Tony Harrison - Them & [uz]

How can the difference between the two sonnets be summarized?

In the first sonnet, Harrison is the outsider, being humiliated for his accent whilst in school, where he does not have all the knowledge he may gain later - he cannot protest this openly but through slights of speech.

In the second sonnet, he protests against the system, making jokes at the expense of those who speak RP, speaking openly how he would at home and showing off his mastery of English.

“Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!’

\
I played the Drunken Porter in Macbeth.”

An intellectual ‘superiority’ the teacher feels he has over Harrison, over accent and punctuation. A sense of classism, that accents will ruin their heritage. The porter is a comical role, who ultimately sees the worlds truths - could be suggested that Harrison too has learned the truths of the world through the mistreatment of him due to his accent.

“Received pronunciation, please believe \[As\] / your speech is in the hands of the receivers.'“

The ‘them’ of the poem make the rules of language, and Harrison believes he must obey them. The rules contrast his accent and strip him of individuality.

“‘We say \[As\] not \[uz\], T.W!’ That shut my trap.”

Demeaning and humiliation, he no longer wants to talk, though the use of slang ‘trap’ suggests perhaps he will not conform.

“my mouth all stuffed with glottals, great / big lumps to hawk up and spit out *. . . E-nun-ci-ate!”*

Final lines of the first Meredithian sonnet. ‘Glottals’ are Glottal Stops, a characteristic of lower class speech, his spitting and hawking a further sign of disrespect and defiance whilst he is urged to speak properly and enunciate, he seems both unable and unwilling to do so.

“So, right, yer buggers, then! We’ll occupy / your lousy leasehold Poetry.”

First lines of the second Meredithian sonnet. A refusal to comply is shown in this one, whereas in the first sonnet we were faced with a torn Harrison unsure of what to do.

“I chewed up Littererchewer and spat the bones / into the lap of dozing Daniel Jones.”

Daniel Jones is known as the father of phonetics, ‘Littererchewer’ is a on on the way ‘literature’ can be said, ‘spat the bones’ is an echo of earlier in the poem of Demosthenes’ “gob full of pebbles”.

“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!

Harrison challenges the authority and ‘them’, and shows his mastery of the language through wordplay. He finds his voice again and rejects the teachers imposed identity and becomes himself, fully.

“once you know / Wordsworths *matter/water* are full rhymes, / \[uz\] can be loving as well as funny.”

His home accent and identity shouldn’t just be tied up with the ideals of it being a joke accent, but people should see them as whole people.

“My first mention in the *Times* / automatically made Tony Anthony!”

His achievement is still mocked by them and he is still having his identity forcefully removed, just like ‘T.W’ in school.