Tony Harrison

If any of you would like to try your luck with the reading of 'National Trust', you can find it here on the poetry archive site, though I still can't get the sound to work. You can listen again to 'Them and [uz]' here if you want to, and there's also an interesting interview with Tony Harrison on The poetry channel.

If you've enjoyed looking at the Tony Harrison poems we've done in class, you might also enjoy listening to his poem 'Initial Illumination'. He is a real wordsmith, and it is enormously enlightening to hear him talking about the ways in which he composes.

A challenge--what has this picture of a cormorant got to do with Tony Harrison?

Mariana

Such a gloomy poem--but so brilliantly created that you don't realise quite how cleverly you're being manipulated until you take it apart. I hope you enjoyed looking at it, and thinking about the pictures related to it.

It does make me think about the ennui of the Victorian woman who did not have to work--protected, but also somehow stifled. How aware do you think Tennyson was of the undercurrents in his writing here?

Here's another version of Mariana by a rather less well-known pre-raphaelite painter--this one looks to me rather cheerier, and as though she does think it possible that Angelo may return... what do you think? Interesting to contrast her cheery tulips with the leaves in the version by Millais.
She reminds me slightly of someone in a dutch interior--solemn, but not enervated, as the other seems.