Grip of Light: The Whitsun Weddings

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Here

Mr Bleaney

'Mr Bleaney' is the portrait of an invisible man; the story of a person who is not there. In fact, more than this, it tells us about the speaker by reflecting his characteristics in the imaginary mirror of the eponymous 'protagonist'.

Larkin displays his customary good ear for dialogue in quoting the landlady in the first and second verses. He captures her lonely, shrewish ill temper without excessive elaboration. There is an allusion to Mr Bleaney's loyalty to her lodgings, then to her "bit of garden". The picture is developed by her harping on the minutiae of her former tenant's life.

The language employed reveals some clever touches. An enigmatic reference to "the Bodies", presumably a nickname for Mr Bleaney's former workplace, is somehow apt. Its slightly ghoulish ring corresponds to the notion of him as a spectre, silently hovering at the speaker's shoulder. Likewise when the room is referred to as "one hired box", sounding like nothing so much as a coffin. The "saucer-souvenir" doubling as an ashtray reinforces the idea of migration, that both the speaker and his predecessor were just passing through.

And of course the poem's closing verses describe the fear that all our lives are no more than a 'passing through', furthermore, that our success, our happiness or otherwise in so doing are reflected by "how we live". Given this, the conclusion would seem to be that if all one has to show for oneself is a grubby rented room then one's life cannot have amounted to much.

Yet, as so often with Larkin, there is more to 'Mr Bleaney' than a simple kind of materialist philosophy. The poem ends with the words "I don't know". The version of events described first by the landlady, then by the speaker himself, are never substantiated. It is clear that as the analysis of this invisible third party goes ever deeper, his imagined behaviour and experience reflect ever more upon the speaker.

For it is the very fact that he knows Mr Bleaney's "habits"- the banalities of his existence- so well that heightens the speaker's anxieties about what his emotional condition must have been. The "but" which introduces the penultimate stanza makes this clear.

Yet such is the speaker's involvement with Mr Bleaney's imagined traumas that it is easy, on first reading, to misread them as purported fact. There are over six lines of a carefully described fantasy between "But if..." and "...I don't know". And the reason, so the reader must assume, that the speaker is able to imagine Mr Bleaney's angst so vividly, is because they are his feelings.

It is typical of Larkin's method to avoid an unfiltered expression of emotion. Time and again, he uses an independent character as a kind of interface between writer and reader. Now, it may have been that Larkin subconsciously feared the immediacy of an 'I' crying out. Whatever the case (and since it is impossible to infer intention anyway) this approach rendered pieces such as 'Mr Bleaney' more subtly effective.

By wrapping the speaker's anxiety up in speculation about an unknown party, the reader is made to work at really comprehending it, and in a sense to take it more seriously. It also universalises the experience, without insisting on its own veracity (since it is only speculation whether Mr Bleaney felt these things at all).

See also: 'Dockery and Son', 'Deceptions'

Nothing To Be Said

Love Songs in Age

Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses

Take One Home for the Kiddies

Days

MCMXIV

Talking in Bed

Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

These oft-quoted lines reveal much about Larkin's poetic enterprise. 'Talking in Bed' terminates ambiguously, fussily. At first the speaker's problem is how to be both honest and loving. It is the perennial issue of the ugly dress: what is more important to a relationship, candidness or consideration? Should the response be: sorry dear, orange chiffon is just horrible or you look beautiful whatever you wear?

Instead of positing a third way as the solution to this problem, by finding those words that would strike the right balance (if indeed they are to be found) Larkin's persona characteristically shifts the focus. He refines the complaint. Not untrue and not unkind: is this not just a grammatical reformulation of the preceding doublet? Perhaps; maybe the speaker is acting out the difficulty he describes, couching the phrase differently to illustrate the point.

Could the refinement equally be interpreted thus: Not only is it impossible to be candidly loving, nor can one avoid untruth and cruelty? This would be the "neither-nor" interpretation. My own preference would be for the former reading. I consider it to be more elegant. Without wishing to attach too much weight to extra-textual matters, if you listen to Larkin's own reading of the poem, the stress is notably: Or not untrue and not unkind. It sounds like a thoughtful rephrasing rather than expansion.

The rest of this poem has much to commend it. The casualness of the opening reinforces the images and language of repose, reclining and regression. Regression in that the line:

Lying there together goes back so far

suggests prehistoric memorial traces. The emblem of man and woman lying together: deep-seated, genetic, (in theory at least) honest.

There is a pervasive air of doubt, the eye-bulging, sheet-tangling doubt of sleepless nights. The atmospheric, "pathetic fallacy" of the unrest[ing] wind would be too obvious. Larkin hones the figure. The unsettled wind is not entirely so; instead it builds and disperses cloud like a sleepless drunk constructing and dismantling endless houses of cards.

Like lost gaming chips, even the city buildings stack up against the speaker: implacable and cold. And it is at this stage that Larkin generates the energy for the final poetic and philosophical graces. Even better poised than the opening or closing lines, arguably, is the geographical trope at this unique distance from isolation. It is practically an oxymoron, and certainly an audaciously ironic figure of speech to liken closeness and remoteness.

What is so often missed about Larkin's poetry is its radicalism (not politically of course -the conservatism of Larkin's own worldview is an ironic counterpoint). It is the way he toys with meaning, doing so within the bounds of superficially simple verse that is remarkable. The "nothing" in this poem is a case in point: Nothing shows why.... Any initial interpretation will be on the usual meaning of such phrases: there is nothing here to show us why... Yet, heightened by the subtle ambiguities which surround it, that word nothing almost assumes a substantiveness of its own: it is nothing which shows us why... The great black, blankness that so often appears before Larkin's speakers (the wake of the ghost ship in 'Next Please' or the hole in 'The Life with a Hole in It') which is instructive. It is the ever-present absence which dictates and reveals so much.

See also: 'Sad Steps'

The Large Cool Store

A Study of Reading Habits

As Bad as a Mile

It would be easy to dismiss 'As Bad as a Mile' as nothing more than a dour little epigraph, reflecting- if anything- Larkin's self-centred view of the universe, of fate. I find it more interesting than that.

This brief, quirky poem has always intrigued me. It has a cinematic quality about it, or more exactly, the quality of a special effects sequence or video game, even.

For sure, to interpret such a prosaic event (missing a wastepaper basket with a thrown apple core) in such doom-laden terms, even to invest it with any meaning at all, appears indulgent. More significant to me, however, is where Larkin takes this conceit. Bad luck is blamed at first. The blame then shifts to "failure". In other words, an inherent, predetermined force is detected, always connecting the throwing hand with the core with the rim of the wastepaper basket. It is this omnipresent, almost concrete causality that allows the events to be run backwards in the second stanza, like a reel of film.

Larkin takes this reading back further than merely aiming the core at the basket to "the apple unbitten in the palm". Firstly, this emphasises the omnipresence of the ill fate that leads to the shied effort. The speaker was doomed to miss even before he had eaten the apple and decided to throw the core across the room. Secondly, the state of suspended animation described in the last two lines serves as an antithesis to the uncontrollable, chaotic forces of nature acting on the collision described at the beginning.

The past is frequently figured as a frozen (immobile) utopia by Larkin, unreachable yet maddeningly vivid in the memory. In 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album', he writes:

...a past no one now can share,
...calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie
Unvariably lovely there,
Smaller and clearer as the years go by.

Similarly, in 'As Bad as a Mile', the "calm" and "unraised" hand and the "unbitten" apple represent an inviolate past to contrast with the imperfect, unsatisfactory now.

The converse view is arguably put by 'Whatever Happened?' where the past is found to be 'kodak-distant', but in the sense of a disposable print. Eventually even this recedes to mere "latitude", a point on a map. Then it is nothing but a bad dream:

...next day
All's kodak-distant...

'Perspective brings significance,' we say,
...snap!
What can't be printed can be thrown away.

Later, it's just a latitude...

...Where's the source
Of these yarns now (except in nightmares, of course)?

The difference in 'Whatever Happened?' is that it deals with a past trauma and a universal instinct to deny and defer such experience. In 'As Bad as a Mile', it is the perceived imperfection of now that leads the speaker to isolate and idealise the past.

Ambulances

When I was at university I and the other members of my 'Literary Criticism' tutorial group were asked, in turn, to select two poems a week for communal dissection. There was a string of offerings from Tennyson, Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Yeats and the like. When, towards the end of term, my 'go' came around, I selected 'Ambulances' by Philip Larkin (the other was 'Death & Co' by Sylvia Plath). In so doing, I was fully aware of the potential accusations of morbidity and a deliberate attempt to shock or be 'different'. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

'Ambulances' in particular I chose because of its prosaic imagery (which I was very keen on at the time) and because of the rhetoric at the end, calmly and cogently revealing the speaker's response to an experience.

I still love the solemn music of the final two stanzas, the understatement of the metaphors:

For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there

At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable inside a room
The traffic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.

Never in the poem does Larkin use words 'life' or 'death'. Instead, the latter becomes "solving emptiness", "what is left to come", or even just "it" (they "for a second get it whole"). Yet the use of "deadened" as a 'merely' decorative or descriptive adjective (applied to the air) reinforces the uncomfortable, unspoken presence of the word's 'Signified'.

That "may" employed in the second line of the penultimate verse is an ironic understatement. On the other hand, the omniscience of the speaker is undermined as even he cannot say for sure what it is that is borne away inside the ambulance. This serves to reiterate the severance of daily life all around from the contents of the mobile "room", which "traffic parts to let go by" (a powerful line expressed in simple terms).

The first verse employs a familiar device, likening the visitation of death upon successive individuals to a round: "All streets in time are visited." There are similar instances throughout Larkin's work:

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
['Aubade']

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

Every few minutes comes a kind of nurse

To fetch someone away
['The Building']

Something else that appealed to me in 'Ambulances', and which- it seems to me- is evident elsewhere, is an insistence on 'here-and-now'. I mean that the verse is always aware of the fashions and habits of its time. It is a subtly conveyed in snatches such as "Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque", describing the appearance of ambulances of the early 1960s. And it is more readily apparent in poems like 'Here' ("red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes") and 'The Large Cool Store' ("Bri-Nylon Baby-Dolls and Shorties"). Similarly, in 'Broadcast', there are "slightly outmoded shoes", in 'The Whitsun Weddings':

...the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves and olive-ochres...

However much Larkin insisted that his verse belonged to a timeless English Tradition, it was always of its time. I don't refer to the inferior, often brutish "topical" doggerel like 'Homage to a Government'. It is manifest rather in nuances of image, as above, and leaves me in no doubt to which decade each of his lifetime collections belongs. Perhaps I am influenced too by the fact that the four collections were published in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s.

Yet Larkin appears to acknowledge the power of the here-and-now in 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album', where he writes of photography that it shows:

[t]hat this is a real girl in a real place,

In every sense empirically true!
Or is it just the past? ...you
Contract my heart by looking out of date.

See also: 'Aubade', 'Days', 'The Building', 'Here', 'The Large Cool Store'

The Importance of Elsewhere

Sunny Prestatyn

First Sight

Dockery and Son

The first half of this poem constitutes a narrative, witty and well-observed, but little more than a backdrop for the more reflective last three stanzas.

The dialogue with the college dean nicely captures insincerity and diversion. The speaker's response to being in his former place of residence is a familiar sense of distance and disappointment. But the catalyst for deeper self-analysis is a chance comment, hidden in the opening verse: "'His son's here now.'"

Many of us will recognise the shock of time passing felt when confronted with a set of unexpected temporal reference points:

...But Dockery, good Lord
Anyone up today must have been born
In '43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty?

The speaker's subsequent introspection is unsurprising. Now aged forty-one, he ponders the fact that he is neither married nor yet a father. In themselves, these self-doubts would be unremarkable. It is the way that his responses are developed that is interesting.

They progress from "only a numbness" to a more traumatic, almost panicky self-questioning. Pressing his moral reasoning into a reaction to apparent inadequacy, his tone is at first accusatory:

Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution.

Immediately, he seems to recognise this barb as unsubstantiated, and goes on to challenge such "innate assumptions". This challenge runs to the end of the poem, and is as convoluted as any piece of Larkin rhetoric.

First, he denies that such assumptions spring from faith or desire. Those two qualities are unreachable: they "warp tight-shut, like doors". It is unclear whether they are never attainable or merely become so at some point in our youth. The fact that this image echoes an earlier sentence ("I try the door of where I used to live: / Locked.") seems to imply the latter interpretation.

Instead, assumptions are blamed on the laziness of day-to-day life, and woolly thinking:

They're more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we've got

Enigmatically, Larkin claims that these vague, habitual prejudices not only become concrete quasi-beliefs, but are their own source. This, at least is how I understand the amplification, "they harden into all we've got / And how we got it" [my emphasis]. Thus the argument becomes circular. What we believe now is merely the product of habitual thinking. At the same time, this hardened faith seems to be the origin of what we assume.

Pursuing the conceit, the speaker visualises these habits / beliefs as "sand-clouds, thick and close". That they should seem near is ironic. For they are "looked back on", and therefore inhabit the past. As so often with Larkin, the past and present are conflated. His thoroughly nostalgic poetic voice frequently means that present experience is enlivened only by a jolting "reference back". In his poem of the same name, Larkin writes of "this sudden bridge" between now and then. Similarly, in 'Love Songs in Age', finding dog-eared manuscripts sparks a wave of nostalgia "like a spring-woken tree", and causes "[t]he glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love" to "[break] out" again.

Yet there is more to this than mere rose-coloured vision. Larkin's ultimate conclusions are bleaker and, in their own way, braver in facing death. Just as he recognises that death is indifferent to our attitude towards it (whether "whined at or withstood"), he evinces a similar attitude to life:

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes

I shall return to this final conclusion. Before he reaches it, he develops the dust-cloud trope further. Sinisterly, the sand-clouds of faith(lessness) metamorphose into two figures, "embodying / For Dockery a son" but for the speaker "nothing". Characteristically, and for some maddeningly, Larkin lets "nothing" itself stand as a metaphor. For me, he fact that he has one sand-cloud embody a son, another nothing is a radical use of language.

Larkin could simply have had one dust-cloud figure representing 'Dockery Junior', and nothing representing his offspring. But the speaker has his own dusty mirage, which, although he equates it with "nothing", allows the possibility that his life's work is actually no less substantial than Dockery's.

And this implication is lent further weight by the final grim assertion cited above. We wrongly believe that we control our own fate, and hence our legacy, when it is merely "what something hidden from us chose".

But it is the final line that affects me most in 'Dockery and Son'. The speaker repeatedly amplifies on his bleak 'bottom line':

[Life] goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
[my emphasis]

Reiterating "and" has the effect, not of "increase", nor of "dilution", but of focus. It makes the reader realise that however the legacy of a life is described, the conclusion is the same.

This poem has always been popular, and it is rightly regarded as one of Larkin's best. His restrained mastery of language and image, from the unadorned opening lines, is sustained to the end:

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone

If one looks at a picture of the tomb in question, one can see how apposite Larkin's simple description of the eroded carvings is. The illustration is complete, but Larkin goes beyond mere illustration, language soon becoming decorated with irony.

"Their proper habits" refers both to garments hewn into stone, but also to the supposed correctness of behaviour associated with a courtly age. Yet even in the first stanza, the speaker impliedly casts doubt upon this interpretation of former manners, by describing them as only "vaguely shown": can we really interpret centuries-old habit so positively? A reference to "stiffened pleat" implies the restrictiveness of conventional behaviour. The "absurd" pet dogs propping the feet of master and mistress further deflates potential grandeur.

Indeed, by the second stanza, the speaker is losing interest in the plain, pre-baroque monument. Then the famous "grace" is spotted; the earl has removed the gauntlet on one hand to hold the bare hand of his countess. But if one is seeking a simple, dewy-eyed response to this romantic detail, it never comes. Instead, as he so often does, Larkin ponders the truth behind the apparently brilliant gesture of love.

Immediately after completing his visual delineation ("His hand withdrawn, holding her hand") Larkin includes the crucial sentence:

They would not think to lie so long.

The irony is almost too obvious in the double-meaning of "lie". First, that the couple could never have imagined their tomb persisting so many centuries so little molested. Second, that the couple could never have imagined that what was a cheeky afterthought (the "sweet commissioned grace" of her hand in his) could so long be wrongly interpreted as the underlying significance of their monument.

What saves this conceit from becoming a mere pun is the subtlety with which it is expressed, as well as the novelty and clarity of Larkin's response to it. For the speaker considers that:

Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see

The tone is almost harsh in asserting that this was true. This detail was merely "thrown off". Further, there is an implication of vanity in the assertion that its purpose, beyond amusing mourners, was to help maintain their reputation: "to prolong / The Latin names around the base".

Here, perhaps, Larkin's control slips very slightly. He records a kind of epochal "dumbing-down" ("How soon succeeding eyes begin / To look, not read.") This in turn might imply that interpreting the detail as a device to further the models' reputations (significantly carved in Latin) simply suits the speaker's view of the modern "unarmorial" world as ignorant or at best unrefined.

However, even if the certainty with which Larkin ascribes the carved detail to a "hardly meant" whim is questionable, the deftness with which he describes the passing of centuries around the tomb is not. Delicate language is employed, in stark contrast to the hardness of stone:

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would turn to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away

Larkin turns to his lyrical, fantastical tendency in envisaging time like a stop-motion camera: light coming and going, snow falling and melting away, above all the ceaseless march of human visitors to the tomb.

The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.

By emphasising this aspect of the temporal, the speaker is placing himself in the tradition of homage and impliedly involving the reader more immediately. But in truth, an analysis of the final three stanzas cannot do justice to the evocative power of Larkin's language. The last verse attempts to reassert the certainty of the earlier interpretation of the hand-in-hand gesture, but does so in a way that inevitably renders it more open-ended.

"Time has transfigured them into / Untruth." This sounds unequivocal enough. Yet Larkin soon evinces a typical ambivalence. By insisting that the meaning of the "stone fidelity" is deceptive (that it only seems to prove the durability of love) the speaker's certainty of this fact is undermined. When someone declaims "I am sure that this only appears to be so" one inevitably questions the correctness of that assertion.

To me, it is this quality of layers of truth slipping in different directions from one another that makes 'An Arundel Tomb' all the braver and more honest as an appraisal of love and our attitudes towards it.

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