Overview

The poem explores how Harrison’s father coped with grief after his wife’s death by pretending she was still alive. The speaker initially rejects this denial, but later admits he does something similar after his father’s death.

Main themes

The main themes are grief and mourning, love that continues after death, parent-child relationships, and the tension between memory and denial.

Tone and voice

The tone is honest, conversational, and emotional. Harrison speaks in the first person, sharing personal memories and feelings with directness and clarity.

Context

Harrison came from a working-class background and often felt distanced from his family by his formal education. This tension helped shape his accessible style, using simple, everyday language to make poetry feel close to ordinary life.

Form and structure

The poem is a Meredithian sonnet of 16 lines, arranged in four quatrains. A clear volta occurs in the final stanza, shifting the focus from the father’s rituals to the son’s private admissions. The rhyme scheme also changes in the last stanza to signal the poet’s emotional shift and new understanding.

Poetic devices to spot

• Imagery – domestic details like “slippers” and “hot water bottles” suggest warmth, care and continuing love.
• Enjambment – sustains the flow of the father’s fantasy and the speaker’s unfolding realisation.
• Caesura – pauses highlight awkwardness, hesitation and emotional pressure.
• Metaphor – “Blight of disbelief” shows how fragile the father’s comforting illusion is.
• Repetition – everyday phrases and patterns make the voice feel personal and real.
• Colloquial language – creates an intimate, conversational tone that fits family life.

by Tony Harrison

A link to this poem is available in the CCEA Poetry Anthology which can be downloaded from the CCEA website.

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An examination of how the poet’s father dealt with his grief after his wife’s death by secretly pretending to himself that she was still alive; the poet fails to fully understand or sympathise with this until he notes in the final stanza that he himself now exhibits similar behaviour of denial since the death of his father. Written in 1984.

• Title: “Long distance” evokes a phone call from far away but could also be a metaphor for the disconnect the poet may feel from his father; the “Ⅱ” (2) denotes that this is the second of two poems about his father and their difficult relationship.
• Themes: Parent-child relationships, love, death, loss, grief/mourning, remembrance.
• Tone: Conversational, straightforward, candid, anecdotal.
• Speaker: First person perspective; the poet himself speaking on the very personal issue of his relationship with his father.

• Harrison came from a working class background in northern England and got a scholarship to study Classics at university. He found the subject exciting, but it felt quite different from his everyday life and background, which made it hard to connect his studies with his family and upbringing. That disconnect may contribute to the lack of understanding evident between the poet and his father in this poem.
• Harrison came to feel that his formal education had alienated him from his working class background and family. This led him to change his writing style. He became passionate about writing in a more accessible way that his parents and those like them could understand, preferring commonplace and approachable language like that in this poem.
• Harrison noted he had a strained relationship with his father in particular, but after both parents’ deaths, he began to re-examine and re-evaluate his feelings and to incorporate this into his writing. This led to a greater feeling of closeness with them.

Only a little context is needed for each poem; where used, it should be applied to the point you're making.

• Long Distance II is a Meredithian sonnet, a particular form originated by the poet George Meredith and comprising 16 lines rather than 14. These take the form of four quatrain (four-line stanzas); the first three are concerned with the father’s past behaviour, while the last focuses on the son’s current actions. A volta occurs between the third and fourth stanza, as the focus shifts from father to son, from past to present and from discussing the father to addressing him directly.
• The poetic metre used varies slightly throughout. It is mostly based around iambic pentameter but has a little variation from this strict rhythm in places; these imperfections may reflect the father’s difficulty in maintaining the façade of his wife still being alive, as well as supporting the candid tone of the poem overall.
• While the metre varies in places, the rhyme scheme does not – the poem follows a set rhyme scheme of alternating lines in the first three stanzas, giving it a kind of reassuring predictability. This is slightly shifted in the last stanza, when the rhyme subtly changes from A B A B rhymes to an A B B A structure. This small change helps to mirror the fact that in this final stanza, the poet himself has changed; Harrison has come to understand his father’s earlier behaviour better, because he is now displaying similar traits even though he knows.

• Imagery of warmth and domesticity: The world that the father tries to maintain – a world in which his wife is still alive – is notable for its imagery of warmth: “slippers warming by the gas” and “hot water bottles”. The implication is that these caring actions he performs are signs of his love, and love is clearly associated with comfortable heat; grief, by contrast, is cold as well as lonely, and is something he actively resists.
  
  There is imagery of domesticity too – the actions the poet describes take place among normal, everyday things like “slippers”, their “bed”, her “key” – the prosaic and simple items of home life, showing how important these ordinary things can be to someone.

• Enjambment: In the second stanza, enjambment is used across lines two-four, with the actions carrying on in the next line. This evokes a sense of the father rushing to put away all of his dead wife’s things, as though it was shameful to still have them around. In the third stanza, enjambment is used again in describing the father’s belief that he might soon hear his wife come in.
  
  The flow of the first three lines carries us along on the father’s fantasy of normal life continuing, showing this idea to be significant for him and not something he can easily contain or let go of. The enjambment here offsets the finality and irony of the last end-stopped line of that stanza: “He knew she’d just popped out to get the tea.” This final, simple statement represents the father’s ultimate belief, and one he will not abandon even though he knows she has been dead for two years.

• Caesura: There is a slight tone of impatience, or perhaps weariness, in the way the poet recounts the situation in the first line of the second stanza: “You couldn’t just drop in. You had to phone.” Caesura is used, with the full stops indicating pauses after each statement the poet makes. As though he is showing some irritation about the pretence his father makes him go through each time he wants to visit. The caesura stilts the line and emphasises the awkwardness of having to wait before calling in, representing the way the father ‘stalls’ the son to give himself time. He knows she is dead but refuses to accept this, and works hard to maintain the idea that she is still with him.
  
  His carefully constructed fantasy is one he wants to cling to, and he actively avoids any situation in which he might be confronted by the reality of his loss. Harrison writes, “He couldn’t risk my blight of disbelief” – the “blight” is a metaphor for disease, as though the son’s disbelief in the fantasy would sicken and ruin it. The metaphorical idea of this fantasy being “such a crime” shows a slight sense of shame on the father’s part – he may recognise that what he’s doing isn’t healthy, but he doesn’t want to change it when it gives him comfort.

• Repetition: The poet’s use of anaphora in stanza two – “You couldn’t just drop in. You had to phone.” – repeats the word “you”, emphasising that no one is allowed to call without phoning first, and giving a sense of how strictly the father maintains this boundary to protect his fantasy of denial.

This is not a list of every method or notable use of language and structure in Long Distance Ⅱ.

Look at the poem again. Can you find any of the following?

If you have found these methods, consider what you know about the poem and the poet already.

What effects do these methods create? Why has he used them?

• Remember – a poem in which the speaker considers whether she would rather her loved one inconsolably mourn her passing after her death, or move on with life and be happy.

• On My First Son(ne) – another poem centred around a father-son relationship (though from the father’s perspective as poet, unlike Harrison) and expressing the poet’s grief for a loved one’s passing.

• Funeral Blues– a poem capturing a sense of the profundity and hugeness of grief at losing a loved one.

Use these questions to hone your knowledge of Long Distance II, and to practise using your notes and analysis in organised paragraphs that focus on how particular themes or ideas are shown in the poem.

There is an example answer in the following section to demonstrate how you can do this.

• How does Harrison show the sense that love persists after death in Long Distance II?
• What does Long Distance II show us about Harrison’s attitude to his relationship with his father?
• What poetic methods does Harrison use to show his feelings about death in Long Distance II?
• How does Harrison show his changed feelings in Long Distance II?

Below is a demonstration of how to use the material in this section to answer an example essay question. The answer below is not a full essay, but only an extract of a longer answer showing some of the points that could be made.

Q: How does Harrison show the sense that love persists after death in Long Distance II?

A: Harrison anecdotally relates some of his father’s past actions in the first three stanzas of his Meredithian sonnetLong Distance II to paint a picture of how his father behaved as though his wife was still alive after her death. The poet uses imagery of warmth such as “slippers warming by the gas” and “hot water bottles” to describe the father’s ongoing acts of care performed for his absent wife, associating warmth with love and showing that the father’s love for her persists even though she is gone. The idea of warmth and comfort makes the love seem more real, and sets it in opposition to the cold loneliness of grief. Domestic imagery is also used, with references to ordinary objects such as her “key”, their “bed” and her “slippers” showing the simple items of their home life propping up his fantasy; these everyday items suggest that he misses her every day and that his love for her is based in the reality of their ordinary life together despite her no longer being there.

The poet uses caesura and anaphora in the second stanza, dividing the first line with full stops to create short, direct statements, and repeating the word “you”. The caesura makes the first line stilted, mirroring the obstacles the father has put in the way of casual visitors and reinforcing the sense of having to wait before a visit.

The repetition of the word “you”, meaning everyone in general, emphasise the sense that no one was allowed to “drop in” to the father’s carefully constructed fantasy and ruin it. He had to have time to put the wife’s things away and pretend he didn’t have them sitting out. The idea the father went through this charade with everyone, every time he had a potential visitor, shows how deeply invested he was in maintaining the fantasy of his wife being alive, and shows how his love for her persists. In this stanza, Harrison describes that love with the visceral and powerful adjective “still raw”. Evoking the sense that it is an open wound that has not healed up even two years after her death – even though it pains him, he still continues to love and miss her. This is clearly a love that persists after death.

This essay could go on to make the following points, backed up by evidence from the poem and detailed analysis of that evidence:

• The poet uses a metaphor to suggest that failure to believe in the father’s denial of her death would poison it, showing how hard he works to avoid anything that would ruin the world he has created to show his love after her death.

• The last stanza of the poem uses apostrophe and a shift in tense as well as a subtle shift in the rhyme scheme, as the poet reveals that he now shows similar irrational behaviour to that of his father even though he knows it makes no sense, suggesting his love also persists after death.