From

Long
Distance
From Long Distance
Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.
From Long Distance
You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime
From Long Distance
He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.
From Long Distance
I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same, in
my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.
 Meaning Of The Poem
Long Distance by Tony Harrison is a poem about the
grief associated with losing a loved one. In the poem, Tony
Harrison describes his father's emotional reaction to
death by holding onto the memories of his beloved wife.
Harrison links his struggle to accept his parents' deaths to
his father as the poem ironically comes to a looping finale.
 Meaning
In the opening line of the first stanza, Harrison
delves right into the subject of death. He refers
to his mother directly as dead without using any
euphemisms.
In particular, the persona's mother died, and
even after "two years," her father continued to
act as though she was still alive and well- he
continued to warm her slippers by the fire, place
hot water bottles in her bed, and renew her
transport pass.
 Meaning
This creates the impression that his father was in denial, as if
he would not accept that his wife was gone. He behaved as
though she were only going to walk back to the life she had left.
The void his wife left was deep and frigid, and he needed relief
by any means.
Literary Devices
Enjambment:
This is a poetic term for the continuation of a
sentence or phrase from one line of poetry to the
next. It typically lacks punctuation at its line break,
so the reading is carried out smoothly.
 Examples in the
text
Enjambment as seen in the text
In the second stanza of the poem, the writer
uses enjambment to make the poem feel
slow and deliberate appropriate to the mood
of mourning.
Literary Devices
Metaphor: The poet uses the metaphor “His still raw
love was such a crime” in the fourth line of the second
stanza to illustrate the love between the poet’s father
and his wife. This showed a shared comprehension of
the grief, meaning that only the father and child truly
grasped the pain of the mother’s passing.
 Structure
The poem is classified as an elegy, which is a
poem of lament or death and expresses sorrow to
mourn someone.
It can also be classified as an extended sonnet.
It is of 16 lines and is split into four quatrains that
follow an ABAB rhyme scheme.
The structured stanzas and rhyme scheme make
the poem inviting, useful and easy to read.
 Conclusion
Grief handled in a nonsensical or unorthodox
way is not atypical. Instead, grief is a response
to something that is hardly intelligible, and it is
normal and acceptable to deal with it in illogical
ways.