Tony Harrison - The Icing Hand
Wednesday, March 23. 2011
That they lasted only till the next high tide
bothered me, not him whose labour was to make
sugar lattices demolished when the bride,
with help from her groom's hot hand, first cut the cake.
His icing hand, gritty with sandy grains, guides
my pen when I try shaping memories of him
and his eyes scan with mine the rising tides
neither father nor his son could hope to swim.
His eyes stayed dry while I, the kid, would weep
to watch the castle that had taken us all day
to build and deck decay, one wave-surge sweep
our winkle-stuccoed edifice away.
Remembrance like ice cake crumbs in the throat,
remembrance like wind-blown Blackpool brine
overfills the poem's shallow moat
and first, ebbing, salts, then, flowing, flood this line.
Some jumbled thoughts on this:
- There is rough beauty in Harrison's memories of his father, a wedding-cake decorator, and the childish conflation of this in the poet's mind of making sand castles on Blackpool beach, and the way the memories conjure the father, so his hand guides the poet's pen. In the jumbled bewilderment of grief, sand becomes cake crumbs, winkle-stuccoed (what a compound phrase that is - the twin k and cc sounds foreshadowing the grief-catch of the cake crumbs in the throat) becomes sugar lattices.
- The rhyming scheme is more apparent when seen written down, than when read out - to me the greater rhymes are those in the centre of the lines: the 'dry' and the 'I' in line 9, or the 'hand' and sandy' in line 5. In fact the vowel rhymes are like signposts, or lollipop battlements in the sand.
- And those last two lines: the intrusion of the poetic structure and creation (hinted at in the guided pen) seem somehow clumsy to me, but, then again, the last line with its sobbed single syllables is a brilliant melding of the rise of the tide and the onrush of grief.
- 'The main thing is to remember and make poems in the face of the rising tides and not fret that they will be engulfed or swept away' Tony Harrison.