Stylistically [the] thirty-two poems [in The North Ship (1945)] differ from Larkin's mature work in two ways: they are dominated by the influence of Yeats, and they lack "local texture", the air of having proceeded out of a particular experience: only eight of them have titles. Larkin frankly describes them as "a mixture of Yeats and having nothing much to write about". It is not proposed to comment here on the influence of Yeats, except to say that it is not so much a matter of deliberate pastiche as of a kind of ventriloquism, with Larkin as the dummy (or, perhaps, the medium) through whom the dead poet speaks in accents uncannily his own. Yet, despite the Irish accent, many of the sentiments are—as seen with the hindsight afforded by his later poetry—obviously Larkin's: throughout Poem I—a youthful celebration of spring, love, and resurrection—a sinister note recurs:

               Let the wheel spin out
               Till all created things
               With shout and answering shout
               Cast off rememberings;
               Let it all come about
               Till centuries of springs
               And all their buried men
               Stand on the earth again.
                   A drum taps: a wintry drum.

[The] "wintry drum" itself is Larkin's own property: the awareness of sadness at the back of things, of the passing of time and the inevitability of death.

The "wintry drum" also represents the dreariness of reality which obtrudes into romantic illusion. This contrast is one of Larkin's most insistent preoccupations, and it appears for the first time in Poem XX of The North Ship where, despite his Yeatsism disguise as "a sack of meal upon two sticks", we recognize the poet made familiar to us by his later work as "an indigestible sterility". His attitude is polarized between the "wild" and "glad" girl whom he sees in the snowy fields, whose vitality he cannot match even with an equally-vital jealousy, and the "two old ragged men", clearing snow, who demonstrate the beauty of day-to-day survival, of "all actions done in patient hopelessness." Larkin sees himself as akin to these, rather than to the girl…. And yet this vision of affinity is itself a gesture towards life, a grasping at a kind of belief and pattern which transcends the ordinariness of the image.

       I must repeat until I live the fact
       That everything's remade
       By shovel and spade;
       That each dull day and each despairing act
       Build up the crags from which the spirit leaps.

At this stage of his poetry, Larkin is capable of seeing everyday reality as a foothold for the spirit; but obvious in the lines is a sense of the effort involved in this view…. In Larkin's later work the arguments of reality are blunt instruments, the "despairing act" truly gets nowhere, and the spirit leaps from the crags not to fly but to fall flat on its face. Illusion is impossible, reality is a Yeatsian "desolation", and, whatever life one is allowed, the end is the same. (pp. 28-9)

Although an interval of nine years separated the publication of The Less Deceived from that of The Whitsun Weddings, to consider them in chronological order would be to try to tear apart the close fabric which, together, they compose. The same themes occur in both; a poem in one will continue, comment on, or dissent from a poem in the other; and the only essential difference is that the second volume is more pessimistic than the first. Their joint strength is two-fold: their themes are universal—time, failure, love, death; and their context, the detail of one man's experience in a "real place", gives them a sharp contemporary relevance.

It is this combination of universal and particular, rather than an ironic tone of voice, that would account for the strong impact that Larkin's poetry has made…. The basic point is that Larkin is an emotional poet: the irony of his tone may sometimes be the self-protection of a man who guiltily feels himself to be on the edge of life, but more often it is there to control strong feeling. Where irony is absent, as in "Going", the strength of this feeling is frighteningly apparent, but the presence of irony in other poems should not distract our attention from the emotion which is also there. (pp. 30-1)

Larkin's original intention was to call his 1955 volume simply Various Poems. Asked for something more striking, he transferred from the poem now called "Deceptions" its former title "The Less Deceived" and used it for the whole book. This title, though an improvement on its colourless predecessor, was perhaps a mistake, in that it suggested a clever, cool refusal to be "take in": it chimed too easily with the fashion for intellectual suspicion and wariness of the grand gesture—to be "less deceived" by everything was the "In" thing in poetry, even when the poet was an undergraduate who had not very much experience to be "less deceived" about. (p. 31)

Two deductions can be made from ["Deceptions"] about Larkin's attitude to life: the first is that his sympathies are likely to be as much for crudely actual sufferings as for loss of mental illusions; the second (assuming the girl as the poet's surrogate) is that to be without illusions, or at least to be "less deceived", is not much comfort, far less something to congratulate oneself on.

As an example of disenchantment accepted ruefully rather than brandished gleefully one may consider "I Remember, I Remember", which purports to be a debunking of the "literary" childhood in which the future poet goes through the stages of Dylan Thomas pantheism, Betjeman hero-worship, Lawrentian sexual awakening, and eventual local recognition of his budding genius by "a distinguished cousin of the mayor." This kind of childhood Larkin did not have, and his parodic humour implies at first that the lack of it was no loss:

       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".

Yet the ending hints that the satire is more bitter than it first appeared, and that, though the poet may not be sorry that his childhood was not like this, he would have been glad had it been something more than what he calls elsewhere "a forgotten boredom":

  "You look as if you wished the place in Hell",
  My friend said, "judging from your face". "Oh well,
  I suppose it's not the place's fault", I said.
 
  "Nothing, like something, happens anywhere".
                                           (pp. 31-2)

The consolations of religious belief are no more available to Larkin than they were to Matthew Arnold; the "sea of faith" has ebbed, leaving only the "accoutred, frowsty barn" whose residual influence he tries to account for in "Church Going". His inability to believe seems to have nothing more to back it up than had Arnold's in "Dover Beach": the feeling, simply, that religion may have been possible once but is now outmoded. Larkin describes himself as "Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt / Dispersed", and one is inclined to question precisely how he comes by this arguable knowledge. The poem itself, not being a theological inquiry, gives no answer; agnosticism is the premise, modified only by a subdued hope, as in Hardy's "The Oxen", that belief might be possible. The church which Larkin at first describes with a mixture of pity and ironic levity comes gradually to be recognized as a monument to that serious nexus of human concerns, "marriage, and birth, / And death, and thoughts of these". But the conclusion is ambiguous: wisdom is taught, not perhaps by the church as a symbol of faith, but by the churchyard where "so many dead lie round", their graves reminding us of our own eventual fate.

In a world without order or religion, Matthew Arnold's remedy was "Ah love! let us be true / To one another." The poignancy (when it is not ruefulness) of Larkin's poems about love is not that of appeal, but of denial: "that much-mentioned brilliance, love" may forever promise "to solve, and satisfy, / And set unchangeably in order", but the promise is never fulfilled. We are left, as in "Next, Please", "holding wretched stalks / Of disappointment". The bitter pathos of this is nowhere more apparent than in "Faith Healing", where the ironic sketch of the American evangelist in his neat executive suit only underlines the deprivation of the "patients" who find in his businesslike twenty-second morsels of "loving care" a substitute for the love they have missed. (pp. 34-5)

[Presented in this poem] is not only the sadness over lost, or missed, love; it is also the persistent delusion, despite "all time has disproved", that to love or be loved would bring a happier and more successful life. The tension between these two feelings, in Larkin's first-person poems of love and marriage, takes the form of a bachelor's debate on the motion, "Am I, in not marrying, missing anything, or not?" (p. 35)

The final implication [of "No Road"] is both that renunciation, though hard, is the sensible decision for him, and that there is perhaps something wrong with a man who will permit the loss which it entails…. The siren-call of events is always "Come and choose wrong". The choice of marriage and the choice of singleness are equally empty: neither offers any consolation in a life in which inevitably, "time will be the stronger."

Choice, it would seem, is only one more of our illusions. Larkin's universe is a deterministic one…. The search for pattern or "truth" in life is futile; everything we do is rendered meaningless by the cancellation of death.

Yet, though life is short, Larkin realizes the force of his own question: "Where can we live but days?" (pp. 37-8)

Of all Larkin's poems, it is "Dockery and Son" which expresses most comprehensively his various tones of voice and the tension in his thinking between the attempt to evaluate different life-styles and awareness of the ultimate futility of all of them…. Whether a thing be consciously sought or accidentally found, it becomes, when reached, inescapable. Larkin's muted envy of Dockery's fatherhood is held in equipoise with the recognition that their fates are, sub specie mortis, essentially the same: "a son" and "nothing" treat those to whom they belong with equally "harsh patronage"—both father and bachelor are pushed "to the side of their own lives"…. The Oxford which Larkin revisits in this poem is a symbol of the "home" from which we all began our differently-routed journeys towards the common terminus of death. When we attempt to return to it, it mocks us sadly with memories, preserved as in a museum, of our original "joyous shot at how things ought to be, / Long fallen wide."

Charles Tomlinson has spoken disparagingly of Larkin's poetry as the embodiment of "his own inadequacy" and a "tenderly-nursed sense of defeat". If there is such a sense, it springs from clear-sighted observation of the amount of sadness and disappointment in life, and the determination not to burke its expression: far from being "tenderly-nursed", it is unflinchingly admitted. And what Tomlinson sees as Larkin's personal inadequacy can surely rather be said to be the statement, not only of his own, human limitations in a deterministic universe, but of the limitations of many. To find the expression of such limitations unpalatable is not to invalidate them; and even if Larkin's ideas are open to the counter-arguments of Christian belief, that is not to deny the poet his right to put down what he honestly sees. (pp. 38-9)

Those who … recognize their own faces in this mirror will admire Larkin for his scrutiny of their daily situation, and his expression of it in language that, in blending the contemporary with the dignified tradition of elegiac poetry, raises that situation to a higher power. (p. 39)

Philip Gardner, "The Wintry Drum," in Phoenix (reprinted by permission of the publisher), Nos. 11-12, Autumn-Winter, 1973–74, pp. 27-40.