By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Stephen Spender (1909-95) said of Tony Harrison’s series of elegies for his parents that they were the sort of poetry he felt he’d been waiting his whole life for. ‘Timer’, which was published in Harrison’s 1981 collection The School of Eloquence, is one of the most famous of these. You can read ‘Timer’ here; in this post we’re going to offer some notes towards an analysis of Harrison’s poem.