My father speaking was like conjurers I’d seen
Pulling bright silk hankies, scarves, a flag
Up out of their innards, red, blue, green,
so many colours it would make me gag.
Dads eldest brother had a shocking stammer.
Dad punctuated sentence ends with but…
Coarser stuff than silk they hauled up grammar
Knotted together deep down in their gut.
Theirs are he acts I nerve myself to follow.
I’m the clown sent in to clear the ring.
Theirs are the tongues of fire I’m forced to swallow
then bring back knotted, one continuous string
igniting long-pent silences, and going back
to Adam fumbling with Creation’s names,
and though my vocal chords get scorched and black
there’ll be a constant singing from the flames.
It is not often that the figure of a circus performer is used as a distinct symbol for class divide and alienation. Yet, Tony Harrison creates an emotionally powerful, as well as personal, account of the dialectal distance between himself and his family. Harrison, a poet, playwright, and translator, often writes through a political lens, in this case describing himself as an interpreter for his father and uncle.
From a working-class background in Leeds, Harrison attended grammar school, and then Leeds University. ‘Fire-eater’ expresses a consciousness, and perhaps embarrassment, of the difference between his own adopted Received Pronunciation, and his family’s Yorkshire dialect. His father is a ‘conjurer’, and his uncle holds a ‘shocking stammer’. The struggle to express their thoughts is tantamount to a physical effort; it is ‘hauled’, and ‘knotted’. With a marked sense of discomfort, Harrison is the ‘clown sent in to clear the ring’, forced to ‘swallow’ their ‘tongues of fire’, to regurgitate their words to give them a voice.
Crucially, this is not a poem of judgement. In fact, it is quite the opposite, as is proven by the final stanza. The poetic voice is bittersweet; he is helping his family, but at the price of being distanced from them. It is painful, leaving his vocal chords ‘scorched’, yet the Biblical reference to Adam is a reminder that human judgement should not be natural. The image of the phoenix ‘singing from the flames’ seems to symbolise the bravery of Harrison’s father and uncle in the face of judgement, also suggesting a form of resurrection and new beginning.
For Harrison, poetry is something that should be accessible to all, and I think that ‘Fire-eater’ can be read as a poem of love for his family, and a testament to the fact that there will always be some form of hope in the face of condemnation.
“Fire eater entertainer in Key West, Florida” by diana_robinson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0