Elegy and Memory: Harrison's "Timer"

Tony Harrison's "Timer" is one of the most powerful elegies in twentieth-century English poetry. Written after the death of his mother, it combines working-class directness, intellectual rigour, dark humour, and an unflinching engagement with the physical realities of death and cremation. The poem belongs to a sequence of sonnets that Harrison wrote about his parents and his relationship with them — poems that are simultaneously personal elegies and class-conscious explorations of the gap between the educated poet and his working-class origins.

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Context (AO3)

Harrison and Class

Tony Harrison (born 1937) grew up in a working-class family in Leeds. His father was a baker. Harrison won a scholarship to Leeds Grammar School and later studied Classics at the University of Leeds, acquiring the education that separated him — socially, linguistically, and culturally — from his parents.