On a Minor Poem of Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin, who lived a life of quiet desperation, working as a librarian nearly all his adult life, managed to achieve the status of best-loved poet in England over the last half of the 20th Century. Larkin was not an attractive man. His poems are modest, his assertions cautious, his manner self-effacing (even self-deprecating). Nevertheless, Larkin can be moving. One of my favorites, which I first read as an undergraduate at Berkeley in the Sixties, is

 

                                    Here

 

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows

And traffic all night north; swerving through fields

Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,

And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields

Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude

Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,

And the widening river's slow presence,

The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

 

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:

Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster

Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,

And residents from raw estates, brought down

The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,

Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires--

Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,

Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers--

 

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling

Where only salesmen and relations come

Within a terminate and fishy-smelling

Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,

Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;

And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges

Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,

Isolate villages, where removed lives

 

Loneliness clarifies. 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.  

 

 

Having fed myself a steady diet of Spender, Auden and Betjeman (among the English), I initially found this writing to be unambitious, clipped, cowed, even timid.  

 

Why, then, did it speak to me? What was I responding to? The superficial mannerisms of the style seem so stolidly dull--like so much of the careful, stodgy versifying that characterized the dutiful, respectful Fifties--that it's hard to see how Larkin makes it work so well for his purposes. Perhaps it's precisely Larkin's self-deprecating stance that makes such lines a kind of simultaneous burlesque of that tended conservatism of form, a resigned, reluctant indulgence in mediocrity, limited possibility.           

The music of the poem made a claim on my admiration, partly, I think, through its apparent forsaken quality of sentiment. I imagined the speaker to be driving, perhaps desperately, seeking escape--from what didn't seem to matter. Driving all night, possibly, through the mixed countryside of industrial Britain, towards a seaside town, sea air, "unfenced existence."   

 

The catalogue of sights and landscape is accurate, but depressingly uninspiring: The messy edges between urban settlement, and a scrawny Nature that is anything but poetic in the Victorian sense. What a hopeless vision of 20th Century civilization it gives. This is the Britain of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, bleak, drab, and pointless. How shall the speaker define himself against this inertia of crumbling monotony? 

Britain was once a seafaring nation, an island nation. And it still is. How many generations of young men, hemmed in by the narrowest of expectation and custom, longed to escape to another reality? This is the symbolic tendency in the poem, its seaside vantage the launching point for a thousand--a hundred thousand--dreams of adventure.

But Larkin was a librarian, and no adventurer. He didn't travel, was socially somewhat inept, homely--the compass of his life was circumscribed by the predictable, the bland. So perhaps the poem serves as a kind of gesture, a quixotic turn. "Loneliness clarifies"--the phrase almost overemphasized by its placement at the line break to the subsequent 4th stanza, the heavy accent upon "CLAR-i-fies"--suggests that the value in such an exercise, a spin to the coast over familiar terrain, is in the confirmation of the limits we may know by heart, even despise, but must ruefully accept, maybe even welcome. This precarious balance between the rejection and the acceptance of what modern life may offer us--not the fake version, but the real tawdry one of our daily round--is what animates Larkin's best poems. We may long for the rawness and bracing challenge of direct experience, but we know in our bones how much we cherish the modern paradigm of limited comfort.