Incompatabilities
Read 'Incompatabilities' by 'Barry Tebb' and provide your summary and literary analysis in the comments section below.
Incompatabilities by Barry Tebb
For Brenda Williams
La lune diminue; divin septembre.
Divine September the moon wanes.
Pierre Jean Jouve
Themes for poems and the detritus of dreams coalesce:
This is one September I shall not forget.
The grammar-school caretaker always had the boards re-blacked
And the floors waxed, but I never shone.
The stripes of the red and black blazer
Were prison-grey. You could never see things that way:
Your home had broken windows to the street.
You had the mortification of lice in your hair
While I had the choice of Brylcreem or orange pomade.
Four children, an alcoholic father and
An Irish immigrant mother. Failure’s metaphor.
I did not make it like Alan Bennett,
Who still sends funny postcards
About our Leeds childhood.
Of your’s, you could never speak
And found my nostalgia
Wholly inappropriate.
Forgetting your glasses for the eleven plus,
No money for the uniform for the pass at thirteen.
It wasn’t - as I imagined - shame that kept you from telling
But fear of the consequences for your mother
Had you sobbed the night’s terrors
Of your father’s drunken homecomings,
Your mother sat with the door open
In all weathers while you, the oldest,
Waited with her, perhaps
Something might have been done.
He never missed a day’s work digging graves,
Boasting he could do a six-footer
Single-handed in two hours flat.
That hackneyed phrase
‘He drank all his wages’
Doesn’t convey his nightly rages
The flow of obscenities about menstruation
While the three younger ones were in bed
And you waited with your mother
To walk the streets of Seacroft.
“Your father murdered your mother”
As Auntie Margaret said,
Should a witness
Need indicting.
Your mother’s growing cancer went diagnosed, but unremarked
Until the final days
She was too busy auxiliary nursing
Or working in the Lakeside Caf?.
It was her wages that put bread and jam
And baked beans into your stomachs.
Her final hospitalisation
Was the arena for your father’s last rage
Her fare interfering with the night’s drinking;
He fought in the Burma Campaign but won no medals.
Some kind of psychiatric discharge- ‘paranoia’
Lurked in his papers. The madness went undiagnosed
Until his sixtieth birthday. You never let me meet him
Even after our divorce.
In the end you took me on a visit with the children.
A neat flat with photographs of grandchildren,
Stacks of wood for the stove, washing hung precisely
In the kitchen, a Sunday suit in the wardrobe.
An unwrinkling of smiles, the hard handshake
Of work-roughened hands.
One night he smashed up the tidy flat.
The TV screen was powder
The clock ticked on the neat lawn
‘Murder in Seacroft Hospital’
Emblazoned on the kitchen wall.
I went with you and your sister in her car to Roundhay Wing.
Your sister had to leave for work or sleep
You had to back to meet the children from school.
For Ward 42 it wasn’t an especially difficult admission.
My first lesson: I shut one set of firedoors while the charge nurse
Bolted the other but after five minutes his revolt
Was over and he signed the paper.
The nurse on nights had a sociology degree
And an interest in borderline schizophrenia.
After lightsout we chatted about Kohut and Kernberg
And Melanie Klein. Your father was occasionally truculent,
Barricading himself in on one home leave. Nothing out of the way
For a case of that kind. The old ladies on the estate sighed,
Single men were very scarce. Always a gentleman, tipping
His cap to the ladies.
There seems to be objections in the family to poetry
Or at least to the kind that actually speaks
And fails to lie down quietly on command.
Yours seems to have set mine alight-
I must get something right.
Incompatabilities Summary and Analysis
Barry Tebb frames the poem as a reckoning with another person's life, but it gradually becomes a reckoning with his own assumptions, privileges, and failures of understanding. The address to Brenda Williams opens a space of memory and recognition: schoolrooms, family hardship, class difference, and the hidden violence of domestic life. What begins as recollection becomes a moral inventory, as the poem measures the contrast between two childhoods and the long afterlife of that contrast in adulthood, marriage, divorce, and shared sorrow.
The poem moves through layers of biography with increasing urgency. It revisits childhood markers such as clothing, housing, and school opportunities, then turns toward the damaged family structure that shaped Brenda's life: alcoholism, fear, illness, and silence. The father emerges not as a simple villain but as a figure marked by war, work, and untreated illness, while the mother carries the burden of labor and care until cancer and exhaustion catch up with her. By the end, the poem widens into a meditation on speech itself: poetry is valued because it tells the truth, resists politeness, and refuses to pretend that suffering can be made neat. The central tension lies in whether words can ever fully answer such a history, even as they remain the only available act of witness.
Tone in Incompatabilities
The tone is searching, chastened, and accusatory in turns, as Barry Tebb moves between tenderness, regret, and a hard refusal to sentimentalize the past. He writes as someone trying to tell the truth after years of half-knowledge, and that gives the poem a moral seriousness that never settles into ease. The mood for the reader is grave and uneasy: the surfaces of ordinary life are repeatedly pierced by shame, violence, and loss, yet the poem also carries the stubborn energy of witness, as if naming the damage is itself a form of respect.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in Incompatabilities
- Class division and childhood inequality - The poem contrasts two upbringings with sharp detail, showing how clothing, housing, and school experience can expose deep social distance within what later becomes an intimate relationship.
- Family trauma and domestic violence - The poem presents a household shaped by drunken rages, fear, and emotional damage, making private life feel like a site of ongoing injury rather than comfort.
- Memory and retrospective guilt - The poem's reflective voice keeps returning to what was missed, misunderstood, or judged too easily, and that hindsight creates an undercurrent of remorse.
- Silence and speech - Brenda's inability or refusal to speak about her childhood becomes central, while the poem itself insists on naming what family life tried to conceal.
- Illness and neglect - Cancer, psychiatric collapse, and undiagnosed suffering are all linked to a wider pattern of being overlooked until damage becomes impossible to ignore.
- Poetry as witness - The poem argues for poetry that speaks plainly and honestly, using language not as decoration but as a means of moral attention.
Literary Devices in Incompatabilities
- Free verse - The loose, irregular form suits the poem's memoir-like movement and allows memory, judgment, and grief to unfold without a fixed pattern.
- Direct address - Speaking to Brenda Williams creates intimacy and immediacy, while also making the poem feel like an unfinished conversation with the dead or absent past.
- Juxtaposition - The poem repeatedly places opposite conditions side by side, such as privilege and deprivation, composure and chaos, or public respectability and private breakdown.
- Allusion - References to Alan Bennett, Pierre Jean Jouve, psychiatry, and war broaden the poem's world and connect personal history to literary and social contexts.
- Metaphor - Images such as the blazer becoming "prison-grey" and failure becoming a family emblem turn lived experience into condensed symbolic language.
- Cataloguing detail - The accumulation of small, concrete particulars gives the poem its documentary force and makes the emotional burden feel cumulative.
- Irony - The poem frequently undercuts surface appearances, especially where respectability, work, or ordinary family life conceal suffering and rage.
- Colloquial speech - Plain, spoken phrases lend the poem moral force and help it sound like testimony rather than ornamented elegy.
Symbolism in Incompatabilities
- September - The recurring September setting suggests transition, memory, and the waning of light, matching the poem's reflective mood and the sense of life moving toward loss.
- The blazer - The red and black school blazer stands for institutional discipline and the way outward order can feel imprisoning rather than empowering.
- Broken windows - The image of the family home with broken windows suggests poverty, exposure, and the failure of shelter.
- Lice - Lice symbolize shame imposed by deprivation and the body's visible marking by hardship.
- Door open in all weathers - The open door at night suggests waiting, fear, and a desperate hope that something or someone might intervene.
- Wood for the stove - The stacked wood in the neat flat signals domestic order, endurance, and the effort to maintain dignity through work.
- Firedoors - The firedoors in the hospital suggest containment, institutional control, and the attempt to manage disorder before it breaks loose again.
Historical Context of Incompatabilities
The poem belongs to a late twentieth-century British tradition of plainspoken, autobiographical writing that often turns to class memory, domestic hardship, and the legacies of postwar life. Its references to grammar schools, the eleven-plus, psychiatric language, and institutional care place it firmly in a social world where education, family reputation, and mental health were deeply shaped by class and by uneven access to support.
The poem also reflects a broader literary shift toward giving voice to private suffering without disguising it in formal decorum. Its emphasis on testimony, lived detail, and the failures of silence connects it to a modern British poetry of witness, in which personal history becomes inseparable from social history.
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