining that these objects are ‘best’ for ‘deaths’, ‘Christmases’, ‘a houseless aunt’ and the ‘old’ and ‘sick’ who cannot ‘manage stairs’ (2-3). The enjambment present in these lines also lends an open-endedness to it, as if the speaker is not reflecting on the events that happened in this room so much as attempting to process them. In choosing to begin this way, he introduces the complex emotions he has attached to the study. The final line of the quatrain, where the speaker ‘tries’ and fails to ‘whistle’ in the study evokes an image tinged with sadness (4). This signals the gravity of the space, as he cannot make something as light as music in it.

            Retelling the first of two tragic experiences occurring within the study, Harrison uses sound and rhythm devices to establish an air of death and pitiful misfortune around the death of Uncle Joe. The whole quatrain only consists of two sentences, with one short and to the point and the other drawn out. The caesura after the first sentence, ‘Uncle Joe came here to die’ (5), creates a jarring stop, mirroring the abrupt loss of life. It also contrasts the next sentence, where he describes Joe’s ‘gaping jaws/ once plugged into the power of his stammer’ now hanging open helplessly, the words gone (Study’, lines 5-8). He uses enjambments and alliterative ‘p’ sounds in ‘patterned the stuck plosive without pause’ (7) to mimic Uncle Joe’s own speech pattern, sonically demonstrating the way that Uncle Joe’s typical stammer turned into gasping for air, and eventually death. Harrison repeats this sound technique in the final line, comparing this ‘stuck plosive’ to ‘a d-d-damascener’s hammer’ (8). This account of Uncle Joe’s death confers a dark, haunted atmosphere to the study itself, as it constitutes the scene where the terrible thing occurred. By tying these two things together, Harrison creates an inextricable link between the setting and the tragedy.

The description of the second tragic event in the third quatrain utilizes disturbing imagery, figurative language, and sound devices to further establish the emotional gravity of the room. Introducing his own Leeds dialect with ‘Mi aunty’s baby still’ (9), Harrison’s colloquial and choppy sentences suggest that he struggles to process this image, needing to separate the memory into digestible chunks to process it. He suggests that the ‘dumbstruck’ aunt had not planned to give birth here, and certainly not to a stillborn child (9). He describes the ‘mirror’ that ‘held to’ the deceased child as ‘tortoise-shell-like-celluloid’ (10). The concept of a newborn baby’s innocence contrasts the graphic, if not explicit, imagery of its body and the way they subsequently ‘passed’ it around (10-11). It also underscores the innocence in the speaker’s tone, despite the grief; there exists something almost childlike in the way that the speaker reflects, due to the blunt way he speaks. The final line of the quatrain alliterates a ‘b’ sound, describing its lack of ‘babble’, ‘blubber’ and ‘breath’ (12). This sound device highlights the tragedy by mimicking a baby. Harrison returns to the image of the mirror, saying ‘The glass won’t cloud’ (12), producing a twofold effect: in one sense, the ‘glass’ of the mirror not clouding reflects the baby’s inability to get oxygen through the ‘celluloid’ of the placenta, leading to suffocation and death; in another sense, the metaphor of the mirror creates dissociation between the difficult subject-matter and the words, demonstrating lingering pain. Harrison’s choice to end on an imperfect rhyme additionally signals the event’s non-congruence with the family’s expectations, intensifying the tragedy and the confusion caused by it.

The final quatrain closes the poem with an unsettling lack of resolution, emphasizing that the feelings Harrison associates with the study continue to provoke thought, confusion, and grief within him. He paints a picture of a deserted, completely silent place: ‘The best clock’s only wound for layings out/ so the stillness isn’t tapped at by its ticks’ (13-14). The deathlike stillness of the room is only disrupted when it must be shown to others, indicating a solemn reverence the space seems to demand. The ticking sound created by the consonance of the ‘t’, paired with the image of death indicates the finite time humans have on earth and the looming reality of death. He further develops the grim atmosphere with diction and alliteration, as the setee is ‘shapeless beneath its shroud’ (15). He again uses language associated with death to show that the study has fallen into disuse because of its painful associations, adding to its haunted aura.

The final line, ‘My mind moves upon silence and Aeneid VI’ (16) poignantly alludes to Virgil’s great epic. In Aeneid VI, Aeneas undertakes the conventional epic ‘journey to the underworld,’ which likens the study to the land of the dead, and the eventual silence that even he, a writer whose words are his legacy, cannot escape. In exploring death and grief within the study, Harrison leaves open the questions that the room provokes, effectively demonstrating the powerlessness one confronts death with and the imprint of grief a lost loved one leaves, long after he or she is gone.

Bibliography Harrison, Tony. ‘Study’. In Selected Poems. Second Edition. Penguin, 29 June 1995. Pp. 115.

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