As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
If poetry is the highest form of writing, it’s because it does so much with so little. That poem, only thirty-two lines, says as much as a play or a film.
In 1954, Larkin wrote a poem about work, in which he pictured it as a toad: ‘Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?’ This poem, written nearly ten years later, takes a mellower view, with Larkin now rather easier on himself.
Toads Revisited
Walking around in the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on,
Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses –
Not a bad place to be.
Yet it doesn’t suit me,
Being one of the men
You meet of an afternoon:
Palsied old step-takers,
Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters,
Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-baskets –
All dodging the toad work
By being stupid or weak.
Think of being them!
Hearing the hours chime,
Watching the bread delivered,
The sun by clouds covered,
The children going home;
Think of being them,
Turning over their failures
By some bed of lobelias,
Nowhere to go but indoors,
No friends but empty chairs –
No, give me my in-tray,
My loaf-haired secretary,
My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir:
What else can I answer,
When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.
Larkin relished dullness. ‘Deprivation is for me’, he said famously, ‘what daffodils are for Wordsworth.’ But he also said that however negative some of his poems might seem, one should never forget that writing a poem was never negative; to write a poem is a very positive thing to do.
This poem was inspired by a tomb in Chichester Cathedral, and it’s among Larkin’s best known and most hopeful.
An Arundel Tomb
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd –
The little dogs under their feet.
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His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.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
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
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.
Larkin’s last long poem ‘Aubade’ was printed in the Times Literary Supplement in 1977. I remember it being something of an event: you asked friends if they’d seen it. It was what it must have been like in the nineteenth century when poetry was news.
By this time, though, Larkin was writing less and less. He hadn’t abandoned poetry, he said; poetry had abandoned him. In The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde says that he who lives more lives than one, more deaths than one must die, and not being able to write was a kind of death, though one which Larkin bore stoically and with his usual grim humour, comparing it to going bald – nothing he could do about it. But he did regret it very much, and it made the last years of his life all the bleaker.
Aubade
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 always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
And interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
– The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than 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.
When Larkin died, there was a great and u
nexpected out-pouring of public affection and appreciation, some of which, though, he must have been aware of during his lifetime. He had always tried to dodge the public, letting his second nature – the grim pessimism of so many of his poems – do duty for the whole man. ‘I have a great shrinking from publicity,’ he wrote to the novelist Barbara Pym. ‘Think of me as A. E. Housman without the talent or the scholarship. Or the curious private life.’
Still, when one is dead, one’s life is no longer one’s own, and though his diaries were burned, biographical and critical studies now loom, and what we feel now about Larkin then is perhaps another reason why he regarded death with such a marked lack of enthusiasm. If anything, after his death there was too much glad endorsement of the bleaker side of his verse, a lot of jumping on his bandwagon (if a hearse can be a bandwagon), so I’d like to finish on a more optimistic note. I ended the Hardy section with a poem – ‘Proud Songsters’ – that was almost cheerful, and with Larkin’s admiration for and debt to Hardy, it’s appropriate to end this one with a poem very like it in spirit.
The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Index of Titles and First Lines
A cloudless night like this 134
A haze of thunder hangs on the hospital rose-beds 110
A shilling life will give you all the facts 123
A watched clock never moves, they said 168
About suffering they were never wrong 137
All words like Peace and Love 132
‘And now to God the Father,’ he ends 10
Annus Mirabilis 188
Arundel Tomb, An 200
As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade 139
At the Draper’s 23
At the Railway Station, Upway 17
Aubade 201
Autobiography 151
Autumn Journal 163
Because I liked you better 52
Because I liked you better 52
Beeny Cliff 5
Business Girls 101
But let me say before it has to go 121
Carrickfergus 148
Christmas: 1924 12
Coming up England by a different line 177
Convergence of the Twain, The 31
Crossing alone 69
Crossing alone the nighted ferry 69
Death in Leamington 87
Death of an Actress 172
Death of King George V 104
Deserter, The 54
Devonshire Street, W.1 106
Dockery and Son 185
‘Dockery was junior to you 185
Drummer Hodge 35
Early Electric! With what radiant hope 93
Earth, receive an honoured guest 141
Eight O’Clock 59
Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries 71
Eve of Waterloo, The 14
Five O’Clock Shadow 110
From the geyser ventilators 101
From the Wash 45
From the wash the laundress sends 45
Gaily into Ruislip Gardens 96
Going, Going 190
He stood and heard the steeple 59
How to Get On in Society 99
Hunter Trials 83
I am not yet born; O hear me 144
I did not lose my heart 61
I did not lose my heart in summer’s even 61
I looked up from my writing 29
I Looked Up from My Writing 29
I Remember, I Remember 175
I see from the paper that Florrie Forde is dead 172
I shouldn’t dance 119
I sit in one of the dives 126
‘I stood at the back of the shop, my dear 23
I thought it would last my time 190
I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries 147
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night 203
In a Bath Teashop 108
In a solitude of the sea 31
In Church 10
In Memory of W. B. Yeats 141
In my childhood trees were green 151
In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy 19
Into my heart an air that kills 73
‘Is my team ploughing 75
It’s awf’lly bad luck on Diana 83
Last Words to a Dumb Friend 25
Les Sylphides 160
‘Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another 108
Letter to Lord Byron 121
Life in a day: he took his girl to the ballet 160
Look, stranger, on this island now 113
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now 66
Maiden Name 183
Marrying left your maiden name disused 183
MCMXIV 194
Metropolitan Railway, The 93
Middlesex 96
Midnight on the Great Western 19
Musée des Beaux Arts 137
N.W.5 and N.6 90
O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea 5
O What Is That Sound 116
O what is that sound which so thrills the ear 116
Oh who is that young sinner 57
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists 57
On This Island 113
On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble 41
‘Peace upon earth!’ was said. We sing it 12
Pet was never mourned as you 25
Phone for the fish-knives, Norman 99
Portion of this yew 8
Prayer before Birth 145
Proud Songsters 37
Red cliffs arise. And up them service lifts 90
September 1, 1939 126
Sexual intercourse began 188
Shake Hands 50
Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all’s over 50
She died in the upstairs bedroom 87
Shropshire Lad, A 41, 47, 66, 73, 75
Side by side, their faces blurred 1200
Slow Starter, The 168
Spirits of well-shot woodcock, partridge, snipe 104
Tell me not here 63
Tell me not here, it needs not saying 63
The eyelids of eve fall together at last 14
The heavy mahogany door with its wrought-iron screen 106
The next day I drove by night 163
The thrushes sing as the sun is going 37
The time you won your town the race 47
The trees are coming into leaf 206
Their Lonely Betters 139
‘There is not much that I can do 17
These, in the day when heaven was falling 71
They fuck you up, your mum and dad 178
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest 35
This Be The Verse 180
Those long uneven lines 194
To Posterity 170
Toads Revisited 197
Transformations 8
Trees, The 206
Trilogy for X 155
Walk After Dark, A 134
Walking around in the park 197
We Too Had Known Golden Hours 132
‘What sound awakened me, I wonder 54
When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards 170
When clerks and navvies fondle 155
When summer’s end is nighing 78
When summer’s end is nighing 78
Whitewashed Wall, The 21
Witnesses, The 119
Who’s Who 123
Why does she turn i
n that shy soft way 21
Zoo 158
Acknowledgements
The publishers gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint copyright material in this book as follows:
Poems by John Betjeman taken from Collected Poems (John Murray, 2006) © John Betjeman by permission of The Estate of John Betjeman
Poems by W. H. Auden taken from Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (Faber and Faber Ltd, 2007) © The Estate of W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd
Poems by Louis MacNeice © Louis MacNeice, taken from Collected Poems, edited by Peter McDonald (Faber and Faber Ltd, 2007) by permission of David Higham Associates, London
Poems by Philip Larkin taken from The Complete Poems edited by Archie Burnett (Faber and Faber Ltd, 2012) © The Estate of Philip Larkin
Alan Bennett, Six Poets
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