Essay Questions

What can you deduce about the relationship between the speaker, the addressee, and the she? (“Book Ends”)

The speaker, the addressee, and the she encompass a nuclear household. The speaker pronounces, “you said you'd always been a clumsy talker/and couldn't find another, shorter word./for 'beloved' or for 'wife' in the inscription,/but not too clumsy that you can't still cut:/You're supposed to be the bright boy at description.” Plainly, the speaker is the patriarch, the deceased is the wife whereas the addressee is the couple’s son who is thirty years younger than the father for the speaker asserts “what's still between 's/not the thirty or so years.”

How do “Book Ends” and “Long Distance I" converge?

Both “Book Ends” and “Long Distance I” expose a disagreeable father-son connection whose communiqué is dreary. Also, in both, the matriarch is non-existent for she is already departed. Furthermore, the father and the son mostly remain aloof from one another.

What is the implication of the title ‘V’? (“V”)

In “V” Tony Harrison writes, “These Vs are all the versuses of life/From LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White/and (as I've known to my cost) man v. wife,/Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,/Class v. class as bitter as before,/the unending violence of US and THEM,/Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind,/East/West, male/female, and the ground.” The “V” signifies the widespread binary oppositions that demarcate locational, color, gender, ideological, political, class, group, religious and metaphysical dissimilarities. The “V” extricates the actualities that are contradictory in innumerable domains.