exploited and oppressed?the two uncles of 'Heredity,' for example, or a bereaved father unable to articulate his grief, or a terrified convict? exposing their predicaments with passion and indignation. Attributing to working- class speech of the north of England a 'richer engagement, a more sensual engagement, with language,' he brings that sensual vigor, wit, and immediacy of working-class Yorkshire speech into an exciting amalgam with literary English. Like Caribbean poets, Irish poets, Scottish poets, and others, he combines Standard English with nonstandard oral sounds, with the diction, syntax, and grammar of regional speech, in an unstable, sometimes explosive compound. His sixteen-line near-sonnets from the long work called The School of Eloquence, like his important long poem v., richly interweave the literary and the oral, learned allusion and raw directness, Standard English and working-class Yorkshire speech.
Heredity
How you became a -poet's a mystery! Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, foe and Harry? one was a stammerer, the other dumb.
National Trust1
Bottomless pits. There's one in Castleton,2
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
5 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,3
10 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:
I. A British association to preserve places of nat-2. In the Derby coalfields. ural beauty or buildings of architectural or histor-3. A tin mine in Cornwall. ical importance.
.
25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
15 Mes den hep tavas a-gollas y dyr
(Cornish)? 'the tongueless man gets his land took.'
1978
Book Ends
I
Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead we chew it slowly that last apple pie.
Shocked into sleeplessness you're scared of bed. We never could talk much, and now don't try.
5 You're like hook ends, the pair of you, she'd say, Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare . . .
The 'scholar' me, you, worn out on poor pay, only our silence made us seem a pair.
Not as good for staring in, blue gas, io too regular each bud, each yellow spike.1
A night you need my company to pass and she not here to tell us we're alike!
Your life's all shattered into smithereens.
Back in our silences and sullen looks, is for all the Scotch we drink, what's still between's not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.
1978
II
The stone's too full. The wording must be terse. There's scarcely room to carve the FLORENCE on it?
Come on, it's not as if we're wanting verse. It's not as if we're wanting a whole sonnet!
5 After tumblers of neat Johnny Walker (I think that both of us were on our third)
you said you'd always been a clumsy talker and couldn't find another, shorter word for 'beloved' or for 'wife' in the inscription,
io but not too clumsy that you can't still cut:
1. Flames from the gas fire common in lower-class English homes.
.
