The poetry of Philip Larkin-A reconsideration

THE POETRY OF PHILIP LARKIN A
RECONSIDERATION

MRS. NEELIMA MEHTA

Philip Larkin is the best known and most accomplished of the Movement Po­ets, the Movement school associated with Larkin, Davie, Enright, Guim, Elizabeth Jennings and their contemporaries, which flourished in 1950s. Larkin’s poetic works ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘The Less De­ceived’, ‘The North Ship’ and ‘High win­dows’ present very articulately and poignantly the spiritual desolation of a world which has lost religious faith. Sticking to common language, Larkin takes love and death as the main themes of his poetry. Death or transience as a theme runs throughout his poetry. Besides he writes about nature, describing beautiful land­scapes, and about his childhood memories. In some of his poems the subject is a tra­versed landscape. The poem ‘Here’, Larkin’s greatest poem, is one such poem. It progresses panoramic ally through the details of landscape. The poet pictures a car driver going east across the fens:

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all right north, Swering through fields,
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows

(Here, L 1-3)

More scenery is described
And the widening river’s slow presence
The piled gold clouds, the shinning gull marked mud
and then through the old harbour
district out on the east side of the
flat land stretching to the beach

Here silence stands
Like heat, Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously - peopled air ascends,
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
of shapes and shingle, Here is
unfenced existence
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

(Here, L 25-32)

Larkin describes superb landscape here and it is his most uncluttered and lucid landscape poem. In ‘To the Sea’ also he gives us natural scenes with

The small hushed waves repeated fresh
collapse up the warm yellow sand,

and describes the scene at the steep beach and blue water of the sea. Solitude is an­other theme which is strongly and sadly evoked in his poems. ‘Best Society’, ‘Vers de Societe’, ‘Mr, Bleaney’ and ‘At Thirty One’ are some of them. The poems ‘The Old Fools’ and ‘Aubade’ also express the feeling of loneliness. In ‘Mr. Bleaney’ the poet goes to live in some dismal and bare lodgings where a garrulous landlady inces­santly tells him about all the habits and rela­tions of Mr. Bleaney, the previous incum­bent. Larkin ends reflecting that all this talk can’t tell him about Bleaney’s inner imagina­tive life, private jokes and loneliness. The poem is permeated with a kind of land­scape-that-might-have been:

Flowered curtains, thin and frayed
Fall to within five inches of the sill.
whose windows show a strip of building and
Tussocky littered, ‘Mr. Bleaney took,
My bit of garden properly in hand...
(Here, L 3-7)

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself if that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know
(Here, L 21-28)

Another poem from the same volume (The Whitsun Weddings), ‘Home is so sad’ has the same feeling of isolation and loneli­ness, where according to Larkin Home is a left over, ‘shaped to the comfort of the last to go’ and having in it only things like, in the last line, ‘The music in the piano-stool, That vase’. The poem itself is sad, a longing forwhat could have been. Many of his poems, in fact, record his experience of loneliness and anguish with lyrical beauty.

Larkin glimpses wedding in various circumstances, and creates poems out of these. Some of these are ‘Wedding Wind’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘lines on a young lady’s Photograph Album’, ‘After noons’, ‘Annus Mirabilis’ and ‘Wild Oats’)’. In many of his poems the setting is the journey by train or car in which Larkin himself is a pas­senger ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is one such poems. Here the train going south from the countryside into the city (From Fens to Lon­don) takes abroad more and more newly married couples on Whit Saturday. The newly married couples come serially on the train with the same staged movement as the spots of scenery that go past it. At first there is the ‘Street of blinding windscreens’, ‘the rivers level drifting breadth’ and then ‘the tall heat that slept! For miles inland’. Then, much latter, the train approaches London where ‘fields were building plots, and poplars cast! long shadows over major roads’, till finally ‘We raced across / bright knots of rail / past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss’, images tingling with sexuality as marriage consummation is reached. But all of this is paralleled by the wedding events which punctuate each stop on the journey.

All down the line
Fresh couples climbed abroad:
the rest stood round,
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face
seemed to define
Just what it saw departing:
children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known
(The Whitsun Weddings, L 45-50)

The poem ends, as it began, in stasis:

We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow­-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere be coming rain.
(The Whitsun Weddings, L 77-80)

Larkin slots in the details with such astonishing and infallible accuracy that one wants to quote every line.

In another poem concerning wedding, ‘Wedding Wind’, a woman on the mourning after her wedding night wonderingly turns over the fact of her happiness. The wind is blowing with great force. But she thinks that such violent elements have no relevance to the new delight she has found. The whole of creation seems some how to be in union           with her state.

Can it be borne, this bodying forth by wind
Of joy my actions turn on, like a thread
Carrying beads? Shall I be let to sleep
Now this perpetual morning shares my bed

Can even death dry up
These new delighted lakes, conclude
Our kneeling as cattle by all
generous waters (Wedding-Wind, I 18-24)

Yet though it is happy and joyous it is not quite serene: it implies the impermanence of the very happiness it celebrates, the possibility of its being blown and scattered. Another theme of his poetry is religious faith of the present generation many of Larkin’s poems are set in or about church. ‘Church going’, the poet contemplates the past sig­nificance and present decline of the church. The protagonist is bicycling aimlessly and all of a sudden his attention is arrested by a church. He enters the church just like a ca­sual visitor, devoid of any religious convic­tion. He wonders to look at the different contents - “Matting - seats and stone etc.” ­as if it were a museum. He also reads out the religious verses inscribed on the church walls and puts an Irish six pence in the charity box. Then he takes a pragmatic view and thinks of the utility of such places in a com­plete atheistic age.

wondering what to look for; wondering too
When churches fall completely out of use
What shall we turnthem into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
And let the rest rent free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
(Church Going, L 21-27)

The poem is a meditation on the death of religious faith. Submerged in spiritual chaos the contemporary civilisation has threatened church with extinction and the poet is compelled to meditate over the gradual loss of faith among people. But in the end the poet accepts seriously the hu­man ‘hunger’ for ritual and order which is enshrined in churches.

Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
which he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round
(Church Going, I 59-63)
The poet reaches a serious conclu­sion that is still unresolved. This poem is one of the most interesting poems in ‘The Less Deceived’.

Besides other themes death is one of the prominent themes of his poetry. Dimunition, decay or transience as a theme runs through his poetry. In ‘Next Please’, death is presented symbolistically as

Only one ship is seeking us, a black
Sailed familiar, towing at her

A huge and birdless silence, in her wake
No waters breed or break.
(Next Please, L 21-24)

The dark image described gives us a chilling touch, there is ‘birdless silence’ and ‘No waters breed’. In his other poems death has been mentioned as ‘they only end of age’ & ‘what is left to come’ etc.

Larkin shows death hidden in institu­tions or large brick buildings with clinical wards (i.e. hospitals) and we are taken there in machines called ambulances (as in the poem so named). The poems ‘The Build­ing’ and ‘Ambulances’ have death or tran­sience as their first poem opens with such details that it is only gradually one realises that the place being described is a hospital. In the end the poet achieves the realisation.

All know they are going to die
Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,
And somewhere like this, that is what it means,
This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend.
The thought of dying, for unless its
powers Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes.
The coming dark, though crowds each evening try
With wasteful, week, propitiatory flowers.
(The Building, L 57-64)

In ‘Dockery and Son’ Larkin reflects on death with terrible bareness and clarify.

Life is first boredom, than fear
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose
And age and then the only end of age.
(Dockery and son, L 45-48)

Though famous autobiographical poem is on the subject of knowledge, the poet, here, tries to make psychological ad­vances in the experience of self conscious­ness and self knowledge. Visiting his old university (Oxford), the poet learns that a current undergraduate is the son of one of his own contemporaries of years before. On the long train journey homeward, he thinks about this, Shrugs it off, falls asleep, changes trains and turns it over further, but still hours later can’t escape the questioning in the end, about life and death. He says “Why did he think adding meant increase? To me it was dilution”.

Larkin shows his concern over the present state of England. He thinks England is in practice being turned over to develop­ers and bulldozers.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes.
The guild halls, the carved choirs
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries, but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
(Going Going; L 44-49)

To conclude, Larkin’s poems are footed in day-to-day events and his words heighten the common place experience. In ‘Ambulances’ children in the road and women coming from the shop & suddenly catch sight of the ambulance. In ‘Church Going’ the unbeliever enters in empty church in habitual curiosity and lingers, tensed by his own questions of the ‘serious house on serious earth’. In ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ the poet describes a Whitsuntide train jour­ney on which the poet gradually wakes up to the sequence of wedding parties etc. Individual though Larkin is, he often reflects common experiences and common con­cerns. He distills poetry from the objects of life or atmosphere around him, the objects or situations that most people would regard as dull or unremarkable. In his poetry the ordinary things, places and moments of life are invested with a much deeper meaning. He is a poet of observation par-excellence.