Tony Harrison: Cheating the Void

Length / Form Film Poem

Allusion to Classical figure Muse; Memory (Mnemosyne); Pegasus (depicted on the funerary monument of a circus owner); Charon. ‘History’ is referred to as a Muse.

Allusion to Classical place Lethe; Styx (implied through references to Charon’s ferry).

Relationship to Classical text Images of Charon, Harrison’s roll-call of the famous dead buried at Père Lachaise cemetery and reference to those killed in war (in this case the Second World War) recall Vergil’s Aeneid VI.

Close translation of words/phrases/excerpts

Classical/post-Classical intertexts Nineteenth and twentieth century European attitudes to death and mourning, modes of commemoration and funerary practice. The Second World War (concentration camps, the Allied bombing of Hamburg).

Comment There is an oblique reference to Orpheus (through the death of Chopin and ‘the lyre finally unstrung’) whilst ‘Remember me, but, ah, forget my fate!’ is an extract from ‘Dido’ lament’, from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. The silent figures who emerge from a factory in the 1895 film footage, with which the piece begins, are presented as the dead, as though emerging from the Underworld. Their silence brings to mind that of other deathly, transitional figures, such as Alcestis, who is silent at the end of Euripides’ play, or the voiceless Greek heroes Aeneas witnesses on the banks of the Styx in Aeneid  VI (l.492-3). Harrison makes reference to the latter in his poem ‘Study’ (Collected Poems, p.125).