SOURCE: "Philip Larkin," in Eight Contemporary Poets, Oxford University Press, 1974, pp. 69-94.

[In the essay below, Bedient praises Larkin's poetic voice, claiming "[h]is achievement has been the creation of imaginative bareness, a penetrating confession of poverty."]

English poetry has never been so persistently out in the cold as it is with Philip Larkin—a poet who (contrary to Wordsworth's view of the calling) rejoices not more but less than other men in the spirit of life that is in him. Frost is a perennial boy, Hardy a fighter, by comparison. The load of snow, soiled and old, stays on the roof in poem after poem and, rubbing a clear space at the window, Larkin is there to mourn once again a world without generative fire. Well, it is just as he knew it would be, though now and then something surprising—a sheen of sunlight, some flutter of life—almost makes him wish for a moment that he could frolic out of doors.

Not that Larkin has wholly a mind of winter. A neighbourly snowman, he sometimes wears his hat tipped jauntily, and smiles and makes you laugh. Notice the drooping carrot nose in the mockingly titled 'Wild Oats':

About twenty years ago
Two girls came in where I worked—
A bosomy English rose
And her friend in specs I could talk to.
Faces in those days sparked
The whole shooting-match off, and I doubt

If ever one had like hers
But it was the friend I took out,

And in seven years after that
Wrote over four hundred letters,
Gave a ten-guinea ring
I got back in the end, and met
At numerous cathedral cities
Unknown to the clergy. I believe
I met beautiful twice. She was trying
Both times (so I thought) not to laugh …

In fact this is more lively than (say) the typical poem in The Oxford Book of English Verse. A witty and amiable snowman, then, with a clown's rueful sense of himself, and a clown's way of asking a genial tolerance for, indeed an easy complicity in, his ancient familiarity with defeat.

Yet where the clown, however little and stepped on, is indefatigably hopeful, Larkin is unillusioned, with a metaphysical zero in his bones. Larger than his world, outside it, he bears it before him, in chagrin, like a block of ice. While the clown is merely done to, Larkin in a sense does in the world, denying it every virtue in advance. Behind the paint a countenance of stone ….

This dismissal of the world, at the same time as it ensures his nullity, is a proud, self-affirming act. Yet at times his complaint against life is precisely that it has never attempted to lure him. Its very indifference, its failure to have any use for him, makes him want to reject it. 'Life is first boredom', he writes in 'Dockery and Son', speaking of his own life but (so overwhelming is the tedium) generalizing, too. And in 'I Remember, I Remember', he elaborates devastatingly:

By now I've got the whole place clearly charted.
Our garden, first: where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,
And wasn't spoken to by an old hat.
And here we have that splendid family

I never ran to when I got depressed,
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,
Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be
'Really myself. I'll show you, come to that,
The bracken where I never trembling sat,

Determined to go through with it; where she
Lay back, and 'all became a burning mist'.
And, in those offices, my doggerel
Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read
By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,

Who didn't call and tell my father There
Before us, had we the gift to see ahead …

Yet it is just this accident of temperament that brings Larkin into line with contemporary history—not with its actual resilience and stubborn energy but with its contagious fears: his very cells seeming formed to index the withering of the ideal, of romance, of possibility, that characterizes post-war thought. If Larkin is not merely admired but loved, it is partly because, finding poetry and humour even in sterility, he makes it bearable: he shows that it can be borne with grace and gentleness. He arrived at the right time to blend in with the disenfranchised youth of the Second World War ('At an age when self-importance would have been normal', he writes in the Preface to his novel Jill, 'events cut us ruthlessly down to size'). And although his depression, like Hardy's, is as if from before the ages, he has continued to seem the poet mid-century England required, his dogged parochialism reflecting the shrunken will of the nation, his bare details the democratic texture of the times.

Larkin's distinction from other nihilists lies in his domestication of the void: he has simply taken nullity for granted, found it as banal as the worn places in linoleum. Other nihilists, by comparison, are full of emotional and technical protest. With frighteningly poised hysteria, a Donald Barthelme dips his readers into a whirlpool of received pretensions that have just been dissolved by parody; a Robert Lowell is tragically grand, a Samuel Beckett savagely sardonic, a Harold Pinter sinister as a toyed-with knife … Larkin is plain and passive. Yet these qualities, far from letting him down, prove almost as striking as brilliant inventiveness—striking for their very simplicity. Characteristically Larkin presents not a 'world elsewhere' but life 'just here', denuded of libido, sentiment, obvious imaginative trans valuation. Like Hardy and Frost he uses imagination precisely in order to show what life is like when imagination is taken out of it.

'This was Mr Bleaney's room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him'. Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,

Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. 'Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand'.
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook

Behind the door, no room for books or bags—
'I'll take it' …

In everything except effect, Larkin is thus the weakling of the current group of nihilists, or the pacifist, the one who never stands up to the niggling heart of existence, throwing down even the stones of fantasy, technical dazzle, fierce jokes—the devices of an adventurous imagination—as being in any case useless against the Goliath of the void. His achievement has been the creation of imaginative bareness, a penetrating confession of poverty.

This achievement came only with difficulty, Larkin respecting bareness so much and misapprehending the function of imagination so greatly that at first he tried to keep the two apart, like honour from shame. Imagination? The dubious water spilling over the dam the world erects in front of the ego. From the beginning Larkin was the sort of young man, old before his time, whose stern wish is to put aside childish things. 'Very little that catches the imagination', he says in The London Magazine of February 1962, 'can get its clearance from either the intelligence or the moral sense'. 'There is not much pleasure', he adds, 'to be got from the truth about things as anyone sees it…. What one does enjoy writing—what the imagination is only too ready to help with—is, in some form or other, compensation, assertion of oneself in an indifferent or hostile environment, demonstration … that one is in command of a situation, and so on'. The imagination, moreover, is a fetishist, 'being classic and austere, or loading every rift with ore … with no responsible basis or rational encouragement'.

Larkin's problem, then, has been to write in the grim countenance of these views, with their pride in naked endurance, their fierce modesty—his limited output no doubt confessing to the difficulty. And if at first he took up fiction as well as poetry, it was because of its traditional alliance with 'the truth about things'. His fiction became the exercise ground of his lucidity. Both Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947) creep coldly to their conclusions. Though necessarily works of imagination—works conceived—their conceptions are unexcited, even numb. Imagination, they imply, is nugatory, a nail scratching a dream on ice. And so they labour against themselves. Virtually nothing happens to their youthful protagonists; crocuses doomed to fill with snow, they have only to sense futility to give way to it. The pale Oxford undergraduate in the first learns from a visit to his home town, recently bombed, 'how little anything matters', 'how appallingly little life is'. Then a dream tells him that, 'whether fulfilled or unfulfilled', love dies. This is enough to destroy his desire for the innocent Jill. He decides to die, as it were, before his death, so as to die as little as possible. In A Girl in Winter, too, wartime lends plausibility to a disillusionment that in fact seems pursued. And again the most ordinary relationships fail, as if there were something radically wrong with the human heart. The heroine, Katherine, finally repudiates 'the interplay of herself and other people'. With resolution, not in self-pity, beyond calling back, even gratefully, she steps out into a lucid solitude. At the close she envisions the 'orderly slow procession', as of an 'ice floe', of her permanently frozen desires: 'Yet their passage was not saddening. Unsatisfied dreams rose and fell about them, crying out against their implacability, but in the end glad that such order, such destiny, existed. Against this knowledge the heart, the will, and all that made for protest, could at last sleep'. And so she chooses to abstain from life, convinced that the fruit is anyway infested.

Given not only these passive protagonists but a starved-sparrow manner and a merely determined disenchantment, totally lacking in the passion either of truth or regret, the novels could not help seeming too long, indeed superfluous after the drain pipes, the snow. Larkin had yet to see that his thorough disbelief in adventure—even a Beckett shows a taste for mock adventure—necessitated the briefest of literary forms, and that the surest way to make the humanly sterile emotionally forceful is to place it in the midst of a poem, where, dwarfed by the glorious remembrances of the medium, it can have a shivering significance.

Meanwhile his poetry was the lyrical run-off of his lucidity. The poems in The North Ship (1946) treat the same themes as the novels—a world eaten through at the root by time, the wisdom of taking 'the grave's part', the failure of love—with all the runaway outcry that the novels stiffly restrained. Seeking at once the altitudes of the great lyrists of his youth, Yeats and Dylan Thomas, Larkin rises too high for his leaden themes:

I was sleeping, and you woke me
To walk on the chilled shore
Of a night with no memory,
Till your voice forsook my ear
Till your two hands withdrew
And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold hill of stars.

And again:

And in their blazing solitude
The stars sang in their sockets through the night:
'Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world'.

So Larkin sings as the blade comes down, is ardent about the ice in the fire of youth. Fulsomely embracing poetry as a legitimized form of 'compensation', he wrote as if it were unnecessary to be sensible in it, permissible to speak of 'bricked and streeted' seas or of stars that, while blazing, begged to be ignited. A remarkable discrepancy: the novels prematurely grizzled, the poems puerile.

Larkin had yet to reconcile the supposed unpleasure of truth with the pleasure of imagination. This he was now to do abruptly, being one of those poets who undergo an almost magical transformation between their first and second volume. It was Hardy who showed him that imagination could treat 'properly truthful' themes truthfully yet with acute delicacy, deliberate power. Never mind that Hardy's poems are greyly literal: they get into you like a rainy day. 'When I came to Hardy', Larkin says, 'it was with the sense of relief that I didn't have to try and jack myself up to a concept of poetry that lay outside my own life—this is perhaps what I felt Yeats was trying to make me do. One could simply relapse back into one's own life and write from it'. Again: 'Hardy taught one to feel … and he taught one as well to have confidence in what one felt'.

In truth, Larkin's themes belong to that great negative order of ideas that has always proved the most potent in art. We cannot help ourselves: we home to tragedy—optimism in art commonly leaving us feeling deprived of some deeper truth. Nothing is of more initial advantage to a poet than a horizon of clouds. For pathos makes us irresistibly present to ourselves, silhouettes us against a backdrop of fate, renders us final for the imagination. And to achieve it Larkin, as he now saw, had only to 'feel'—feel simply, without exaggeration. This itself meant that he had to measure ordinary life, life as he knew it, with the rigour of regret. In his novels he had passed beyond protest into a limbo of resignation. In The North Ship, on the other hand, he had exhibited a preposterous surprise and anguish—as if sterility were not, after all, the scene on which his blind rose every morning. Now he needed to find a manner at once warm and cold, steeped in futility but not extinguished by it. He had to open bare cupboards that would speak of all that might have been in them.

And so he does in his second volume, The Less Deceived (1955), and again in his third and most recent, The Whitsun Weddings (1964). Here is 'As Bad as a Mile':

Watching the shied core
Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,
Shows less and less of luck, and more and more

Of failure spreading back up the arm
Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,
The apple unbitten in the palm.

What redoubtable depths of acceptance in the calm of that unraised hand. Even so, the close-up of the unbitten apple proves affecting: if the poem is stoic about the end, it is without prejudice to the pleasure preceding it; it is stoic with regret. What is more, here Larkin brings the lofty literary sorrow of The North Ship down from 'black flowers', 'birds crazed with flight', and wintry drums, to the level of the everyday, where, no longer diffuse, it can be felt like pain in a vital organ. And, neither egoistic nor fetishistic, imagination has now become only a way the truth has of entering us all at once, swiftly and completely, in a context of value. Far from being an evasion of the truth, it is a hammer for the nail, the poignancy secreted in the prosaic.

Larkin's poems now take on the brute force of circumstantial evidence. Like sour smoke, the odour of actual days hangs about them. They have an unusual authenticity; they form a reliving. Even when the naming is general, it can have bite:

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

The final articles are as blunt as pointing fingers and, with the adjective that, the series ends in a conclusive jab. It amounts to instant trial and conviction. The vase stands exposed, empty as the atmosphere around it, coldly reduced to its potential function—a failure, a thing without love.

Many of Larkin's poems, however, have the specific density of descriptive detail—often autobiographical. Consider the first portion of 'Dockery and Son':

Here again pleasure and truth meet effortlessly. How casually the lawn and then the moon, both unhindered in beauty, set off hindered humanity. The detail is at once natural (though 'Death-suited' forces perception) and resonant. The poem has the simple fascination of an honestly reported life—even suggesting the moment to moment flow of consciousness. It possesses also a humble appeal of personality, a tone as unpressingly intimate as the touch of a hand on one's arm.

So it was that Larkin took the path of Edward Thomas, of Frost, of Hardy, and became a poet who looks at ordinary life through empty, silent air. His poems now sprang like snow-drops directly from the cruel cast of things, yet in themselves attaining beauty. And just as they now found their pathos in everyday things, so the void now spoke, in part, where day by day Larkin heard it, in the trite though sometimes pert and piquant language of the streets. Here was a language as sceptical as it was hardy, soiled with disappointment. Of a certain billboard beauty, 'Kneeling up on the sand / In tautened white satin', Larkin writes:

She was slapped up one day in March.
A couple of weeks, and her face
Was snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed;
Huge tits and a fissured crotch
Were scored well in, and the space
Between her legs held scrawls
That set her fairly astride
A tuberous cock and balls

Autographed Titch Thomas, while
Someone had used a knife
Or something to stab right through
The moustached lips of her smile.
She was too good for this life …

By contrast, Larkin's words will not be too good for this life. They make room not only for the colloquial 'Or something' but—sympathetically—for words betraying the fascinated disgust of adolescent sexual emotion. Still, Larkin's regret that anything should be too good for this life shines through his contempt for the meretricious poster. He makes the common words sorrier than they know.

Larkin thus renews poetry from underneath, enlivening it with 'kiddies', 'stewed', 'just my lark', 'nippers', 'lob-lolly men', 'pisses', 'bash', 'dude', and more of the same. And yet his manner rises easily from the slangy to the dignified; its step is light, its range wide. Here it is as vernacular caricature, amused at itself:

When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size …

A degree up from this we find the almost aggressive slang of the poem on the billboard girl. Then comes the perky, street-flavoured simplicity of 'Toads', 'Wild Oats', 'Send No Money', or 'SelPs the Man':

Oh, no one can deny
That Arnold is less selfish than I.
He's married a woman to stop her getting away
Now she's there all day …

A step higher and the style rises from self-consciousness and begins to leave the street:

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest …

This is the plain style of most of Larkin's poems. And this plainness is sometimes heightened by rhythmical sculpturing, syntactical drama, or repetition, as in 'MCMXIV':

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word—the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again …

Whatever its degree of formality, the peculiarity of Larkin's style is an eloquent taciturnity: it betrays a reluctance to use words at all. If, as 'Ambulances' says, a 'solving emptiness … lies just under all we do', then Larkin's words, as if preparing to be swallowed up, will make themselves as lean as they can—nothingness, they assert, will not fatten on them. Indeed, they seem to have soaked a long age in a vinegar that dissolves illusions. Such is the impression they make in 'As Bad as a Mile', and here again in 'Toads Revisited':

Walking around in the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on,

Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses—
Not a bad place to be.
Yet it doesn't suit me …

The short lines and clipped syntax suggest an almost painful expenditure of language. A head with a wagging tongue, they say, is time's fool. Larkin, of course, also writes in somewhat freer rhythms, as at the end of 'An Arundel Tomb'. But he always counts before he pays, and his more expansive effects bank on their moving contrast with his usual, slightly tough laconicism.

Larkin's laconicism also conveys the poverty of the sayable. That 'Life is slow dying', it implies, 'leaves / Nothing'—or almost nothing—'to be said'. He says little because he sees too much. Like Ted Hughes, he feels pressed back into himself by a vision of an unjustified and unjustifiable reality, but where this has finally provoked Hughes into desperate garrulity, it has all but frozen Larkin's mouth—two slender volumes since 1946; two interruptions of silence.

If Larkin relies on traditional form, it is partly out of the agreement of numbness and caution that we find in his style. Why seek new forms, he seems to ask, when there is nothing new under the sun? In any case, 'Content alone interests me', he says. 'Content is everything'. Like a man freezing to death in a snowstorm, refusing to be distracted by the beauty of the flakes, he resolves to be lucid to the last, his mind on the truth alone. And, paradoxically precisely this is why he writes in form. For, by virtue of its familiarity, traditional form, skilfully used, is all but transparent. (Only experiments, antiformalists, and writers of verse make an issue of form.) At its finest, prosody is anyway meltingly one with the content; and Larkin is frequently a fine craftsman. So nothingness stares out of Larkin's poems undistracted, with a native starkness. Even the bodily warmth conveyed by rhythm is often restrained by nicely calculated metrical irregularity.

Yet form has also for Larkin its traditional function: not modest after all, it is an attempt at the memorable. If he writes, the reason is to silence death, if only with the fewest possible words. In a statement contributed to D. J. Enright's anthology, Poets of the 1950's, Larkin says: 'I wrote poems to preserve things I have seen / thought / felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake. Why I should do this I have no idea, but I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art'. Nihilist though he is, he thus raises against nothingness—like every other literary nihilist, if more moderately—the combined plea and protest of his constructions, with their exemplary inner necessity, their perfection.

In sum, his forms are at the same time sorry to be there and insistently there. In his use of words and form alike, Larkin both defies and skulks before his nihilistic 'content', like an animal that, while shrinking back, offers to fight.

So it was that, without betraying his scruples, Larkin became a poignant and cohesive poet, his means the functional intelligence of his ends. More sophisticated writers have chided him for his poetic provinciality, but he is right, I think, to be as simple as he is. His poetry seems not only the necessary expression of his temperament but the very voice of his view of things, the pure expression of his aim—his purpose being not to make sterility whirl but precisely to make it stand still, freed from confusion, from the human fevers that oppose it. Far from adhering piously to English poetic tradition, he uses it for his own ends. The result, in any case, is a poetry of mixed formality and informality, mixed severity and charm, mixed humour and pathos, that carries a unique personal impress—a poetry that, for all its conservatism, is unconsciously, inimitably new.

Even The Less Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings, however, are somewhat subject to the 'poetic' toning up of The North Ship, and poems corrupted by self-pity appear side by side with the mature poems just described. A void with an ashen pallor—how resist rouging it, giving it dramatic visibility? Regret, in any case, touches us so nearly that it slips at the slightest urge into self-commiseration. At his weakest Larkin exploits this readiness for sorrow-suckling, for the histrionic; he tries for pathetic effects.

Of course, when a poem is so delightful as 'Days', criticism hesitates:

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

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

But those men in their long coats are too easy to summon over the fields: they border on the animated cartoon. Throwing us on the wretchedness of being passive before them, in need of them, they are more melodramatic than the truth. For all that its subject is 'days', the poem places itself so far from the quotidian that it can say, can picture anything without fearing contradiction from itself. The often admired 'Next, Please' also steps off from life into self-pity. The poem figures expectancy as a 'Sparkling armada of promises' that leaves us 'holding wretched stalks / Of disappointment'. But whatever were we waving at those ships? In the intoxication of its chagrin, the piece neglects propriety and probability. Even the final stanza, though grand, begets uneasiness:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

This is a trifle too awesome, Death in makeup. Another admired poem, 'No Road', begins:

Since we agreed to let the road between us
Fall to disuse,
And bricked our gates up, planted trees to screen us,
And turned all time's eroding agents loose,
Silence, and space, and strangers—our neglect
Has not had much effect.

Leaves drift unswept, perhaps; grass creeps unmown;
No other change …

What is really 'unmown' is the conceit—its leaves, grass, bricks, and trees lacking specific reference as metaphors. As in 'Next, Please', the vehicle is too much an end in itself. All three poems are rhetorical, written in emotional generality. Like still other pieces, including 'Whatever Happened?', 'Age', 'Triple Time', 'Latest Face', 'If, My Darling', and 'Arrivals, Departures', they stand at a remove from the literal, on a swaying rope bridge of tropes, dramatic but ill-supported.

Yet virtual fact is liable to the cosmetic impulse, too, as witness so ostensibly autobiographical a poem as 'Church Going'. The first two stanzas, it is true, are everything these other poems are not:

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new—
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Pungently detailed, this has a wonderful air of verisimilitude and candour. Except for 'Someone would know: I don't', the lines are free of padding, and the symbolism, as in the brownish flowers and 'Here endeth', is like an afterthought to the forcefully literal. Compare the middle of the poem, with its speculation about the time when churches will be out of use:

Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gowns-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh? …

It is hard to say what is more forced here—the questions, or the assertions that 'power of some sort or other will go on' and that the church will be 'less recognizable each week', or the effort to imagine 'the very last' to seek its purpose. Like the consciously colourful detail at the close, all this is essentially idle, a fabrication. The poem picks up again as Larkin confronts the church in discovery and wonder:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies …

But the effect is partly to make us regret all the more the triviality of the middle stanzas.

The impression of falseness is sometimes just as strong when Larkin sets his imaginative paints aside and attempts serious thought. Indeed, without much exaggeration it might be said that he is only poised and intelligent with particulars—abstractions tend to spill out of his hands. When he thinks, he often seems to be frowningly struggling to create a philosophical intricacy and importance. Here he is in 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album':

With 'Yes, true', you can virtually hear his voice leaving its natural home in particulars, growing thin and subject to confusion. As if driven to manufacture complexities, the lines suddenly snarl up what had been plain from the descriptive life of the poem. To say that the past leaves us 'free to cry' is to make a false conundrum of what has already been said simply: that it excludes us. The truly subtle idea in the passage—namely, that the past is forlorn because excluded from us—is obscured by the fussy thought. And meanwhile grace and measure are aban doned—'yowl' being especially awkward, an attempt to bring the blanched thought back into poetic animation.

'Dockery and Son' similarly gravels in 'philosophy'. Why, asks the speaker, did Dockery

Reasoning this through is at first like trying to put on a shirt with sewn sleeves—and finally we can only grant that such assumptions are 'innate' or distant from what we 'think truest'. (Innate assumptions are usually not all we have but what we wish we had: eternal life, supreme importance, a guiltless being….) The simile of the sandclouds is slipshod also. Until the last line, we are far from the brilliant beginning.

In the final stanza of 'Deceptions', the self-pity that permits such laxity lies still more forward, spoiling an even more exquisite poem. At the same time, it compares weakly with the epigraph from Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, a statement of bald power almost beyond art itself: 'Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain my consciousness till the next morning. I was horrified to discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable, and cried, like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt'. The stanza comments:

Slums, years, have buried you. I would not dare
Console you if I could. What can be said,
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?
For you would hardly care
That you were less deceived, out on that bed,
Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair
To burst into fulfilment's desolate attic.

The final phrase, 'fulfilment's desolate attic', bears a Johnsonian indictment, irrevocably disabused, of the delusions of desire. But even granting the romantic assumption that the seducer made too much of his desire, what is its brief match flame compared to the conflagration of the girl's young life? We can hardly care either that the girl was the less deceived. The poem treats the misreading of desire as a tragedy. But nothing it says or implies supports so extravagant and self-condoling a view.

Yet, serious as they are, Larkin's defects are easily outbalanced by his virtues. Thus, though he may abandon an imaginary scene for questionable thought, he is also likely to have put us into that scene with as piercing a dramatic immediacy as any poet now writing. We have witnessed this in 'Church Going' and 'Dockery and Son'; and here is the first stanza of 'Deceptions':

Even so distant, I can taste the grief,
Bitter and sharp with stalks, he made you gulp.
The sun's occasional print, the brisk brief
Worry of wheels along the street outside
Where bridal London bows the other way,
And light, unanswerable and tall and wide,
Forbids the scar to heal, and drives
Shame out of hiding. All the unhurried day
Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.

Imagination, said Emerson, is a sort of seeing that comes by 'the intellect being where and what it sees', and this happy definition highlights what is remarkable in the stanza. For the lines virtually are the original moment, as well as a beauty beyond it and compassion for it. 'Print', it is true, is lost in ambiguity (footprint? a picture-shape on the wall?) and indefinite in relation to the light described later; and 'scar' rather rushes a fresh wound. But almost everything else tells keenly—'The brisk brief/ Worry of wheels' poignantly commenting on the girl's inconsolateness, 'bridal London' on her social ruin; 'Light, unanswerable and tall and wide' being unimprovable; and the simile of the drawer of knives, though risking melodrama, properly savage.

We touch here on gifts more specialized than the dramatic imagination, gifts for epithet and metaphor. Of course, in their own way, these too are dramatic, restoring a primal power to the language. We are all bees trapped behind the spotted glass of usage till the poet releases us to the air. And so Larkin releases us in these lines of 'Coming':

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork …

'Chill and yellow' and 'fresh-peeled' are especially happy inventions. So again at the beginning of a recent poem, 'Dublinesque': 'Down stucco side-streets, / Where light is pewter…." In another recent poem, 'The Cardplayers', the trees are—magnificently—'century-wide'. Spring, in the poem of that title, is 'race of water, / Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter'. Delightful in 'Broadcast' is the 'coughing from / Vast Sunday-full and organ-frownedon spaces'. And what could be at once more homely and endearing than the 'loaf-haired secretary' of 'Toads Revisited'?

Larkin's imagination has also, of course, a turn for wit. At times he instinctively inhibits the sobbing in his strings by playing staccato. Consider the lover in 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album':

From every side you strike at my control,
Not least through these disquieting chaps who loll
At ease about your earlier days:
Not quite your class, I'd say, dear, on the whole …

Or take the comic candour of 'Annus Mirabilis':

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP …

Next time around the parenthesis reads, 'Though just too late for me', which gives the playfulness a fine grimace. These poems have the good grace of self-irony, a civilized lightness. Better still is the comedy—vigorous with universal truth—in 'Toads' and 'Toads Revisited'. With rising bravura the first begins:

The second, with toad-eating helplessness, concludes:

No, give me my in-tray,
My loaf-haired secretary,
My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir:
What else can I answer,
When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.

Entertaining though they are, these are works of the full imagination, more quickened than compromised by caricature. They are true and touching as well as spirited. One would be tempted to call the poisoning toad and the pitchfork the best comic conceit in modern poetry were not that of the old toad on Cemetery Road consummate to the point of tears. We are not far here from the world of fairy tales and have only to hear of Cemetery Road to fancy that, like the way through the woods to Grandmother's house, it has existed in the imagination for ever.

An unusual poet, reminding us on the one hand of the grand classical tradition and on the other of Beatrix Potter and Dorothy Parker, and all the while sounding like no one so much as himself! And Larkin has still other virtues. To begin with, there is, as we have seen, the instinctive adjustment of his means to his end, so that, for instance, he is one of the most pellucid of poets because nothing to him is more self-evident than nothingness. Then the unconscious Tightness of his forms, 'Toads' being, for example, appropriately restless in alternating uneven trimeters and dimeters, 'Toads Revisited' properly more settled in its trimeters; 'Toads', again, troubled with alternating off-rhyme and 'Toads Revisited' calmer in off-rhymed couplets, full rhyme kept in reserve for the entente cordiale of 'toad' and 'Road'. There is the frequent perfection of his metrical spacing; the easy way his words fall together; the tang and unsurpassed contemporaneity of his diction and imagery; the fluent evolution of his poems. There is also his beautifully mild temper and his tenderness for those pushed 'To the side of their own lives'. Nor finally should we fail to add his facility at opening that scepticism about life which everyone closets in his bones.

Still, only at his best does Larkin make us grateful for what a human being can do with words. It is above all in 'Coming', 'Toads', 'Toads Revisited', 'At Grass', 'Here', 'The Whitsun Weddings', and 'An Arundel Tomb' (with two fairly recent poems, 'High Windows' and 'To the Sea', pressing near) that he puts experience under an aspect of beauty, gracing and deepening it with the illusion of necessary form and producing the privileged sensation—perhaps illusory, perhaps not—of piercing through to a truth. It is in these poems, too, that, at once detached and concerned, he most frees us from self-pity without destroying feeling.

With the exception of 'Here' and 'Toads', these pieces display an exquisite stoic compassion for the littleness, the fragility, indeed the unlikelihood, of happiness. Even in 'Here', however, tenderness is implicit in the perception, the diction, the syntax. For instance, in 'Isolate villages, where removed lives / Loneliness clarifies', the lives are considerately enfolded by the clause at the same time that the line break removes and isolates them. But such tenderness is like water under ice. Where life is as raw, insufficient, and essentially lonely as it is in 'Here', better (so the poem implies) keep yourself inwardly remote, like the 'bluish neutral distance' of the sea. Though 'Here' is all one travelling sentence till it brakes in short clauses at the end, 'Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows' out finally to the 'unfenced existence' of the sea, emotionally it is one continuous 'freeze', since each successive 'here' is as barren, as without self-justification, as the rest. 'Here' leads us as far from ourselves, as far into objective reality, as we can go—to the sea that has nothing for us, 'Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach'—then leaves us there, all but freed from desire and too well schooled by the accumulated evidence, too guarded, to be appalled. The poem is a masterpiece of stoicism.

The equally fine 'Coming' is as remarkable for its original conception as for the felicity (already sampled) of its similes. Indeed, the two prove inseparable in the second half of the poem:

It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon—
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

Throwing us back into the vulnerable heart of childhood, into an ignorance not ignorant enough, the simile redeems an inevitably romantic subject by abrading it, complicating it with domestic truth. Nor could any comparison be at once so unexpected and convincing, giving exactly, as it does, the situation of being drawn into an emotion neither understood nor trusted yet beyond one's power to refuse, since the moment it comes it reveals itself as all, nearly all, of what was needed. The poem, if complete in itself, is also an expressive elaboration of its most poignant word, 'starts'. Too doubting and perplexed for rhyme or a long line, as slender as the inchoate joy it evokes, it is like the 'chill and yellow' light described at the outset, lyrically lovely yet inhibited—its recurring two beats like a heart quickened but still at the tentative start, the mere threshold, of happiness.

There is nothing tentative about 'At Grass', which celebrates the profound peace, the cold joy, in the relinquishment of labour and identity. The retired racehorses in the poem have stolen death from itself:

The eye can hardly pick them out
From the cold shade they shelter in,
Till wind distresses tail and mane;
Then one crops grass, and moves about
—The other seeming to look on—
And stands anonymous again …

The early, strenuous days of the horses, full of 'Silks at the start' and 'Numbers and parasols', are later evoked with the same classical directness as this shaded scene, which has a clarity that leaves nothing between us and the subject. Like the horses the poem exists quietly, is envyingly 'at ease' in a pace slowed often enough by stressed monosyllables to seem tranced beyond all care. The rhyme, too, is spaced out placidly, making the stanzas like the 'unmolesting meadows'. (It does, however, cause an awkward syntactic inversion at the close: 'Only the groom, and the groom's boy, / With bridles in the evening come.') Because of its distanced subject and because the horses have both lived out and outlived their swiftness, the poem takes the sickness out of the desire for oblivion, offering in place of weariness a paradise of shade.

An even more exquisite poem is 'An Arundel Tomb', which begins:

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd—
The little dogs under their feet.

The lines rise to the ceremony of their occasion. So 'Side by side', each syllable royally weighted, is balanced by the four syllables of 'their faces blurred', the two phrases equal and graceful in their partnership but immobile as the effigies they describe. Through rhyme, the third line offers its arm to the second as they move in iambic procession. Then the time-softened long i stiffens into the short one, and the little dogs break into the sentence like an after-thought (which in fact they may originally have been). Modelled and exact in its rhythms, lovely, fresh, and affecting in its detail, tender in its deeply deliberated tone, holding the slow centuries in its hands, the poem is indeed very lovely, very moving. Unfortunately, it has need to be in order to humble its one defect: its manipulation of the subject for the sake of pathos. Nothing 'with a sharp tender shock' that the earl and countess are holding hands, the poet says:

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base …

But why would they not think to lie so long? If Larkin denies them intention, it is evidently to press his own, which is to view faithful love through the ironic and brittle glass of accident. One balks at this, censures it, and at the same time acknowledges, 'This is Larkin's most beautiful poem'.

Less exquisite but more substantial than 'An Arundel Tomb', 'The Whitsun Weddings' is distinguished for ease, poise, balance, and inclusiveness.

It has even more of England in it than 'Here', similarly taking us by train through the country and making its breadth and variety, its unfolding being, our own. The very movement is that of a leisurely if inexorable journey, the lines frequently pausing as if at so many stations, yet curving on in repeated enjambements past scenes swiftly but tunelessly evoked, as though the stanzas themselves were the wide windows of a moving train:

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 …

This is deft, light in depiction but strongly evocative. And the English themselves are as vividly present as their towns and countryside, indeed man himself is here in his several ages: the children in the platform wedding parties frowning as 'at something dull', the young men 'grinning and pomaded', the brides' friends staring after the departing trains as 'at a religious wounding', the married couples themselves boarding the carriages in distraction, the uncles shouting smut, the fathers looking as if they had 'never known / Success so huge and wholly farcical', and the mothers' faces sharing the bridal secret 'like a happy funeral'.

And the poet? By chance, he himself is there on the train that Whitsun as the eternal witness of the contemplative artist, inward with what he sees yet outside it precisely to the extent that he sees it. Single amid the married couples in the carriage, he is yet caught up by them, caught up with them ('We hurried towards London'), quickened into a sense of physical existence in time. On the other hand, with his indisplaceable knowledge of failure, absence, endings, he is the loneliness of contemplation lucid before the happy blindness of the body and its emotions. He knows he might well envy this happiness and yet he dwarfs it:

Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem
Just long enough to settle hats and say I nearly died.
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl—and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. 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 becoming rain.

The poem throughout links beginnings to ends, ends to beginnings—as in its wedding parties 'out on the end of an event / Waving goodbye', its mingling of generations, and the stops and starts of the journey itself. And here at the close, at the same time that it gives the energy of life and the fruition of time their due, even as arrows speed and rain promises germination, it also makes us aware of inevitable dissolution, as arrows fall and rain means mould, dampness, the cold, the elemental. Like certain romantic poems—'The Echoing Green', 'Kubla Kahn', 'Intimations of Immortality', 'Among School Children'—the poem thus brings together, irreducibly, life in its newness and power and life in its decline and end. Nowhere else in his work (though 'To the Sea' marks a near exception) is Larkin so irresistibly drawn out to observe with an emotion close to happiness the great arena of life in its diversity and energy, undeluded though he is, doomed though he feels the energy to be.

'Poetry', St.-John Perse remarks, 'never wishes to be absence, nor refusal'; and certainly in The Whitsun Weddings Larkin grants it the presence of the world, as he grants the world its presence. Yet even apart from The Whitsun Weddings we would be without Larkin's poems the poorer by that much presence and that much love. Poet though he is of the essential absence of life from itself, he yet makes himself present as regret that it must be so; and for all his defeatism it is easy to find him a sympathetic figure as he stands at the window, trying not to cloud it with his breath, mourning the winter casualties, concerned to be there even though convinced beyond all argument that, like everything else, his concern is gratuitous.