Andrew Motion in his biography of Philip Larkin (see this post) says Larkin was popular because of the familiar language and syntax of his poems, their ambition to speak from and about ‘ordinary life and their tendency to aspire to the condition of epigram. Which made them at once approachable and memorable. But at the same over-simplified them and sometimes actually distorted the character of his work. Nowadays after so much has been written about him, both from primary sources like his letters and memoirs from people who knew him, Larkin is sailing into posterity in a manner that befits his status as a major poet. I’m late to appreciate him, but love many of the poems. He observed mundane things so closely. Here is what he said about his practice: You write because you have to. If you rationalize it, it seems as if you’ve seen this sight, felt this feeling, had this vision, and have got to find a combination of words that will preserve it by setting it off in other people. By ’it’ I think he means the emotion, or feeling, that the sight aroused in him. Beautifully put. Here are just a few of his poems I selected reading this book.
Church Going
Describes the poet, a non-believer, stopping at a church seen while bike riding. The church is till in use, but he ponders its purpose now and in the future. Motion tells us that there were 21 pages of drafts of this poem; an elegant archetype of his tone, method and interests.
Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
………..
But superstition, like belief must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognisable each week, A purpose more obscure ….
… For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blunt air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
At Grass
This was prompted by the sight of former race horses in a field leading to comparing their current life with former days at the racetrack. The final line discloses an error on his part, the groom and his boy would come with halters not bridles. Which for its filmic re-creation of actual details, its formal melancholy and its graceful swoop into familiar experience is now one of Larkin’s most admired and best-liked poems.
The eye can hardly make them out
From the cold shade they shelter in
…………………..
Yet fifteen years ago perhaps
Two dozen distances sufficed
To fable them: faint afternoons
Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps,
…………………….
Do memories plague their ears like flies?
They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows.
Summer by summer all stole away,
The starting gates, the crowds and cries –
All but the unmolesting meadows.
Almanacked, their names live; they
Have slipped their names, and stand at ease,
Or gallop for what must be joy,
And not a field glass sees them home,
Or curious stop-watch prophesies:
Only the groom, and the groom’s boy,
With bridles in the evening comes.
Mr Bleaney
The poet fled the first digs Hull University found for him because they were too noisy. But the replacement room he found himself in was worst – even noisier. His garrulous landlady apprised him in detail of the previous tenant’s daily life. His new, bare surroundings lead him to suspect his own life and Mr Bleaney’s might be interchangeable.
‘This was Mr. BLeaney’s room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.’ Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,
Whose windows show a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.’
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt globe, no hook
Behind the door, no room for books or bags –
I’ll take it.’ So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
on the same saucer-souvenir …
[and while trying to drown out the noise of the jabbering set he egged her on to buy, and knowing his daily habits, the poet wonders whether Mr Bleaney like him]
… stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.
The Whitsun Weddings
This took Larkin eighteen months to write this at a low-key, low-spirited time.Larkin himself claimed there was nothing of himself in this poem but Motion claims there is everything of him in it – the yearning for love as well as the standing-off. The poet is on a train on his way to London on a Saturday afternoon, not noticing that at each country stop there’s a wedding party – fathers with broad belts under their suits and seamy foreheads, mothers loud and fat, uncles shouting smut, girls with nylon gloves and jewellery- substitutes wearing lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres – farewelling brides and grooms off on their honeymoons.
That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
………….
At first I didn’t notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what’s happening in the shade
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started , though,
We passed them, grinning, and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,
As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all in different terms
………….
… the wedding days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
…………
A dozen marriages got underway.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
– An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl- and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
……………
… and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
Dockery and Son
The poet returns to Oxford and is told a classmate, who he can’t quite remember, has had a son. He’s thinking about his response to this news and comparing his own situation – unmarried, no progeny, no home of his own. Bitterly funny and grievously melancholic, [it] is a compressed autobiography …[the final lines] ensure the poem rises from its authenticating details to spell out general truths.
‘Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean ‘His son’s here now’.
.…
I try the door of where I used to live:
Locked. The lawn spreads dazzling wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In ’43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger then did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? …
…
To have no son, no wife
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery , now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of … No, that’s not the difference: rather how
Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddently they harden into all we’ve got
…..
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden for us chose,
And age, and then the only ending of age.
An Arundel Tomb
He has visited this tomb and is bored with the carved images of husband and wife on their tombs until he notices a distinctive detail which was in fact added in the 1840s. According to Motion one of his most moving evocations of the struggle between time and human tenderness. The untruth in the final stanza seeks to instil a sense of futility but the rhetoric of the final line takes charge and established it as a separate truth: An Augustan wisdom arising from a part-medieval, part nineteen-century monument. Motion also tells us that Monica Jones supplied the word blazon.
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
… Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy …
…….
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
This Be The Verse
Despite being one of his later poems, this is one of Larkin’s most famous poems and one that he sometimes thought would be the only thing remembered of his work would be the first line. Which is indeed memorable. Motion notes the final verse reflects opinions Larkin held from as early as his university days but this time without qualifications, here serving them up so bleakly that we are more dared than invited to agree.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats, …
……….
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Annus Mirabilis
This is another famous introduction to a poem. After the first stanza he talks about how sexual relations before that year as A sort of bargaining, A wrangle for a ring and shame that started at sixteen and spread to everything. Then that quarrel sank so life was better in 1963 or was it? Motion suggests what the poem wants to know is whether a better life consists in having these kinds of freedoms at all.
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP. …
The Explosion
Motion tells us that Larkin discovered D H Lawrence at school and says that this adolescent reading was a source for this early poem. It starts with the poet describing the miners heading to the pit, full of life, one of whom chases a rabbit into a field and returns holding a birds nest.
On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed to the pithead: In the sun the slagheap slept.
… At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun
Scarfed as in a heat-haze dimmed.
… and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion
Larger in life they managed –
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,
One showing the eggs unbroken.
Aubade
Described by Motion as a bleak late masterpiece this was written in his last decade – written over three years. It was published in the TLS but not included in any collection.
I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
……………….
… Courage is not good
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at or withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
The Mower
This is a record of an actual event. It’s sad, and beautiful. This is the whole poem.
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
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