Critical Commentary of "Book Ends" by Tony Harrison
Book Ends by Tony Harrison – Critical Commentary
Book Ends by Tony Harrison is a poem about the death of the writer’s mother, and the effect this has on the complicated relationship between father and son, who are unable to relate to each other or communicate emotionally. The tone of the poem is melancholic, reflecting on the theme of death and the breakup of family, with a bitter edge in the description of the unbridgeable rift between father and son which widens following the mother’s death.
The poem is separated into two parts, each with sixteen lines, and is loosely based on an iambic pentameter metre. The rhyme scheme is ABAB throughout the poem, with the noticeable exception of the last four lines of part II, in which it changes to ABBA, reflecting a time shift in the poem’s narration. The first ten lines are made up of couplets, but the general structure is flexible and there is no strict format or line grouping to the poem – this is perhaps representative of the emotions and disjointed thought processes felt by the writer following his mother’s death. The two parts of the poem take place at different points in time. Narrated by the son from a first person perspective, part I describes his and his father’s reactions immediately after the death of the mother and introduces their problematic relationship. The first line is a sudden and mildly unsettling beginning to the poem, and juxtaposes the homely, familiar image of a homemade apple with the stark reality of death in a reminder that devastation can strike at even the most ordinary of moments. The father and son slowly chew over both the pie and the actuality of the mother’s death as they begin to come to terms with their loss. The father, ‘shocked into sleeplessness’, seems to feel the absence of his wife most profoundly, and his son accuses him of being ‘scared of bed’ and unable to face his loneliness. He reflects that the two of them have always had difficulty communicating, but now in the time when
Book Ends by Tony Harrison is a poem about the death of the writer’s mother, and the effect this has on the complicated relationship between father and son, who are unable to relate to each other or communicate emotionally. The tone of the poem is melancholic, reflecting on the theme of death and the breakup of family, with a bitter edge in the description of the unbridgeable rift between father and son which widens following the mother’s death.
The poem is separated into two parts, each with sixteen lines, and is loosely based on an iambic pentameter metre. The rhyme scheme is ABAB throughout the poem, with the noticeable exception of the last four lines of part II, in which it changes to ABBA, reflecting a time shift in the poem’s narration. The first ten lines are made up of couplets, but the general structure is flexible and there is no strict format or line grouping to the poem – this is perhaps representative of the emotions and disjointed thought processes felt by the writer following his mother’s death. The two parts of the poem take place at different points in time. Narrated by the son from a first person perspective, part I describes his and his father’s reactions immediately after the death of the mother and introduces their problematic relationship. The first line is a sudden and mildly unsettling beginning to the poem, and juxtaposes the homely, familiar image of a homemade apple with the stark reality of death in a reminder that devastation can strike at even the most ordinary of moments. The father and son slowly chew over both the pie and the actuality of the mother’s death as they begin to come to terms with their loss. The father, ‘shocked into sleeplessness’, seems to feel the absence of his wife most profoundly, and his son accuses him of being ‘scared of bed’ and unable to face his loneliness. He reflects that the two of them have always had difficulty communicating, but now in the time when