Discuss the use of the extended metaphor in Tony Harrison’s poem ‘Book Ends’.

In the poem Book Ends by Tony Harrison, the speaker’s mother has just died and he is sitting with his father as they try to decide which words should appear on her gravestone. Harrison uses the conceit of book ends to explore his relationship with his father – an extended metaphor of two entities exactly alike but facing in opposite directions and divided by something between. The speaker laments that “she [is] not here to tell us we’re alike!”, implying that the mother was a connecting figure between the two and that, with her gone, the division between them is more keenly felt. Now, “for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between’s/not the thirty or so years/but books, books, books.” The repetition of “books” in a list of three emphasizes a vast separation with a great many obstructions. The voiced plosive of the letter “b” creates a feeling of hardness, solidity, indicating a barrier not easily overcome. The books are also a metaphor for education and for the educational difference that divides the speaker and his father. Contextually, Tony Harrison was the son of a baker who won a scholarship to Leeds Grammar School and went on to study Classics at Leeds University. His poetry frequently explores the discrepancy between his working-class background and the upward social mobility that academia afforded him. In Book Ends, this is felt regarding the speaker’s relationship with his father – “The ‘scholar’ me, you, worn out on poor pay,/only our silence made us seem a pair.” The use of inverted commas around “scholar” indicates that this is a label the speaker feels has been attached to him, rather than how he truly sees himself. Nevertheless, it has left his father and he with little to say to one and other, seemingly because of the gap between their perceived social positions and daily realities. It is implied that the father too feels the disconnect here, as they struggle to find the right words for the gravestone and he becomes frustrated when even his poet son falls short – “You’re supposed to be the bright boy at description/and you can’t tell them what the fuck to put!” Ironically, it is the father who achieves this at the end of the poem: “I’ve got the envelope that he’d been scrawling/mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling/but I can’t squeeze more love into their stone.” Though the words are amateur – something underscored by their being written on an envelope – and rough – stressed by “scrawling” – they express feelings of love and loss as adequately as any poet or scholar. This could be interpreted as a reminder that, on either end of the “books” dividing them, despite their different directions in life, the father and son are as equal and alike as two bookends.