For about nine years this poem has been set in the English GCSE. I didn't write this poem or any other for exams, needless to say: what follows below is just to provide some context to the poem, from a few excerpts from my other writing, dealing with the political nature of language in Britain.
The poem itself was first published in 1976.
From "Situations Theoretical and Contemporary" (1985)
And their judges spoke with one dialect
but the condemned spoke with many voices.
And the prisons were full of many voices,
but never the dialect of the judges.
And the judges said:
"No-one is above the Law."
Q . What is the percentage of people in command of the British Army who have working-class accents?
A . I'm sorry, he would have been pleased to speak to you, but he is in bed with laryngitis.
Q . What is the percentage of British troops in the front line who have public school accents?
A . I'm sorry, he would have been pleased to speak to you, but he is in bed with laryngitis.
… I’m doing a lot of readings across Britain just now, one of my poems is in the English GCSE exams, and we go to different places, and the schools are bussed in to hear eight poets who have poems in the GCSE, and who talk about their poems. And as I say to the children from the platform, I like the fact that when I step on a train in Glasgow and I step off the train somewhere else, I hear a different language, a different sound system, and I find that interesting. I think it’s one of the interesting things about Britain and it’s one of the things I like in Britain. I like it in the actual fact of the place itself as much as in the art that has been made from it. I like getting off the train in Yorkshire and hearing Yorkshire voices round about me, I like getting off the train in Llandudno and hearing Welsh voices round about me, and that I can find in Scotland as well. I like hearing different voices.
From "The Proof of the Mince Pie" — an essay written in response to a request for an essay on "culture" (1973)
What do a lot of people think of when one mentions the word "poetry" to them? More than once I've been told it's "Keats, and that"-sometimes I got Shelley, Milton and Shakespeare thrown in. As I heard one teacher put it, she always felt proud that she spoke the same language as "the byootiful lengwidge of Milton". And how often do you hear those letters on "Any Answers" etc. on the radio complaining about the corruption of "our beautiful English language"? The "beauty" of a lot of English poetry (particularly the Romantics) for many, is that the softness of its vowel-enunciation reinforces their class-status in society as the possessors of a desirable mode of speaking. And of course Keats's "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" goes down a bomb with the "Any Answers" brigade; where beauty in language is recognised as the property of a particular class, then naturally truth is assumed to be the property of that class also. So a person who doesn't "speak right" is therefore categorised as an ignoramus; it's not simply that he doesn't know how to speak right, but that this "inability" shows that he has no claim to knowledge of truth. That supposed insult "the language of the gutter" puts forward a revealing metaphor for society. The working-class rubbish, with all its bad pronunciation and dreadful swear words, is only really fit for draining away out of sight; the really great artist though, will recycle even this, to provide some "comic relief" to offset the noble emotions up top.
From "The Locust Tree in Flower, and Why it had Difficulty Flowering in Britain" —an essay on the American poet William Carlos Williams (1976)
What I like about Williams is his voice. What I like about Williams is his presentation of voice as a fact, as a fact in itself and as a factor in his relationship with the world as he heard it, listened to it, spoke it. That language is not simply a means of snooping round everything that is not itself - that's what I get from Williams.
The British are very sensitive about voice. Not sensitive the way Williams was sensitive, but in a very different way. And the answer lies as usual, not in the soil, but in the bankbook. There are basically two ways of speaking in Britain: one which lets the listener know that one paid for one's education, the other which lets the listener know that one didn't. Within these two categories there are wide variations, the line between the two is not always clear, and there are always loads of exceptions to any rule. But one can say of the two categories, the latter - the "free" education one - has much the wider variety. It is this very variety of regional working-class accents which the "bought" education has promised to keep its pupils free from, and to provide them instead with a mode of pronunciation which ironically enough is called "Received". The "Received Pronunciation" of Edinburgh will differ from that of Oxford (in its retention or elision of the "r" in a word for example) but the message of the medium is basically the same: this pronunciation is not received at all, but mummy and daddy paid for it: this pronunciation is important not so much for what it is, but for what it isn't.
All modes of speech are valid—upper-class, middle-class, working-class, from whatever region: linguistic chauvinism is a drag, pre-judging people just because they speak "rough" or with the accent of another region, or equally, pre-judging people just because they speak "posh". But to have created, or at least to have preserved, a particular mode of pronunciation on a strictly economic base, cannot but have very deep repercussions in a society, and in the literature of a society - and there's no use in anyone trying to minimise the importance of this fact, because it's got to be seen for what it is, and what it's done.
When you have in a society on the one hand a standardised literary grammar (standardised spelling and standardised syntax) and on the other hand a standardised mode of pronunciation, the notion tends to get embedded in the consciousness of that society, that one is part of the essence of the other. Prescriptive grammar, in other words, becomes the sound made flesh of prescriptive pronunciation. The tawdry little syllogism goes something like this:-
1. In speaking of reality, there is a standard correct mode of pronunciation.
2. In writing of reality, there is a standard correct mode of spelling and of syntax.
therefore,
3. In reality, correct spelling and correct syntax are synonymous with correct pronunciation.
Putting it another way, if a piece of writing can't be read aloud in a "correct" Received Pronunciation voice, then there must be something wrong with it. It's not valid. And this might not merely apply to the grammar of the writing, but the semantic content as well: since the standard pronunciation, having to be bought, is the property of the propertied classes,then only such content as these classes do not find disagreeable, can be "correct". Enter the inevitable assertion that the language of these economically superior classes is aesthetically superior - then in the interests of "Beauty" and "Truth", the regional and the working class languages,whatever else they're capable of, certainly aren't capable, the shoddy little things, of great Art.
