Lyres, Liars, Repetition, and Prophecy

This chapter looks at the future-oriented nature of Harrison’s drive, which in this reading is always towards ‘coming’ life. Harrison looks for ‘signs’ of it in times of its ending (as at the end of ‘The Mother of the Muses’); he imagines its extinction. More than witnessing, he tells us of ‘the worst thing that our imagination can, and [he’s] afraid, must conceive’ so that we ‘face up to the Muses’ as did Hecuba, and still say ‘life’ at the last, as she does in Euripides’ play, affirming it rather than averting her gaze from it, or going silent before horror. Classical sources not only provide precedents for staging the unspeakable to be spoken about, and faced up to, but also much else besides. Although Harrison is not a backward-looking artist, culture’s receding memory of founding conflicts and violence affords his deep double-vision a new kind of believability when he hears the furies coming for us out of that past in new/old forms of self-destruction. The chapter considers the roles played by classical references in his forward-looking poetry written in response to war, violence, and escalating destruction in the age of mechanical reproduction. Fine lines between prophecy and pretence, revelation and deadening repetition as witness, make the venture one of risk-taking toward ‘righting,’ as one early Harrison poem put it. Tony Harrison’s poetics of seeing by paying attention to a number of poems are explored, especially those of his collection, The Gaze of the Gorgon.