Grip of Light: The North Ship Index

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The North Ship: Comment

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I. 'All catches alight'

II. 'This was your place of birth'

III. 'The moon is full tonight'

IV. Dawn

V. Conscript
(For James Ballard Sutton)

VI. 'Kick up the fire'

VII. 'The horns of the morning'

VIII. Winter

IX. 'Climbing the hill within the deadfening wind'

X. 'Within the dream you said'

XI. Night-Music

XII. 'Like the train's beat'

XIII. 'I put my mouth'

XIV. Nursery Tale

XV. The Dancer

XVI. 'The bottle is drunk out by one'

XVII. 'To write one song I said'

XVIII. 'If grief could burn out'

XIX. Ugly Sister

XX. 'I see a girl dragged by the wrists'

It has been commented, with some justification, that The North Ship is far from a great collection of poems. In parts, it reads awkwardly, leading at least one critic to observe that there is little about the collection to commend it.

This writer would not go so far as to dismiss the work out of hand, but would concede the point Larkin himself readily acknowledged, namely that the poems of The North Ship are very heavily indebted to W.S. Yeats, to the near-exclusion of an original voice at all. And the homage is at times not even especially flattering.

There are healthy specimens amongst the casualties of what Larkin referred to as a short-lived Celtic fever. Amongst these I would certainly include 'A Girl Dragged...'- not least for qualities which genuinely foreshadowed Larkin's mature work.

Its pace is less frenetic and its progression less adolescently forthright than many of its companion pieces. Larkin observes and analyses in a measured, self-questioning way:

I see a girl dragged by the wrists
Across a dazzling field of snow, And there is nothing in me that resists. Once it would not be so...

His persona rehearses many of the mature motifs such as peeling away the onion-skins of responses to an experience, breaking off with exclamation and invocation, animating abstractions such as fate, age and indecision as mythical beasts. Only it does so clumsily and without conviction, at times.

Such lines, with a little spit and polish, might just pass as mature Larkin:

...Perhaps what I desired
- That long and sickly hope, someday to be
As she is - gave a flicker and expired
...
That each dull day and each despairing act

Builds up the crags from which the spirit leaps...

Elsewhere, his touch is less sure:

There is snow everywhere,
Snow in one blinding light.
Even snow smudged in her hair...

The language is occasionally archaic, lacking the later modern directness:

Nothing...
Rears up in me,
And would not, though I watched an hour yet.
[emphasis mine]

Then as I pray it may for sanctuary
Descend at last to me

However, the poem succeeds where others in the collection fail on several grounds. It tells a single, focussed story. There is relatively little of the wanton obscurity of other poems in the book.

The pivotal experience motivating the speaker is convincingly conveyed- that he yearningly desires the carefree wildness of the girl he sees (and, characteristically, the girl herself). In this it is the precursor to poems like 'Wild Oats' where the speaker, a touch self-indulgently, hangs on the mere image of an untouchable, unapproachable female. Not only her perceived flawlessness but also the speaker's own inarticulate reaction to it somehow become albatrosses about the speaker's neck.

Larkin was no more than 22 years old when he wrote 'A Girl Dragged...' and yet the poem is notable for the empathy expressed not for a girl skylarking with other youngsters but for "two ragged old men" digging snow. It would be too easy to mock the writer for misplaced sympathies, but the conceit is effective in its way.

Larkin "chooses" to relate to the old labourers because it suits his rhetorical ends. It is the very incongruity of a twenty-two year old projecting himself onto a pair of panting, worn-out codgers that suits the speaker's argument. The two diggers represent more than a cliched antithesis to the girl, which the speaker at first feels himself to be ("I can / Never in seventy years be more a man / Than now").

The old men and their digging inspire a subtler response to the experience. In the first verse, the speaker is a meekly passive agent, "no more, no less, than two weak eyes", who gawps, immobile at the beautiful, laughing girl. Then he moves away.

On first observing the aged labourers, the speaker wonders why the sight of their robotic, "useless" actions- apparently the opposite of those of the girl- should agitate his mind afresh. Eventually, his stream of thought runs across the notion that his nature is such that he too is condemned to dull and despairing shovelling. However, potential salvation comes in the fact that such hard labour might form the foundations for a flight of the spirit. A connection has been forged between the seeming-antitheses of young freedom and aged slavery.

Or at least Larkin's poetic genius has settled upon a version of experience that reconciles the two poles with one another, however tenuously.

XXI. 'I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land'

XXII. 'One man walking a deserted platform'

XXIII. 'If hands could free you, heart'

XXIV. 'Love, we must part now: do not let it be'

XXV. 'Morning has spread again'

XXVI. 'This is the first thing'

XXVII. 'Heaviest of flowers, the head'

XXVIII. 'Is it for now or for always'

XXIX. 'Pour away that youth'

XXX. 'So through that unripe day you bore your head'

XXXI. The North Ship

XXXII. 'Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair'

This poem was written in December 1947 and added to the contents of The North Ship for the 1966 edition published be Faber and Faber. Of it, Larkin remarked wryly that it showed "the Celtic fever abated and the patient sleeping soundly". It was a reference to the excessive influence of Yeats on the earlier poems of the collection and to the fact that the writer felt he was "over him".

'Waiting for Breakfast' is certainly more mature than many pieces in The North Ship and is in certain respects superior. It reads more like a 'real' experience, rather than a fantasy dreamt up to be set to the music of Yeats's verse. The voice is less faltering, and has clearly 'broken'.

The poem's weaknesses are in its strident outbursts, which seem to owe something to another of Larkin's literary mentors, D.H. Lawrence:

How would you have me?
...
Are you jealous of her?

We find Larkin, for neither the first nor the last time in his verse, gazing out of a window. His touch in delineating the dead-seeming, actually-immanent vista beyond is sure:

...Cobblestones were wet
...
Drainpipes and fire-escape climbed up
Past rooms still burning their electric light

The hesitant reaching towards sexuality is nicely alluded to: "featureless night...yet hung like a stayed breath...the lights burnt on, / Pinpoints of undisturbed excitement". Abstractions are animated in typical Larkin fashion:

...Towards your grace
My promises lock and race like rivers

The obscurity that occasionally surfaces in Larkin's later verse (but is all too prevalent elsewhere in The North Ship) is restricted here to the odd phrase and image:

beyond the glass
The colourless vial of day painlessly spilled
My world back after a year, my lost lost world
Like a cropping deer strayed near my path again,
Bewaring the mind's least touch.

When the speaker refers to his world spilling back "after a year" the incompleteness of explanation deepens the significance of the figure, rather than distracting the reader. The repetition of "lost" on the other hand arguably weakens its impact, the tone being more plaintive and unfettered than that which the mature Larkin usually employs.

To this reader, the poem's final line says as much about the development of Larkin the poet as about the conclusion of this particular verse. It shows Larkin willing to posit an unresolved 'ending', and to use direct, modern language in so doing. The language is also tough, and evinces little "humanity"- a trait reflected in later poems such as 'The Old Fools'. What jars here is the application of such a tough voice to this subject. Balancing uncomfortably close to spite, it lacks the measured quality of still-more mature Larkin.

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