Grip of Light: High Windows

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High Windows: Comment

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To the Sea

Sympathy in White Major

To deal with the controversy first. It is not easy, on the face of it, to excuse the 'sexual politics' of the opening stanza. As has no doubt been observed, the male of the species is ascribed an active role: "he's fucking her" (in doubtless 'offensive terms' to those who have never employed such language themselves). Meanwhile, the female is reduced to shopping for contraceptives ("pills" or "a diaphragm") in a more passive role.

I shall leave aside the issue of exactly how helpful such an exclusively political-biographical reading really is. Instead, I will accept the allegations for argument's sake, and proceed to interrogating the language more deeply.

In context, we see the irony of the speaker's evident chauvinism. He is clearly cast as a grumpy old man: so much is clear from the dismissive description of the opening line, "a couple of kids". The two human beings become a unit, shorthand for the iniquities of a permissive age. From such a basis, the 'sexist' assumptions mentioned above flow naturally. And to meet the charge that the speaker is merely jealous of the young man and his biddable sexual plaything, comes the deep irony of the fourth line:

I know this is paradise

The irony is sharpened by the succeeding line:

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives
[my emphasis]

In this way the notion that apparent sexual free-for-all (or if you prefer, a fantasy of male power) is thoroughly undermined, first by the placement of "paradise" hanging without punctuation at the end of the opening stanza, and then by the restriction which follows of envy to a class: "the old".

Irony continues to debunk the myth of misogyny. Surprising, faintly ridiculous imagery is used: "an outdated combine harvester". This irony points up the danger of taking the speaker's implied reverence for the old "bonds and gestures" too seriously. (The motif which I believe does warrant sincere examination is "the long slide", as I explain below.)

Returning to the ironic voice currently in question, it culminates in the imaginary internal monologue of the third and fourth verses. Superficially, the speaker reflects the commonplace rebuke to those who complain of moral decay, that it has always been so. Put another way, two generations ago the old were bitterly jealous of the new-found freedoms of the speaker and his peers; yet look at him today! Tutting to himself as a frisky young couple passes his net-curtains.

This is to stop at the outer layer of irony, however. Given the speaker's extreme apparent misanthropy, are we not supposed to suspect that no-one in fact "looked at [him], forty years back" with jealous eyes? He was probably always a stuffy prig, old before his time, discrediting the seeming sexism of his world-view yet further.

I have made considerable play of perceived irony in 'High Windows'. However, irony and sincerity are seldom divisible in Larkin. The image of "the long slide" is crucial to 'High Windows', arguably even more so than the eponymous metaphor. For a long time, Larkin had intended to use 'The Long Slide' as a title. This, to me, would have been a much more subversive and uncertain title. A long slide has inherent the contradictory notions of decline and exhilaration. Although Larkin writes of a slide to "happiness", the act of sliding itself suggests a loss of control, of increasing entropy.

As if to further destabilise the structure of metaphor and image, Larkin reiterates the figure in the penultimate stanza, at the same time adding to the strangeness with the wonderfully phrased "like free bloody birds". The disturbing notion of "everyone young" perpetually descending a chute is further contorted by the image of birds somehow going down a similar slide.

The idea that a "dumb creature" might slide down a chute of its own accord (surely only if dead or anaesthetised?) is more perverse when the creature is a bird, so commonly associated with flight, ascension.

The "older" speaker employs an obscenity suited to his generation, "bloody", which by the 1960's had become tame, and is deliberately set against the genuinely shocking (certainly at the time of composition) "f-word" in the first line. The "neutral" meaning of the word (covered in blood) also reinforces the idea that the "free" birds are nothing more than gory carcasses descending a chute in an abattoir or similar.

The poem is much less famous for this remarkable set of conceits than for its eponymous metaphor of "high windows". Of course, the sudden interpolation of such a restful, quasi-religious image has a powerful effect on the mind of the reader. It is commonly considered a gesture to some secular higher order, despite the explicit references to a void: "nothing... nowhere..."

More and more when I read 'High Windows', however, I consider this final reference a kind of reaction to the terrifying, contradictory forces at work behind "the long slide". I am not necessarily arguing that Larkin was frightened by the dark implications I have spoken about above, and that the fear caused a retreat to blank amorality. I consider Larkin a stronger writer than that. I would rather view the jarring juxtaposition of the Long Slide and High Windows as a conscious attempt to force the reader into challenging notions of morality, culture, sex and death.

Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel

Homage to a Government

'Money' is a strange little poem. For three-quarters of its length it adheres to the model of light verse employed by Larkin in, for example, 'Annus Mirabilis' or 'Vers de Société'. As such it displays flashes of wit:

Clearly money has something to do with life
...
You can't put off being young until you retire...

You get a familiar scowl in the direction of others' more successful love lives ("I am all you never had of goods and sex"). The rhyme scheme is a suitably sing-song aabb and some of the couplets knowingly border on the banal: "sex / cheques", "save / shave".

The opening line is interesting for its awkward syntax:

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me

By commencing with this adverb, Larkin stresses the cycle of demands that money makes on us all, relentlessly. "Quarterly" is how utility bills are generally paid, which in themselves represent the bare necessities of human life: water, heat, light. Yet here the interval is referred to in the imaginary, regular reproach money makes to the speaker. The implied image is of the speaker realising he has a surfeit of money on paying his bills, and not knowing how to dispose of it, bar "keep[ing] it upstairs".

The first line has always perplexed me in its use of a redundant clause ("is it") at its centre. It is a distinctly un-English-sounding use of syntax, or at least vaguely archaic. The notion of certain lines or phrases 'sounding foreign' is lent credence by comments Larkin made during his lifetime. Of his excellent 'Absences', he stated:

The last line ["Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!"] sounds like a slightly unconvincing translation from a French Symbolist

This loose adoption of 'foreign-sounding' idiom appears surprisingly often in the verse of such an avowed English traditionalist. Leaving aside the only half-serious "translation" of Baudelaire's Femmes Damnées from Larkin's youth, there are other occurrences in his mature work:

Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial place!
['The Card-Players']

Creatures, I cherish you!
['Livings']

In any case, the poem lurches away from its light-hearted beginnings in the final stanza. It is obscure even by the standards of Larkin's tendency for juxtapositions of image and theme. "I listen to money singing". This bare, yet haunting sentence implies so much about money. We are all thrall to the power of money, a power whose intangible quality is captured in the idea of "singing". The image must also be read in the light of the first verse, however, where money was given a different voice altogether. In the beginning, it is merely articulating the speaker's own guilt and anxiety: "Why do you let me lie here wastefully?" Here, it has generated its own dynamic, and a more inscrutable voice.

But Larkin is not content to leave the metaphor at that. In a characteristic switchback manoeuvre, he likens the song of money (itself a metaphor of course) to surveying a vista:

...It's like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

There is a certain amount of unpicking necessary here because the layers of logic are built up with typical care. As we follow the rhetoric, we are forced to go back and qualify each step we think we have made, in a way I shall attempt to describe below:

It's like looking through windows
It's like looking down through windows
It's like looking down through rather grand windows
It's like looking down through rather grand windows onto a provincial town
It's like looking down through rather grand windows onto a poor provincial town
[and so on]

As to the content of the images Larkin employs, each element has a significance. The reader's immediate response to a figure looking down on a town from french windows is to presume and air of superiority. The adjective "provincial" (with its snobbish overtones) reinforces this reading, as does reference to slums and a canal (in England associated with industrial, lower-class areas). Yet things are not so simple.

What of the allusion to churches? Critics accuse the Church (as an institution) of draining money, especially away from the poor. Up to the end of the penultimate line, the reference here might be read in such terms. For the churches are "ornate" and "mad", especially juxtaposed to the slums and canal. Yet the final line reveals them to be "mad / In the evening sun", the light flashing of them in a way which is common to other poems (for example, 'The Whitsun Weddings', 'Water', 'Solar'). The churches being 'mad' in the sense of dazzling ties in with the singing of money and the vertiginous view down from long french windows to describe a figurative migraine.

Ultimately, Larkin avoids making any definitive statement about the nature of money. Earlier he loosely associates money with "life", calling to mind platitudes about 'not being able to take it with you'. The heady imagery of the final stanza says as much about the speaker's own inability to isolate the quintessence of his subject as it does about money itself. After all, the speaker does not complain of a lack of funds, rather the opposite.

A 'materialist' analysis of Larkin's conclusion might suggest that his innate conservatism led to a fear of losing the crutch offered to him by money. Further, his inability to do anything but hoard money brought about a trauma, which the final verse of 'Money' attempts to articulate.

I'm sure that there is something to such a reading, but feel that the last line, "It is intensely sad", suggests rather more than this. As with other sentiments evinced by Larkin (for example "home is so sad") there appears to be an unconscious world-weariness in his view of so many prosaic experiences. In other words, he 'merely' felt that there was something inherently sad about money. Moreover, I would argue that the imagery of the final stanza is an attempt to find what T. S. Eliot dubbed an "objective correlative" for this innate feeling, an extended metaphor to inspire in the reader a shared experience. Larkin alluded to such a purpose on more than one occasion in his life (without necessarily supporting the likes of Eliot, since he demonised that poet's great ally, Ezra Pound at least once). It found perhaps its high-point in the poem 'High Windows', but 'Money' is similarly effective in its own way.

Cut Grass

This is one of a type of poem to which Larkin sporadically returned, especially towards the end of his career (see also 'The Trees', 'Solar', 'The Explosion') which is intensely lyrical in nature and- at least superficially- very different in tone from certain, more well-known pieces.

On the face of it, poems such as 'Cut Grass' leave (in the words of the eponymous verse) "nothing to be said". They 'merely' describe a feature of Nature, albeit in somewhat heady terms. Yet in the power of its restricted metre and the haiku-like quality of its imagery, 'Cut Grass' has its own particular place in the Larkin canon.

In 'Cut Grass', the brevity and intensity of each line lends it a mantra-like aspect which appears unexpectedly but with powerful effect elsewhere. 'Cut Grass' was written in 1971. Almost 18 years earlier, Larkin had written 'Tops', which appeared in Listen and again only in 1988, in Collected Poems. The affinity between the two pieces is remarkable, particularly given the temporal gap in their composition:

Tops heel and yaw,
Sent newly spinning:
Squirm round the floor
At the beginning
['Tops', 1953]

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death
['Cut Grass', 1971]

As regards the content of 'Cut Grass', it evinces a remarkable sympathy for the Nature, bordering on pity. This might be taken as proof of Larkin's misanthropy and a naïve 'preference' for the unthreatening non-human world. Whilst not disputing that 'as a person', Larkin displayed an occasionally bilious antipathy towards his fellow man, I would argue that Larkin's lyricism should be read in the context of a tradition of pastoral and romantic verse. Larkin see-sawed from admiration to contempt for Romantics like Wordsworth, so his own 'version' of such verse is best seen as filtered through the poetry of Thomas Hardy. Throughout his mature career he persisted in his idolatory of Hardy, frequently citing him as his all-time favourite.

His evocation of summer in 'Cut Grass' is brilliant, not merely casting about for platitudes and stock imagery but focussing- almost radically- on the notion of death and loss. Rather than concentrate on the traditional ideas of blooming and fecundity, cut grass is shown wilting in the heat, the 'last gasp' of stalks carried away on a breeze.

By examining the death of flora in the white heat of June, Larkin implies the regenerative powers of the summer more dramatically than if he had homed in on ripened fields of wheat or some other shorthand for growth. He is saying that, yes, nature is blooming all around, yet the intense powers which bring such life to ripeness will also smother and extinguish to make way for yet more life. In implying the endlessness of the cycle of life, 'Cut Grass' has much in common with 'The Trees'. Furthermore, it gestures out towards the visions of deep blue sky, or fathomless depths that appear in so many of Larkin's greatest verse, such as 'High Windows' or even 'This Be The Verse' (the sharp tailing-off of the coastal shelf).

See also: 'The Trees', 'Solar', 'The Explosion', 'Tops', 'High Windows'

The Explosion

To many, 'The Explosion' is one of Larkin's very finest pieces. It has found favour even among critics otherwise unsympathetic towards his canon. The tender, dignified poise of its verse is therefore well-acknowledged. And Larkin's own satisfaction with his work is evident in the placing of the verse right at the end of High Windows, a suitably noble seal to the volume.

Such is its well-crafted brilliance that it almost defies, or rather perhaps mocks any attempt to analyse its qualities. Any reader who cannot appreciate the virtues of this poem quite probably does not possess a soul for poetry at all. From the first, mundane yet ominous lines:

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed toward the pithead

to the forlorn, though redemptive, closing:

Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.

the poem is a perfectly-formed gem. Despite their apparent differences, Larkin and T S Eliot shared at least one poetic aim: what Eliot called the objective correlative and what Larkin speaks of as

construct[ing] a verbal device [to] preserve an experience indefinitely by reproducing it in whoever read the poem.

And Larkin surely succeeds here at least as well as anywhere else in his works. 'The Explosion' is surely a fine example of what Larkin elsewhere refers to as a 'sole freshly created universe'.

The use of language is interesting. Larkin's best work often calls to mind the strange, gnomic simplicity of Old English or Anglo-Saxon. The study of this curious, Latinate/Scandinavian-looking forerunner of the English language would have formed an important part of Larkin's undergraduate education at St John's College, Oxford. And, although he is somewhat dismissive of its merits in correspondence, traces of an Anglo-Saxon influence are evident in his verse.

'Going' from The Less Deceived seems to echo lines from an Old English verse known as 'The Wanderer' [I have loosely translated the Old English lines to indicate the general effect]:

Where has the tree gone, that locked
Earth to the sky? What is under my hands,
That I cannot feel?
['Going']

Where is the horse gone? Where is the man? Where the treasure-giver?
Where is the feast-seat?
['The Wanderer']

Old English poetry did not employ rhyme. Instead, each line relied on alliteration, basically three similar-sounding syllables, not unlike: In the sun the slagheap slept. There are other echoes of ancient Anglo-Saxon: 'oath-edged talk', 'Shouldering off the freshened silence' and the abbreviated inventory of actions culminating: 'lodged them in the grasses'. The missing definite article in sun/Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed also recalls the antique grammar.

It is interesting but ultimately unprovable to speculate why Larkin utilised this venerable style. The lack of French / Latin forms and the prevalence of one- and two-syllable Anglo-Saxon derivatives (e.g. Through the tall gates standing open) certainly lends an air of dignity.

But Larkin's genius in this poem is the adroit management of his chosen register of lannguage. The humanity of the lost men is somehow magnified by binding them inextricably in with the natural world around them. They are clad in hide ('moleskins'), their path to terrible fate is indicated by the morning shadows on the ground, they chase rabbits, and gather birds' eggs: the men larking, pinching the nest of a lark. And of course when the explosion occurs, it is the cows which hear it, breaking off mid-chew as a startled crowd might fall silent in a public house, and the sun dims.

Larkin juxtaposes the (albeit disturbed) rural idyll (past tense) with the hard textuality ('plain as lettering') of the chapel sermon (present tense) to staggering effect. The coup de gras is to mint the fallen men anew, 'gold as on a coin', showing them to be truly at one with dumb nature (walking/Somehow from the sun) and showing the eggs unbroken.

See also: 'Solar', 'Going'

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