Tony Harrison’s V

Abstract

These days, we most commonly encounter the dead in cemeteries, and our colloquies with their shades occur in the spaceless precincts of our minds and memories. Perhaps the most common such scenes involve the silent communion with departed parents, and it is likely that the narratives and rituals that make up the necromantic and katabatic traditions in Western literature derive at least in part from cults of ancestor worship that predate even the ancient pilgrimage to Tiresias’s tomb. Parents certainly play important parts in the founding texts of these traditions: Odysseus discovers his mother’s death when he sees her among the shades, and the reality of this fact is born in on him when he tries and fails to embrace her, while Anchises takes up the prophetic role for Aeneas so that national destiny and filial piety are tightly intertwined. While the poems from which Eliot draws much of the compound ghost’s speech are provoked by the poets’ visits to the graves of other poets (Mallarmé on Poe, Yeats on Swift), the more common graveside meditation surely happens in the cemeteries where our ancestors, especially our parents, are interred.