The Less Deceived: Comment
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Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album
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Wedding-Wind
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Places, Loved Ones
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Coming
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Reasons for Attendance
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Dry-Point
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Next, Please
'Next, Please', written in 1951, finds Larkin's voice fully matured and brimming with confidence. This superficially simple poem, with one central conceit, is as well-realised as an advertisement or propaganda short. Its metre and rhyme-scheme are adeptly handled, each image is crafted and the rhetorical message never wavers.
For example, disappointment is figured as "stalks" held in the hand. A stalk is pathetic in itself, the embodiment of inadequacy. Beyond this, there is a tie-in with the central trope, of promises as advancing armada. For it is ironically apt to be holding a spray of flowers to greet the arrival of a ship, a beloved passenger. Yet the vessels never dock and not only is the speaker left with no-one to receive the bouquet, the flowers themselves are revealed as headless and thus "wretched".
Larkin displays his customary ear for the chatty cast-off:
...we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy
...
Till then we say
He wrings from this platitude a whole superstructure of image and metaphor, working methodically up from one level to the next, until the final, inevitable dénouement. However, he does not simply insist that the ship we are awaiting is that water-borne hearse, Death. Instead, he acknowledges the substance of those other vessels which represent our unreachable desires. He casts them as unfaithful, endlessly turning tail at the last moment and implying that they may well be docking elsewhere, to unload "all good" into the lives of others (a common theme for Larkin: see especially 'No Road').
The final revelation could easily have been handled crassly, risking bombast. Equally it could have been underplayed, reducing its power. Instead, it quietly leaves its stamp on the mind. In this, it is aided by the adroit delineation of the earlier imagery, which ultimately strains at the threshold of:
...all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong
Larkin figures his Marie Celeste as "black-sailed". This simple inversion of normality (rarely does a ship sport black sails) disturbs as it reinforces the central image of blank nothingness. For a black sail against a (presumably) black "silence" at the ship's back would appear as invisible, making the ship appear to travel unaided. Which is itself implied by the fact that
...In her wake
No waters breed or break
See also: 'No Road'
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Going
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Wants
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Maiden Name
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Born Yesterday
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Whatever Happened?
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No Road
'No Road' is a compact masterpiece of Larkin's. It shares the consistency and focus of vision of a companion in The Less Deceived, 'Next, Please', though its subject matter is very different.
The central theme is so uncomplicated as to risk border on the platitudinous. Yet it is handled so adeptly and with reference to such novel and startling imagery that it avoids such charges altogether.
The simple, meandering metrical scheme is well-suited to the eponymous subject, rhyming ababcc with lines of rough pentameter (sometimes 10, sometimes 11 syllables) punctuated by strict four-syllable lines and ending on lines of six or seven syllables. In the first verse casualness is emphasised by having self-rhyming first and third lines:
Since we agreed to let the road between us
Fall to disuse,
And bricked our gates up, planted trees to screen us...
[emphasis mine]
The ambulatory pace is reflected in the repetition of "And..." at the beginning of third and fourth lines, scanned by the reader's eye like passing streetlamps or road markings. Likewise in the fifth line: "Silence, and space, and strangers..."
Larkin's metaphors are, as usual, both restrained and striking (bricked-up gates, screens of foliage, unswept leaves and creeping grass). His rhetoric is (at least until the final stanza) simple to follow, yet also arrestingly novel. For it is not merely "time's winged chariot" which is acting unaided upon the road between the two protagonists, but their own will; they "agreed to let the road between [them] fall to disuse".
So it is that the speaker does not merely bemoan the attrition of time on his link to the other, but rather examines how the vacillations of desire have their effect. He begins with the premise that it is the will of both parties that the cord should be broken, like a mutual severance of a frustrated contract.
The observation that even such willed negligence has failed to eradicate the connection leads to an awareness that all things in time shall pass, whether or not the passing is sought-for. Which in turn sparks a typically Larkinesque riddle of logic in the final verse.
Rather than settling upon the notion of time merely erasing all trace of the road in this world, a logical leap is made. Instead, time will bring about the dawn of a whole new world, where, by implication, no such road was ever known. In a further logical leap, the speaker envisages such a world as "a cold sun".
Now, to some, this mangling of logic may appear a pretentious caprice. To this reader at least, it serves to refine the experience conveyed by the speaker. For the metaphor of a ruined road has become transformed into a glorious sun, as the second party builds new roads, "rewarding others". Although this constitutes a bright new future, to the speaker it is the dawn of a cold sun, from whose warmth he is now screened.
Once the meaning of these images is understood, one can proceed to the final couplet. Its message is couched in the syntax of double-negatives so characteristic of Larkin (see, for example 'Talking in Bed': "not untrue and not unkind"). What is "meant" by the last two lines is something like: I want this to happen / But I want it too much. The way in which Larkin expresses this manages to convey the uncertainty felt by the speaker: seeking "not to prevent" an event is less definitive than wanting something to happen. Not really desiring something but willing it on, doing what is "for the best", the duplicity of the will: all of these themes underpin the sentiment at the end of 'No Road, and indeed lie at the heart of many of Larkin's best poems.
See also: 'Talking in Bed', 'Wild Oats', 'Love Songs in Age', 'If, My Darling'
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Wires
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Church Going
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Age
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Myxomatosis
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Toads
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Poetry of Departures
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Triple Time
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Spring
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Deceptions
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I Remember, I Remember
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Absences
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Latest Face
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If, My Darling
I was staggered the first time I read 'If, My Darling'. Then, I knew relatively little of the Larkin oeuvre, having read, so I recall, only The Whitsun Weddings. For it seemed to me then that the poem managed, brilliantly, to combine the best of Larkin's deadpan worldweariness and a till-then unfamiliar spikiness, a kind of tangentiality.
Maturity (I believe I was only 17 years old on first reading) and exposure to the entire Larkin canon have deadened the poem's impact on me somewhat, today. Yet I retain a fondness for what remains a familiar-unfamiliar poem. There are not many lines of Larkin that I can quote reliably, but snatches of 'If, My Darling' have marched on in my inner ear ever since that first, distant reading: "to hear how the past is past and the future neuter / Might knock my darling off her unpriceable pivot" and "A Grecian statue kicked in the privates".
In the poem, Larkin allows himself a playfulness of language and an exuberance of image not always apparent elsewhere in his verse. He launches into the poem with a literary allusion - extremely rare for a believer in the simple integrity of a poem for a poem's sake: "If my darling were... to jump, like Alice, with floating skirt into my head..." Moreover, it is a simile that courts charges of banality or triteness, until the remainder of the poem places that simile in an appropriate context.
The first verse also evinces an clumsy attitude "to women" or (more correctly) to the version of a woman represented by the speaker's muse that is recognisable elsewhere in Larkin's work. To some, that adjective "clumsy" must be replaced by one such as "chauvinistic" or "misogynistic". If there is more to the attitude than mere awkwardness, I should label it "uncomprehending". True, the first two lines imply a shallowness on the part of the addressee, that she never seeks to investigate further than the outward appearances.
An alternative interpretation is that it recognises the reluctance of so many (all?) of us to genuinely engage with the dark subconscious of our partners. After all, the grotesque litany which follows surely represents the deepest recesses of the speaker's mind, depths to which- arguably- few would encourage their partners to navigate.
Furthermore, there is an underlying tone of black comedy here. This is not only reflected in that early reference to Alice but also in the very outrageousness of the imagery employed. The two tally interestingly in verse five:
Delusions that shrink to the size of a woman's glove,
Then sicken inclusively outwards
This recalls Alice's misadventures with a cake and a bottled potion, causing her to "shrink to the size of a woman's glove" then "sicken inclusively outwards".
Beyond the merely grotesque, Larkin's radical use of imagery reveals a romantic enjoyment in representing abstract notions through the furniture of daily life. This is an aspect which is sometimes overlooked by critics of the bookish, dreary, foulmouthed Larkin.
The unwholesome floor, as it might be the skin of a grave
From which ascends an adhesive sense of betrayal,
A Grecian statue kicked in the privates, money,
A swill-tub of finer feelings
Quite apart from the virtuoso use of irony and juxtaposition in these and other lines, they evince Larkin's manifestation of concepts as a string of images, also present in, for example, 'Dockery and Son' (describing "innate assumptions"):
Those warp tight-shut, like doors...
Suddenly they harden into all we've got
And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds
Or in 'The Whitsun Weddings', where fate, or failure(?) is depicted "like an arrow-shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain."
Perhaps 'If, My Darling' differs from other poems in a similar vein in that it is really self-reflexive. The speaker utters these remarkable lines:
She'd be stopping her ears against the incessant recital
Intoned by reality, larded with technical terms,
Each one double-yoked with meaning and meaning's rebuttal
Yet what has he been doing throughout but larding this poem with technical terms ("tantalus", "bibulous", "fender-seat")? And in oxymoron such as "a swill-tub of finer feelings", he has yoked meaning to meaning's rebuttal. More particularly, the first line of the final stanza is a rare insight into Larkin's own poetic enterprise:
For the skirl of that bulletin unpicks the world like a knot
For me, it is the skirl of Larkin's bulletin, meaning the probing action of his (sometimes complex) rhetoric that unpicks the world of experience he seeks to share.
See also: 'The Whitsun Weddings', 'Dockery and Son'
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Skin
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Arrivals, Departures
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At Grass
'At Grass' was apparently the first poem Larkin wrote in a new decade, on 3 January 1950. And whilst, perhaps, it lacks some of the sophistication of his later work, it is spoken in a voice which is clearly his. Furthermore, it represents the first of a number of poems which evince a deep sympathy for animal subjects (see also, for example, 'Wires', 'Myxomatosis' (both in TLD) 'First Sight' (in TWW) and 'The Mower' (not colected until CP)).
In 'At Grass', Larkin displays his characteristic eye for significant detail, detail which in a phrase captures the essence of what he sees and what he wants us to feel about it.
...one crops grass, and moves about
-The other seeming to look on-
And stands anonymous again.
Anyone who has observed horses even cursorily will recognise the fidelity of this description. The punctuated syntax and unadorned language reinforce the imagery.
The poem goes beyond mere naturalistic lyricism however. A typical Larkin conceit, that these retired racehorses may actually be "plagued" by memories of past glories, of "starting-gates" and "Cups and Stakes and Handicaps", turns the poem in on itself.
Do memories plague their ears like flies?
They shake their heads...
"They shake their heads" as if to answer Larkin's fantasy in the negative. And yet it is of course anthropomorphism to read this into the horse's instinctive movements. And Larkin is of course aware of this.
The purpose of this ambivalent device is to establish a philosophy that recurs time and again. Larkin's characteristic approach to questions of happiness and misery, good and evil, is to posit both alternatives and offer the reader a kind of gap between the antitheses. In this gap, judgment is suspended. Larkin seems to want us to sympathise with his own ambivalence towards what he observes.
Larkin's genius is in masterfully inter-weaving romantic fantasy with pragmatic realism. The prosaic ("littered grass", "squadrons of empty cars") is drawn with the same razor-edged assurance as the fanciful ("they / Have slipped their names").
His words assure us that the retired horses now relish their freedom, galloping "for what must be joy". Yet his earlier evocation of their racecourse heroics has been so vividly achieved that the reader is forced to question the integrity of that "must". Are they really happier with nothing to live for but the daily arrival of groom and groom's boy, bringing menacing-sounding bridles?
The reader may be racked between the two worlds Larkin imagines for these horses as to which is / was the better. In fact, the sole certainty that is stamped onto the poem is the speaker's deep sympathy for his animal subjects. And in this, the poem is archetypal.
(A footnote) It is interesting to note that on his death Larkin left the residue of his testamentary estate to the RSPCA. In fact, many of Larkin's 'endings' invoked the 'non-human' natural world. 'At Grass' concluded both of Larkin's post-North Ship collections (XX Poems and TLD). The last poem of his last collection is 'The Explosion', about a mining disaster. Yet the final line is:
One showing the eggs unbroken.
Arguably Larkin's last significant poem, 'The Mower', describes the discovery of a mangled hedgehog in the blades of the machine. It's ominous, sad, final lines are:
...we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
See also: 'Wires', 'Myxamotosis', 'First Sight', 'The Mower'
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