Explore the poem

‘Timer’, from Harrison’s 1981 collection, The School of Eloquence, is one of a long sequence of poems that explores the poet’s relationship with his parents. It deals with the death of his mother, focusing on her wedding ring, which would not burn, and the emotions this prompts. Notice the unusual sonnet form Harrison uses. It is a sixteen-line version of the form made popular by the nineteenth-century poet George Meredith. Harrison’s brilliant handling of polysyllabic and colloquial rhymes (‘St James’s with ‘their names is’ and ‘incinerator’ with ‘together “later”’) give the sense of an ordinary man expressing his thoughts in his own authentic voice.

His father is present in the poem when Harrison talks of how his father wanted his wife’s‘eternity’ ring to go in the incinerator as a symbolic gesture of a future togetherness. Holding the burnished ring, Harrison can almost ‘feel’ the physical presence of his mother, and the poem ends with a remembered moment of gentle intimacy involving watching the sand of his mother’s egg timer. Inevitably, given the topic of the poem, the egg timer takes on a deeper, metaphorical significance within this poignant and unsentimental poem.

About Tony Harrison

Regarded by many as one of the major poets of the last fifty years, Harrison was born in Leeds in 1937 and attended the local grammar school before studying classics at Leeds University. His early poetry explored the tension between his working-class upbringing and the culture he was introduced to through education in verse that is both moving and technically accomplished in its precise control of rhythm and rhyme.

His long, ambitious poem v., written during the miners’ strike of 1984–5, was highly controversial. Inspired by the vandalizing of his parents’ grave by football hooligans, Harrison reflects on his feelings of outrage within the context of a profound meditation upon social conflict and the waste of human potential.

Harrison has translated Greek drama, written for the theatre, adapting the medieval mystery plays and directed a film of his own poem Prometheus. He is one of the most distinctive voices writing in English today.