fine but unexpected fish?
His heart beat faster when a living mouth
(the jotting said a ‘fishwife’s’) used the old
and, for him forgotten in his flit down South,
border word
yagach
to describe the cold.
Though society’s not like the OED
and the future ’s just as yagach as the day,
I celebrate beside the same bleak sea
James Murray, and a scholar’s clarion call
that set those sharp speech combers on their way:
Fling our doors wide! all, all, not one, but all!
Classics Society
(Leeds Grammar School 1552–1952)
The grace of Tullies eloquence doth excell
any Englishmans tongue … my barbarous stile …
The tongue our leaders use to cast their spell
was once denounced as ‘rude’, ‘gross’, ‘base’ and ‘vile’.
How fortunate we are who’ve come so far!
We boys can take old Hansards and translate
the British Empire into SPQR
but nothing demotic or too up-to-date,
and
not
the English that I speak at home,
not Hansard standards, and if Antoninus
spoke like delinquent Latin back in Rome
he’d probably get gamma double minus.
And so the lad who gets the alphas works
the hardest in his class at his translation
and finds good Ciceronian for Burke’s:
a dreadful schism in the British nation
.
National Trust
Bottomless pits. There’s one in Castleton,
and stout upholders of our law and order
one day thought its depth worth wagering on
and borrowed a convict hush-hush from his warder
and winched him down; and back, flayed, grey, mad, dumb.
Not even a good flogging made him holler!
O gentlemen, a better way to plumb
the depths of Britain’s dangling a scholar,
say, here at the booming shaft at Towanroath,
now National Trust, a place where they got tin,
those gentlemen who silenced the men’s oath
and killed the language that they swore it in.
The dumb go down in history and disappear
and not one gentleman’s been brought to book:
Mes den hep tavas a-gollas y dyr
(Cornish) –
‘the tongueless man gets his land took.’
Them & [uz]
for Professors Richard Hoggart & Leon Cortez
I
ααĩ, ay, ay! … stutterer Demosthenes
gob full of pebbles outshouting seas –
4 words only of
mi ’art aches
and … ‘Mine’s broken,
you barbarian, T.W.!’
He
was nicely spoken.
‘Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!’
I played the Drunken Porter in
Macbeth
.
‘Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those
Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!
All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see
’s been dubbed by [Λs] into RP,
Received Pronunciation, please believe [Λs]
your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.’
‘We say [Λs] not [uz], T.W.!’ That shut my trap.
I doffed my flat a’s (as in ‘flat cap’)
my mouth all stuffed with glottals, great
lumps to hawk up and spit out …
E-nun-ci-ate
!
II
So right, yer buggers, then! We’ll occupy
your lousy leasehold Poetry.
I chewed up Littererchewer and spat the bones
into the lap of dozing Daniel Jones,
dropped the initials I’d been harried as
and used my
name
and own voice: [uz] [uz] [uz],
ended sentences with by, with, from,
and spoke the language that I spoke at home.
RIP RP, RIP T.W.
I’m
Tony
Harrison no longer you!
You can tell the Receivers where to go
(and not aspirate it) once you know
Wordsworth’s
matter/water
are full rhymes,
[uz] can be loving as well as funny.
My first mention in the
Times
automatically made Tony Anthony!
Working
Among stooped getters, grimy, knacker-bare,
head down thrusting a 3 cwt corf
turned your crown bald, your golden hair
chafed fluffy first and then scuffed off,
chick’s back, then eggshell, that sunless white.
You strike sparks and plenty but can’t see.
You’ve been underneath too long to stand the light.
You’re lost in this sonnet for the bourgeoisie.
Patience Kershaw, bald hurryer, fourteen,
this wordshift and inwit’s a load of crap
for dumping on a slagheap, I mean
th’art nobbut summat as
His heart beat faster when a living mouth
(the jotting said a ‘fishwife’s’) used the old
and, for him forgotten in his flit down South,
border word
yagach
to describe the cold.
Though society’s not like the OED
and the future ’s just as yagach as the day,
I celebrate beside the same bleak sea
James Murray, and a scholar’s clarion call
that set those sharp speech combers on their way:
Fling our doors wide! all, all, not one, but all!
Classics Society
(Leeds Grammar School 1552–1952)
The grace of Tullies eloquence doth excell
any Englishmans tongue … my barbarous stile …
The tongue our leaders use to cast their spell
was once denounced as ‘rude’, ‘gross’, ‘base’ and ‘vile’.
How fortunate we are who’ve come so far!
We boys can take old Hansards and translate
the British Empire into SPQR
but nothing demotic or too up-to-date,
and
not
the English that I speak at home,
not Hansard standards, and if Antoninus
spoke like delinquent Latin back in Rome
he’d probably get gamma double minus.
And so the lad who gets the alphas works
the hardest in his class at his translation
and finds good Ciceronian for Burke’s:
a dreadful schism in the British nation
.
National Trust
Bottomless pits. There’s one in Castleton,
and stout upholders of our law and order
one day thought its depth worth wagering on
and borrowed a convict hush-hush from his warder
and winched him down; and back, flayed, grey, mad, dumb.
Not even a good flogging made him holler!
O gentlemen, a better way to plumb
the depths of Britain’s dangling a scholar,
say, here at the booming shaft at Towanroath,
now National Trust, a place where they got tin,
those gentlemen who silenced the men’s oath
and killed the language that they swore it in.
The dumb go down in history and disappear
and not one gentleman’s been brought to book:
Mes den hep tavas a-gollas y dyr
(Cornish) –
‘the tongueless man gets his land took.’
Them & [uz]
for Professors Richard Hoggart & Leon Cortez
I
ααĩ, ay, ay! … stutterer Demosthenes
gob full of pebbles outshouting seas –
4 words only of
mi ’art aches
and … ‘Mine’s broken,
you barbarian, T.W.!’
He
was nicely spoken.
‘Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!’
I played the Drunken Porter in
Macbeth
.
‘Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those
Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!
All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see
’s been dubbed by [Λs] into RP,
Received Pronunciation, please believe [Λs]
your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.’
‘We say [Λs] not [uz], T.W.!’ That shut my trap.
I doffed my flat a’s (as in ‘flat cap’)
my mouth all stuffed with glottals, great
lumps to hawk up and spit out …
E-nun-ci-ate
!
II
So right, yer buggers, then! We’ll occupy
your lousy leasehold Poetry.
I chewed up Littererchewer and spat the bones
into the lap of dozing Daniel Jones,
dropped the initials I’d been harried as
and used my
name
and own voice: [uz] [uz] [uz],
ended sentences with by, with, from,
and spoke the language that I spoke at home.
RIP RP, RIP T.W.
I’m
Tony
Harrison no longer you!
You can tell the Receivers where to go
(and not aspirate it) once you know
Wordsworth’s
matter/water
are full rhymes,
[uz] can be loving as well as funny.
My first mention in the
Times
automatically made Tony Anthony!
Working
Among stooped getters, grimy, knacker-bare,
head down thrusting a 3 cwt corf
turned your crown bald, your golden hair
chafed fluffy first and then scuffed off,
chick’s back, then eggshell, that sunless white.
You strike sparks and plenty but can’t see.
You’ve been underneath too long to stand the light.
You’re lost in this sonnet for the bourgeoisie.
Patience Kershaw, bald hurryer, fourteen,
this wordshift and inwit’s a load of crap
for dumping on a slagheap, I mean
th’art nobbut summat as
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