Sigggggh, I love Philip Larkin...

Here

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river's slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:
Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires--
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers--

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages, where removed lives

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iJPUPy50Gxc/TTGujk5h1TI/AAAAAAAAAww/4WEwGmfagwY/s1600/Wilberforce-House.jpg

the slave museum

turns out I'm a fan

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thus shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff 5
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font. 10
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant. 15
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, done an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this, 20
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases, 25
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some 30
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone? 35
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew 40
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he by my representative, 45

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth, 50
And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutered frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is, 55
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious, 60
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

I start rereading THE LESS DECEIVED (1955).

My feeling thus far is:

a) slight over-familiarity of the very familiar ones, which can then - being what they are, poems that say things and convey thoughts or arguments - feel glib. 'Reasons for Attendance' and '... Photograph Album' here. And I find myself looking at lines and wondering what they really mean, eg: why would photographs be 'smaller and clearer as the years go by'? Photographs do not, in fact, do that. So why are they figuratively doing that?

b) with the less familiar ones, a very different feeling - of surprise, uncertainty, mystery. 'Wedding-Wind' is, I suppose, a pastiche, partly Yeatsian (but perhaps supposed to be English not Irish) but still contains some of that mystery, in a line like: 'Can it be borne, this bodying-forth by wind / Of joy my actions turn on, like a thread / Carrying beads? Shall I be let to sleep / Now this perpetual morning shares my bed?' 'Dry-Point' is even more mysterious to me: I literally don't know what it's about. (And Larkin is supposed to be all too obvious and conversational.) 'Coming', serious about hope, is matched by 'Going', serious about death.

More generally the obsession with death is already somewhat too heavy for me (he was only 33), and doesn't give the poems weight and power in the same way that his interest in the actual difficult sensations of life does.

I finish rereading THE LESS DECEIVED.

I think I can see why the book is, certainly was, significant; why Larkin earned his reputation; though I have a feeling that THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS is even better (and a bit longer). I think the poems can hold a certain brittleness, partly because they are almost always saying something, making a case. Larkin seems to have written himself into that mode - in which to write a poem was to make a statement or assess an argument - and not very often moved out of it. I suppose it means that in reading the poem you have to assess the argument (which is not really the same as assessing a poem), and you might feel that he is rigging up a case just for the sake of it, to make a poem. To read him consecutively taking so many positions (in poetic form) can be wearying, or makes me feel that he himself must be wearied by it.

A thing that many many other poets, especially later, have done - just recording an impression, without offering a strong view on it - does not so much seem to have occurred to Larkin as a viable mode.

Perhaps I am seeking to say that the poems are rhetorical, and that rhetoric can be suspect, especially when applied so intensively (that is, in a sequence of highly charged pieces of rhetoric called poems, read in quick succession).

To return to my feelings above: I still feel that glibness hovers around some of those that feel more familiar. The pay-off of something like 'I Remember, I Remember' is another example. Yet it is also true that some of the poems are obscure to me, more than one might expect.

Thus 'Age':

My age fallen away like white swaddling
Floats in the middle distance, becomes
An inhabited cloud. I bend closer, discern
A lighted tenement scuttling with voices.
O you tall game I tired myself with joining!
Now I wade through you like knee-level weeds,

And they attend me, dear translucent bergs:
Silence and space. By now so much has flown
From the nest here of my head that I needs must turn
To know what prints I leave, whether of feet,
Or spoor of pads, or a bird’s adept splay.

I am not sure how much I understand that. 'O you tall game I tired myself with joining!' - Larkin must have known how perverse that line was, and been happy with it.

Larkin can enjoy delving into idiom, as in the list of trades in 'Toads', or this terrifically evocative, deliberately naive and vague stanza:

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines.
They seem to like it.

Fires in a bucket!

Yet even that poem ends somewhat enigmatically, for me:

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

What are the two things? I think one is the 'toad-like' quality in the speaker, and the other is work itself. The latter embodies the former. But what really is the former? Not very clear.

'Deceptions', whence largely comes the title, is notable, for one thing because Margaret Thatcher misquoted it interestingly when Larkin met her in the early 1980s; for another because it draws on a prior non-literary source; for another because it therefore seems to be thoroughly sympathetic to a (violated) woman. But then I don't really understand the line 'where / Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic', and I wonder if that part got Larkin back into the trouble the poem should have got him out of. I note also that the tone of the poem anticipates the Heaney of something like 'Punishment' in NORTH.

'Skin' is another example of a certain glibness: it's all too understandable. Whereas 'Absences' is strange, not that understandable. I genuinely don't necessarily know what it means:

Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.
Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,
A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
Where there are no ships and no shallows.

Above the sea, the yet more shoreless day,
Riddled by wind, trails lit-up galleries:
They shift to giant ribbing, sift away.

Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!

It seems to me that these are the book's poles: a degree of communicativeness that can work so well that the poem is relatively quickly exhausted, and a degree of mystery that keeps the poems from that fate; with a middle ground.

That reminds me that to me the most powerful and painful poem in the book is 'No Road'.

i am rarely much of a champ when it comes to interpeting poetry but isn't "'O you tall game I tired myself with joining!" a memory of himself when small trying to keep up with the big children (where the line before and the line after it is him as a grown-up, first peering down at and then striding through the tinies)

Reluctant as I am to link to the Spectator, I am surprised we have come so far in the Larkin thread without discussing this article

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/this-be-the-curse-philip-larkins-big-problem

I am inclined to agree with Mark S's statement and find it perceptive.

I still think that the line retains a deliberate oddity, and still think the rest of the poem quite obscure.

mark s's read also seems right to me. enjoying this thread, Larkin's sort of measured gravity can thrill

in conclusion: in this two-stanza poem ('age') PL likens himself to sesame street's BIG BIRD

it opens with him surrounded by the grown up clouds of metaphysics (time! space!) but at its close he must pay attention to his own splayed feetprints on the far distant ground to make sense of himself

10/10 no notes, comments are closed

we shd start a thread where we interpret poems together, i think it wd be instructive (*sharpens trolling pencil*)

Larkin seems to have written himself into that mode - in which to write a poem was to make a statement or assess an argument - and not very often moved out of it. I

This is the thing with Wallace Stevens too.

we shd start a thread where we interpret poems together, i think it wd be instructive (*sharpens trolling pencil*)

So long as we do it I. A. Richards style

Mark: we did that, about 18 years ago, when poster Cozen was a notable ILB poster. Among other things (?) we had a rewarding long discussion of a particular poem that I liked by Sean O'Brien.

I don't especially see the comparison of Larkin to Stevens, as Larkin's 'ideas' or 'arguments' are usually quite straightforward or at least comprehensible - well, they are often this, though I admit that above I said that sometimes they were not - whereas I don't find those qualities in Stevens. To the point where I am not really sure that Stevens is making a case at all.

I have been reading very early Derek Walcott and he actually reminded me of Stevens, more than anyone.

Stevens can be abstruse but is often straightforward:

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Or:

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.

Those may be good poems, but I don't understand what ideas they are advancing - in the particular way that Larkin (for good or ill) does.

I emphasise that I don't think poems 'should' put forward clear ideas; I just observe that Larkin sometimes does.

"We say God and the imagination are one" and "His self and the sun were one/And his poems, although makings of his self,/Were no less makings of the sun" are as straightforward as you can get!

I'll stop b/c we disagree.

take it to the poetry parsing thread!
a thread in which ilx interprets poems, sometimes line by line, and disagrees a lot (probably)

For me, Larkin is particular and personal and local: work is a toad squatting on my life. Parents are shit. Hull is other people. I can't get laid even in a sexy time. He has a grasp of details. He touches universal themes from time to time, but his feet were on the ground.

(I love Larkin BTW)

Stevens is an ontological writer concerned with the universe and with Berkelian perception: masts against a seascape create an order (if a perceiving being contemplates them). A jar shapes a landscape and ultimately a universe (if a perceiving being contemplates it). A frozen dessert, while you contemplate it, is an empire. A stupid bird becomes a whole fucking universe, while you are contemplating it. Any observed detail, to Stevens, can be a springboard into the universal. He touches reality from time to time, but his head was in the clouds.

(I love Stevens BTW)

Can't imagine a world without both

being pretty familiar with what's left of much of the region Larkin writes about i see recognisable details dropped in even when the poem itself is predominantly making the kind of arguments Pinefox describes

otm, Puffin.

I do wonder about Larkin's endings though, and how these lift him free of the accusation of groundedness (I know it's not an accusation really, but I think Larkin has become 'Larkinised' - kind of a subject of his own poem, frozen in time and space like the lovers in An Arundel Tomb - in a way Stevens hasn't and will never be).

I think 'The Whitsun Weddings' is as good an example as any:

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.

It's pointedly ambiguous, certainly, psychedelic even, and perhaps a deliberate attempt at unmooring from a perceived anchoring in the local and the particular. 'High Windows' makes the same move.

Perhaps these are the exception that prove the rule.

Stevens is less of a presence in his poetry; even his grand "we"s are the pronouns of a medium.

I agree, your Lordship. I get the feeling that Wallace Stevens (the person) would have regarded "Wallace Stevens" (the poet) as a character, as a mouthpiece for a particular epistemological viewpoint that was more or less sincerely held by Wallace Stevens (the person).

To Chinasky's point I don't think Phillip Larkin (the person) would have minded being conflated with "Phillip Larkin" (the poet). And I don't think of ~relative~ groundedness as being a bad thing. Being more "down to earth" than an airy spirit like Stevens is not exactly a criticism.

I may have missed something because am not really clear on why this comparison is being made - like, why are we comparing Larkin to Stevens instead of to Dylan Thomas or Sylvia Plath or Randall Jarrell or Audre Lorde or for that matter Adrienne Rich?

Because ILB poster Alfred, Lord S., above, stated that Stevens was like Larkin in writing poems that made statements and arguments.

No other reason.

Chinaski: I don't think Larkin's 'rise to transcendence' moments are the exception at all -- they're a standard feature of his work. I think that most full descriptions of what Larkin does would include this as a major weapon in his armoury, or option in his repertoire, or temptation to which he yields. I think he does it very well, but also that it might risk being routinised by its frequency.

Sure, isn't High Windows pretty much a textbook study in contrasts? Awkward cycle clips, religion, awkward cycle clips, transcendence, seriousness, death.

No one would remember it if it were just about bicycling and pants

That's a different poem. 'Church Going'.

'High Windows' is from about 20 years later.

Oh duh, sorry, serves me right for posting from work and away from the shelf

I will slink away into ignominy now

High Windows is about kids fucking

It is also name-checked by Jonatha Brooke on the uber-literary album by the Story, The Angel in the House, 1994ish

I finished THE NORTH SHIP, Larkin's 1945 collection. It would be fair to say: if you think you know Larkin (as most people do), but haven't read these poems (as some people haven't), then there is an aspect of Larkin you don't know.

A couple of years ago I read the Collected Poems of Larkin. Its a much more approachable volume than the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which I also have. For one thing the poems tend to be short, and the obscure moments generally surrounded by relatable anecdotes from daily life. Also the generally dour and wistful mood carries you through - even if you don't understand everything you feel like you understand the feeling.

since this thread was bumped recently i got a copy (collected poems) and have been enjoying it immensely.

Arrivals, Departures

This town has docks where channel boats come sidling;
Tame water lanes, tall sheds, the traveller sees
(His bag of samples knocking at his knees),
And hears, still under slackened engines gliding,
His advent blurted to the morning shore.

And we, barely recalled from sleep there, sense
Arrivals lowing in a doleful distance –
Horny dilemmas at the gate once more.
Come and choose wrong, they cry, come and choose wrong;
And so we rise. At night again they sound,

Calling the traveller now, the outward bound:
O not for long, they cry, I not for long –
And we are nudged from comfort, never knowing
How safely we may disregard their blowing,
Or if, this night, happiness too is going.

The first stanza's last line.

"Horny dilemmas" as a bashful allusion to sexual frustration seems typical.