These are my customs and establishments.
It would be much more serious to refuse.
—Philip Larkin
“The Importance of Elsewhere”
                                                            A man who ought to know me
                                                            wrote in a review
                                                            my emotional life was meagre.

—Donald Davie “July, 1964”

In his recent collection of lectures, Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric, Donald Davie argues that, because of twentieth-century history, the lyric poet has lost the privilege of being responsible only to himself and his emotions. Therefore, he must find a way to speak for more than himself. The late twentieth-century search for a more representative self is not peculiar to our era. Keats sought it in his attempts at empathy, in the very negative capability now associated with the self-involved lyric and against which Davie reacts. Davie himself has sought in his poems a larger expression, while at the same time acknowledging the limits of the lyric that make such an expression impossible. “In the Stopping Train,” one of Davie's finest poems, is an attempt to understand the insufficiency of lyric by subjecting the poet himself to nearly merciless critical examination.

It is helpful to compare Davie's poem, from his 1977 volume of the same name, with the title poem of Philip Larkin's 1964 collection of poems. “In the Stopping Train” seems, in part, a response to “The Whitsun Weddings” and not merely because both record journeys on stopping or local trains, but because the former presents a totally different role for the poet from that of the latter. The irony is that Larkin, in his poem, is not nearly as wrapped up in himself as Davie is in his. Yet Larkin's detachment from his subject has been cause for serious criticism, and quite rightly.

First of all, justifying his own ways to those of his fellowmen has never been the problem for Larkin that it is for Davie, except as Larkin has been too much like other people, letting “the toad work squat” on his life for example, or not enough like them, as in “Annus Mirabilis” where he admits to being a very late bloomer. Larkin is at his best when posing as the curious observer or when absent altogether. His self-effacement has been called smugness, though it might be seen as modesty. Davie's self-examination is not its opposite exactly, but more a search for humility, for atonement. But Davie is a Christian poet, and Larkin is not.

Existential anxiety is not present in “The Whitsun Weddings.” Once Larkin boards his train on a hot Saturday afternoon at Whitsuntide, he feels “all sense / Of being in a hurry gone.” The windows are down, the cushions are hot, but he pretty much has the car to himself, and after observing the urban landscape giving way to countryside as the train makes its way from Lincolnshire to London, he begins to read. The landscape is important to Larkin, especially as it retains its rural features and as they are lost or marred. Despite the poem's fame, stanza 2 is worth quoting entirely.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
                              For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

All of Larkin's strengths are present here, including his love of and doubts about pastoral England: his eye for the telling image—those cattle, that hothouse, those canals—his extraordinary gift for the simple yet perfect imagistic phrase, “the tall heat,” and even his way of pointing to a poem's central intelligence, the annoyed reference to “the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth.” Yet it is the little drama of the poem, beginning in the third stanza and continuing through the next six until the end, that requires an assessment of Larkin's particular, even peculiar temperament as a lyric poet. It requires one because, in this poem at least, none is offered by the poet himself.

Both American and British critics have noted Larkin's superior air in this poem. Blake Morrison in his book The Movement says that Larkin “seems to patronize as well as to pity” the working-class wedding parties he observes at each train depot. Merle Brown in an essay on Larkin's audience published in the Iowa Review in 1977 is downright censorious, but he puts his finger on the problem of how much the lyric poet can represent himself and others. Brown writes,

In “The Whitsun Weddings” … Larkin takes on the sovereign privileges of … invisible, unnameable observing even though he also presents himself as a visible, existent, individual entity. He should have recognized that such a hybrid is inadmissible in poetry the likes of his. By bringing the act of attending into the scene, he has unknowingly committed an obscenity, in the sense that he has brought on stage what by its nature must occur offstage.

Strong stuff. But what Larkin has done in this poem is no more than what Tolstoy does in War and Peace, except that it violates our expectations of the first-person point of view, especially in a poem where we implicitly take that point of view to be the poet's himself.

What Larkin does is to presume to understand what is going on in the minds and hearts of the people he sees. Once he realizes the noise at each stop is not merely workers on the platforms but truly an event—the last weddings of the Whitsun week, portions of festivals that have marked the week for centuries—he is interested.

Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms.

Granted, the catalog of Larkinesque caricatures that follows is smugly satirical. On the platforms waving good-bye to the newlyweds are fathers with “seamy foreheads,” “Mothers loud and fat,” “An uncle shouting smut,” and girls in their “parodies of fashion,” including “jewellery-substitutes.” Yet Larkin's eye is typically English, picking out as it does the limited expectations, the cheapness at the end of empire; what it sees has been a theme of British literature since World War II. But Larkin penetrates the phenomenon more deeply here, understanding it even as he seems to push it away, and to do this he assumes an omniscience based on shared experience. He observes that this event is witnessed in different ways, by children as “dull,” by fathers as “Success … huge and wholly farcical,” by the women as a “secret like a happy funeral,” and by the girls themselves as “a religious wounding.”

Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London …

Critics of this poem point out that Larkin either fails or refuses to see his place among the dozen marriages that have “got underway” on the train with him, and that he presumes even further to speak for them, when he notes,

                                                            none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.

Only he sees this coming together, “this frail / Travelling coincidence,” where in fact he is the odd man out. Although we might express irritation with him, to censor him is to deny the emotional accuracy of the poem. His removal from the others, his difference from them, may have resulted in complacent self-regard, but it is not alienation. It does allow him to see the event whole, and his personal affection for it is related to his love for England itself. When he recognizes what is going on, his response is “Yes.” This response is an affirmation, too. Larkin affirms the persistence of Whitsun festivities. He also affirms the weddings themselves with the blessing that ends the poem, when he imagines that, after the train stops, what it holds will continue on “like an arrow-shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.” Finally, however we may object to the condescending tone of this, it is not an emotion that any of the other passengers—the newlyweds—would have had; rather, it is one felt for them.

“In the Stopping Train” may be the poem Larkin's critics are looking for in “The Whitsun Weddings.” Davie's train passenger would enjoy Larkin's serene outward look, too, if he believed it would do any good. But Davie's rage is inward and is aimed precisely at what divides him from others, including himself. The rhythm of “The Whitsun Weddings” is unhurried. Its eight ten-line stanzas rhyme ababcdecde; five of the eight dovetail with the stanza following them; all but the second line of each stanza is in iambic pentameter; only that second line, in iambic dimeter, registers the jolt of the train's stopping and starting, if it is meant to imitate anything. Davie's poem, in ten unnumbered parts, with stanzas appearing as couplets, tercets, quatrains, does not flow smoothly from strophe to strophe over bright knots of rhyme like Larkin's. Instead, it reflects in its lurching, enjambed, trimeter lines not only the speaker's anguish but the train's frustrating stop and start. Davie's train trip is neither as comfortable nor as magisterial as Larkin's. It lacks, too, Larkin's sweeping way with a metaphor in which he can speak of well-wishers left behind on boarding platforms

As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it.

But Davie's cramped, self-analytical ride does give us a narrative structure that exists as more than a route to an end. It is the mode by which the commonplace event—taking a train somewhere—is invested with the urgency to have understood oneself before the end of the journey. Davie's poem, then, has the greater symbolic and emotional resonance.

Part 1 of “In the Stopping Train” gets right to the matter, yet at the same time it begins probing for the heart of the poet's unhappiness.

I have got into the slow train
again. I made the mistake
knowing what I was doing,
knowing who had to be punished.
I know who has to be punished:
the man going mad inside me;
whether I am fleeing
from him or towards him.

The tone of puritanical self-loathing is quite clear, but is boarding this train “again” a recurrent error or, as he implies, a deliberate punishment? The self divided from the self has to be punished, in part, for his lack of charity.

He abhors his fellows,
especially children; let there
not for pity's sake
be a crying child in the carriage.
So much for pity's sake.

This is the first of the bitterly humorous remarks made at the speaker's own expense throughout the poem. Is there a crying child on the carriage to which the “So much for pity's sake” has been directed? Or does the wish defeat any notion of pity, even that suggested by the expression “for pity's sake”? The fascination of this poem is the total lack of objectivity. No flowers will be observed, no architecture or landscapes will be noted simply for pleasure as in the Larkin poem. Instead, language about them will be analyzed.

Jonquil is a sweet word.
Is it a flowering bush?
Let him helplessly wonder
for hours if perhaps he’s seen it.

Davie zeroes in on the culprit—it is the artist, the man going mad inside him with a self-involved passion, who “never needed to see, / not with his art to help him.” It is this figure, too, who has hatreds and loves, though false. He is the passionate figure who, for reasons not yet clear aside from his selfishness, must be punished.

Meanwhile, he displays for us his various artistic and intellectual strengths as he tries to understand his situation. The play of language, of tones of voice, and of rhythm predominate in Davie's poem, whereas in Larkin's imagery and metaphor are foremost. Part 2 of “In the Stopping Train” contains the most moving of Davie's wordplay; it is affecting because it touches on the larger symbolism of this ride.

A stopping train, I thought,
was a train that was going to stop.
Why board it then, in the first place?
Oh no, they explained, it is stopping
and starting, stopping and starting.

Here, “they” are adults; the exchange recalls their voices. In this section there is a child in the carriage after all. Having understood the adult assurances, Davie says, “I saw the logic of that; / grown-ups were good at explaining.” But the starting and the stopping of the train do not keep it from getting to the end of the line. As broad as the hint becomes here—“even expresses have to do that”—still, there is a power in this internal dialogue, this analysis of memory. The child Davie is not sure the adults understand his anxiety about riding such a train, and the adults show this by ending the conversation.

Well, they said, you’ll learn
all about that when you’re older.
Of course they learned it first.
Oh naturally, yes.

Is it mortality, then, that has been the source of the inner man's, the artist's madness? The resentful tone of the last lines is mitigated by one of resignation. This is one of the poem's quietest moments.

Davie shows a distinct temperament in part 3; that is, it is distinct from Larkin's ironic detachment. Regarding the reckless traffic on the highway that runs beside the train, the “passing and re-passing” of cars with “a recklessness like breeding,” “he is shrieking silently: ‘Rabbits!’ “To follow this with the refrain “He abhors his fellows” may be seen as an understatement. Yet the British use of the rabbit, despite its cutesified transformation in Watership Down, is instructive. Larkin's “Myxomatosis,” ostensibly about the disease spread to control the rabbit population in Britain after World War II, ends with lines that could be meant to indict an aspect of the British character,

You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.

And there is in The Wind in the Willows, of all places, Kenneth Grahame's characterization of the rabbits who never wish to be involved, whose response is “Do something? Us rabbits?” Davie's epithet here may carry these connotations, along with the angry one of the sterile condemning the mindlessly procreative. Yet, this dissonance is resolved.

Yet even the meagre arts
of television can
restore them to him sometimes,
when the man in uniform faces
the unrelenting camera
with a bewildered fierceness
beside the burnt-out Simca.

Confronted by the record of urban, probably terrorist violence, in which “his fellows,” individuals like those he has been cursing, have been victimized and the representative of order, “the man in uniform,” must make sense for the masses watching, Davie is capable of what he claims to lack—pity, perhaps even charity.

Lest we be seduced by this harmonic moment, however, the splenetic voice returns in part 4, growling, “What’s all this about flowers?” He observes that “Some people claim to love them.” Here the poet is faced with the full power of a word's meaning and the need to justify it to his own intelligence.

Love them? Love flowers?
Love,
love … the word is hopeless:
gratitude, maybe, pity. …
Pitiful, the flowers.

Again, as with the rueful “So much for pity's sake,” the notion of pity being misaligned with its object has wit. But “love” is the most important word in the poem, the word the poem resolves on, its last word, in fact. These flowers are pitiful because they are merely words, or merely a word, and the poet “can name them all, / identify hardly any.” The madness, the passion, and the spleen here are vented because of an inability or a refusal to apply to reality the names the poet has for it, including “love.” Nominalists make for anxious Christians.

Part 5 is interesting for a number of reasons. First, though not the most important, is that in Davie's recent Selected Poems, it has been deleted from the poem. Second, and more important, it helps to characterize the speaker, to identify him more closely with Davie. It is subtitled “Judith Wright, Australian.” Why would this particular character be thinking about the Australian poet Judith Wright? It would be simple enough to say that, well, Donald Davie is the speaker and he thinks of quite a lot of things to do with English literature, especially contemporary sorts. Has Davie carefully created a fictional self or selves for this poem? We already know the character has a literary bent; here he is giving an opinion that appears first to be gratuitous but, on a closer look, is not. Our speaker is occupying his time with more than internal agony and outward grousing. He is writing or thinking about somebody else.

Judith Wright, Australian,
‘has become,’ I said,
‘the voice of her unhappy,
still-to-be-guilty nation.’
Wistfully I said it,
there in the stopping train.

A literary man can be believed to be writing or thinking about a review, for example, as he takes even the most miserable of rides; after all, he has time, and there is the leisure to work on a train. The greater import here, however, is that Davie has recognized that a poet can be the voice of an entire nation. Though guilt is that nation's inheritance, he assigns Wright's voice to it wistfully, with a melancholy wish. Australia's history has been, though it is no longer, bound up in England's. England has had its voices, but the singular spokesman has faded along with empire. For whom today does the contemporary English poet speak? Here he speaks only for himself and his own guilt.

In part 6 the poem turns and the speaker faces himself.

The things he has been spared …
“Gross egotist!” Why don’t
his wife, his daughter, shrill
that in his face?
Love and pity seem
the likeliest explanations;
another occurs to him—
despair too would be quiet.

These lines look back to the rumination of part 5 and ahead to those to come. What he has been spared is any concern for or obligation to anything besides his profession. Here “Love and pity” are introduced, although this time not as part of a witty self-satire, but as solemn recognitions of his family's indulgence. They are joined by another motive, in a play on Thoreau's famous observation, here personalized and all the more poignant. Our speaker himself is living a life not of quiet desperation but, if his inner turmoil is an indication, of noisy desperation. His self-disgust is partly with the ridiculous figure cut by the ranting inner man. Love, pity, and despair, in the form of those closest to him, regard his anguish sadly and quietly.

Part 7 is the most rhythmically compelling of the poem. At this point, rather than apologize, Davie rears up and justifies his professional activities in martial terms.

Time and again he gave battle,
furious, mostly effective;
nobody counts the wear
and tear of rebuttal.

He has not shrunk from controversy. He has even been proud of the stands he has taken, although there is some question about their lasting importance. Finally, playing on his favorite metaphor of poetry as sculpture, an art worked in a durable medium, he admits that his intellect and emotions have been “hardened” by his engagements. One can make a list of the many stands Davie has taken in his career, the areas of intellectual and artistic endeavor he has pronounced for—and against—and recognize this as an honest assessment of the man by the man himself. The phrase “Time and again” that begins each of the section's five quatrains and the rhymes in each stanza, rare in this poem, give the section its power. Yet the single most powerful stanza in the poem derives its strength from an apparent disruption.

Time and again, oh time and
that stopping train!
Who knows when it comes to a stand,
and will not start again.

Once more, the emblematic nature of this train is emphasized; the subject and the form could not be more closely welded.

Part 8 brings a change of tone, one that approaches the second stanza of “The Whitsun Weddings.” As I have argued, there is a calmness, even a serenity, to Larkin's point of view that allows him to see the big picture, or what he imagines to be the big picture, without coming himself to any sort of intense self-realization. That is not his point, to be sure. Davie, on the other hand, shows us active and painful self-division. As he recognizes this state for what it is, he detaches himself from it so to speak, and in this section speaks more in Larkin's disinterested tone. Part 8 is also subtitled, in parenthesis, “Son et Lumière.” It is as if the window of the stuffy car were opened for a moment.

I have travelled with him many times
now. Already we nod,
we are almost on speaking terms.
Once I thought that he sketched
an apologetic gesture
at what we turned away from.

He describes how his traveling companion's glasses caught the light as he turned away, and comes to the following passage of deft, impressionistic landscape painting.

I knew they had been ranging,
paired eyes like mine,
igniting and occluding
coppice and crisp chateau,
thatched corner, spray of leaf,
curved street, a swell of furrows,
where still the irrelevant vales
were flowering, and the still
silver rivers slid west.

This is called having your cake and eating it, too. Though the spectacles blind the viewer and though the vales are called “irrelevant,” the self-laceration is missing here in words like “crisp,” “thatched,” “spray,” “curved,” “swell,” “flowering,” and “silver.” The sounds are gorgeous and forgiving.

Perhaps they hint at a reconciliation not to occur in this poem. An intenser rhythm returns in part 9, albeit with a sprightliness that includes a recognition of the landscape's redemptive properties. Here, too, the play of voices is most apparent and effective. If for this character “words alone are certain good,” then admitting this leads to a sort of acclamation of what our fellow can do—play with words.

The dance of words
is a circling prison, thought
the passenger staring through
the hot unmoving pane
of boredom. It is not
thank God a dancing pain,
he thought, though it starts to jig
now. (The train is moving.) “This,”
he thought in rising panic
(Sit down! Sit down!)
“this much I can command,
exclude. Dulled words, keep still!
Be the inadequate, cloddish
despair of me!” No good:
they danced, as the smiling land
fled past the pane, the pun's
galvanized tarantelle.

This may be the most emotionally complicated section of the poem, since the dull words tie him to the earth (“cloddish”), tend to embarrass him as he grows excitable about their possibilities (“Sit down! Sit down!”), and bring on a “rising panic” with its connotations of terror and the power of Pan. The “dancing pain” becomes a “jig,” and the words, despite Davie's demurral, do dance. The landscape smiles, and the hot boredom of the poet's self-examination gives way, as was hinted in the previous section, to a momentary forgiveness in which we can hear not only the immediate wordplay on pane/pain, but reverberations between those words and the words “pun,” “panic,” and the important initiating circumstance, “punishment.” The punishing slow pace of this self-criticism has yielded, despite impending panic, to the play of words, yet still within the prison of language.

Davie is too much the puritan to let himself off on a gaudy note of consolation or to let his poem become a pastoral. The final part, its tenth, is at once the most varied tonally, the most self-revealing, and the most moving. The play becomes self-punishment again as Davie “pummels his temples.”

‘A shared humanity …’
… ‘Surely,
surely that means something?’
He knew too few in love,
too few in love.
That sort of foolish beard
masks an uncertain mouth.
And so it proved: he took
some weird girl off to a weird
commune, clutching at youth.
Dear reader, this is not
our chap, but another.
Catch our clean-shaven hero
tied up in such a knot?
A cause of so much bother?
He knew too few in love.

By the end of Larkin's poem, he knows many in love, e.g., all the newlyweds. But Davie knows, he claims, “too few.” Yet detachment like Larkin's could hardly be ascribed to what Davie does know and has observed. In one of the most risky satiric caricatures I can imagine, Davie first skewers what appears to be a contemporary, perhaps the victim of a midlife crisis, “clutching at youth.” Then he turns on himself and plays on the doubleness he has presented throughout the poem to emphasize that in no way are we to mistake “our chap” for “another.”

Catch our clean-shaven hero
tied up in such a knot?
A cause of so much bother?

What adds to the chill of this portrait is its echo of one in a similarly structured and similarly emotional poem, from Davie's Events and Wisdoms, “After an Accident.”

Death is about my age,
Smiling and dark, clean-shaven.

The “shared humanity” that must mean something has been glossed in numerous ways throughout the poem, as Davie responds to his possible carriage mates, to the remembered wisdom of grown-ups, to the traffic outside the train, to his wife and daughter, to the enviable position of Judith Wright who speaks for her nation, and to himself. Davie may not know what he means, but he does know how it feels to share the humanity of others, to be human. Larkin, on the other hand, does know what a shared humanity means, for others if not exactly for himself.

The most compelling and most ambiguous line in this section is the refrain, “He knew too few in love.” Michael Schmidt has read it simply as “He loved too few people.” That is the reading that makes the most sense. Yet there are subtler overtones that are compelling, too. In his knowledge of others there was not enough love. Of those he knew, too few were in love—even in love like the foolish bearded man with his weird girl. A commune might, indeed, be the sort of community Davie claims to know nothing of, a weird one as far as he can tell. The reproach implicit in this line is a Christian one. The Christian admonition, to love one's neighbor as oneself, comples Davie in many of his poems. No less does it here.

My distinction that Davie is a Christian poet and Larkin is not might seem strange only because the occasion of Larkin's poem is a Christian holiday. Yet Larkin's interest is in what characterizes the object of his affection; this has little to do with Christianity. In his most famous poem, “Church Going,” he affirms the perpetuation of custom much as he does in “Show Saturday”—“Let it always be there.” This is his theme in “The Whitsun Weddings” as well. Davie's concerns as a Christian are the salvation of his soul and the fellowship of his fellowmen. It makes sense that as a Christian poet he would be distressed by the self's interference with these aims, especially as it uses language to obstruct them. Furthermore, it follows that he would find the lyric insufficient to express the obligations of a modern poet. “In the Stopping Train” tests the limits of the form, whereas “The Whitsun Weddings” goes beyond the form inadvertently and, perhaps, dubiously. What is tantalizing is to imagine a form in which the achievements of both poems—the intensity of self-revelation and the understanding of the experience of others—are shared.