The question of the two profiles in Larkin's poetry—the implacable skeptic and the visionary manqué—is best considered in connection with those poems which explore the meaning of death. There emerges gradually a distinction between a view of personal death, which is seen as inevitable and unmitigated, and a view of death in relation to a world which perpetually renews itself. In this latter view—and it is one increasingly exemplified in his latest work—a quiet trust is sometimes apparent, a trust in continuity, a belief in something "undiminished somewhere" …, which will survive beyond his individual "extinction". There is, in addition, a significant body of work which illustrates the proposition that "life is slow dying"…. This fundamental idea shapes much of Larkin's perspective on human experience, a perspective, above all, on the habitual deceptions and failures with which our lives are composed, on life which is a succession of deaths, a "repeated fraying of the thread". (p. 80)

In Poem XXIX from Larkin's first published volume, The North Ship … the poet advises himself to "Take the grave's part, / Tell the bone's truth," and to "Walk with the dead / For fear of death." This commitment to the "bone's truth" manifests itself in various ways throughout Larkin's work, but one of the earliest forms it takes is an attempt to visualize the ghostly figure of Death itself, and to imagine the awesome and arbitrary change from life to oblivion which its presence heralds. Poem II … introduces us to "The stranger who will never show his face, / But asks admittance." In this sonnet the movement from birth through life to the urgent proximity of death is delicately balanced between the known and the experienced, the clear ability to look back and remember, and the unknown which can only be met with questions and uncertainty…. Unlike the "lighted tenement scuttling with voices" in "Age" …, the image of the life experience as a light-filled building is positive and almost utopian in its detail. "Sunbeams", with photographic effect, pick out representative poses: "pausing at a picture's edge / To puzzle out the name, or with a hand / Resting a second on a random page—." But the supremacy of light is threatened in the eighth line which is separated from the body of the octet and cuts the sonnet dramatically in two: "The clouds cast moving shadows on the land." The spell is broken, the miraculous mirage of life dissolves, and desperation begins. In a manuscript poem dated 14 September 1946 the same phenomenon is recorded and presented in the form of a definition: "Death is a cloud alone in the sky with the sun." The eclipse, it seems, is inevitable.

The interior settings which begin Poem II are obliterated by this sudden switch to a landscape and a skyscape combined, but they return, negatively, in the sestet. Space narrows, from the "palace" and "hall" to the claustrophobia of one chamber and the mysterious room adjoining it. The poet asks: "Are you prepared for what the night will bring? / … will you greet your doom / As final; set him loaves and wine; knowing / The game is finished when he plays his ace, / And overturn the table and go into the next room?" The answer seems to be that there is no adequate preparation for this last move in a predictable game of chance. Appeasing the stranger with ritual offerings is a recognition only of the consistent skill of a player who never loses. The "next room" contains the secret of what "the night will bring" and we will not likely "go gentle" into it. There is a self-taunting quality to these last lines; the poet pursues a relentless inquiry which tests an impossible courage. (pp. 80-1)

In the poems which confront death in The Less Deceived there is a movement away from allegorization, from the traditional visitation by a death figure. In the opening poem of that volume, "Wedding-Wind", a celebration of a wedding night spoken by the new bride, the sense of the "silver" of life is strong. The marriage bonds signify the central passage of life, and on the morning after the first night of that journey the winds blow in harmony with a newly discovered strength and liberation. Yet in the midst of the bride's elemental happiness comes an inevitable question, one which, significantly, concludes the poem and leaves an air of foreboding and threat:

         Can even death dry up
         These new delighted lakes, conclude
         Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters?

In "Going" that same power of extinction and conclusion assumes a larger shape. Oblivion comes in the guise of evening, "one never seen before, / That lights no lamps." In the second short stanza it metamorphoses again into a burial shroud, a constriction of space from the fading vision of a landscape of "fields" to the black intimacy of the grave where there are no more perspectives. Time seems to be measured in terms of this growing and changing apprehension. In our younger days, perhaps, death is only a hint in the landscape; over the passage of time, death becomes all…. Death is now portrayed as an alien and powerful force which can disguise itself, come upon us from the most familiar of surroundings, and deprive its victims steadily of sensory and intellectual response. The pictorial rationalization of death by means of traditional figures with their intimate summonses is replaced by a kind of blank nightmare lacking in all familiarity. (pp. 82-3)

In "Ambulances" …, "The Old Fools" and "The Building" …, the apprehension of death becomes more generalized and more readily located in a contemporary world, though the note of individual desperation still sounds strongly in "The Old Fools". This poem acts, in a sense, as a sequel to "Dockery and Son" …, which ends: "Life is first boredom, then fear. / Whether or not we use it, it goes, / And leaves what something hidden from us chose, / And age, and then the only end of age." In a poem which compares and reflects upon the illusory choices made by the poet and a near contemporary at Oxford following their student days, the inevitable progression of life is seen as an experience which sharpens from "boredom" to "fear", and that fear is the growing sense of age and death, the final act not mentioned by name in "Dockery". Death is mentioned in the second stanza of "The Old Fools" …:

        At death, you break up: the bits that were you
        Start speeding away from each other for ever
        With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true:
        We had it before, but then it was going to end,
        And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
        To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
        Of being here. Next time you can't pretend
        There'll be anything else.

The oblivion which descends in "Going" is here rationalized as a process which should be made less terrible when considered with the oblivion from which we journeyed at birth, but this parallel is seen to offer scant comfort; the second darkness is an epilogue not a prologue. (pp. 83-4)

One gets the strong sense in "The Old Fools" of Larkin trying to keep his head above water, trying to find the most secure lifeline, and finding it in the very articulation of his fear.

Stanza one begins with a series of frightened questions, behind which lurks a mixture of disgust for those who are unfortunate enough to be old, and self-loathing for one whose fate this will also be. What appears most disturbing is the likely state of consciousness in old age; how differently is death envisioned when the faculties begin to weaken, when "you keep on pissing yourself" and you behave as if you were "crippled" or "tight"? How much does age and ageing block out from the mind? The process of disintegration which preoccupies Larkin in some of his earlier poems—what happens when you are actually dying?—is now enlarged to include senility and the total ageing process. How does one cope with the knowledge of death when one's own decay—"ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines"—stares back day by day?

The second stanza, as we have seen, tries to grasp and elaborate upon a metaphysical apprehension of death and birth. The poem, in effect, begins again. Yet another starting point is evident in stanza three, where a calmer and more compassionate imagination seeks to describe the surviving private world of memory: "Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms / Inside your head, and people in them, acting." The saving grace of old age, conjectures Larkin, is an ability to recreate the past and to live there, but this possibility is rendered doubtful…. (p. 85)

The poem moves into its final phase now reluctantly sure of its direction, heading back to the fear which impressed itself in the first verse. We return to the "old fools" after a brief lyric interlude in the rooms and among the furnishings of this much changed "daytime palace", with the occupants "setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair," and find them now ignominiously "crouching below / Extinction's alp," unaware of the "peak" which we, and the poet, hold in view, and only conscious in their fading years of "rising ground". If the coming of old age means a decline of imagination and awareness does this decline represent a merciful release? How precious is the freedom to see, to know, and to be afraid; the freedom to write a poem like this? And so Larkin ends with a series of questions which worry their way around this central issue. There is also an ironic echo of the "stranger's" summons, but here the "strangers" do not come to lead away the victims but simply gather to say farewell, and are perhaps people they once knew but no longer recognize:

                     Can they never tell
     What is dragging them back, and how it will end?
                              Not at night?
     Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
     The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
                 We shall find out.

That cryptic final sentence does not terminate [the] panicky debate, but merely suspends it for the time being. The poem stops itself just short of breakdown. The cool colloquial intrusion effects a dramatic shift and closes off the poem brilliantly, but it is not the shrugging calm of resignation—let us wait and see—but a clenched effort at self-control.

There is nothing of the "solving emptiness" [as in "Ambulances"] in this contemplation of death and how it may or may not be perceived by the very old and the senile. The poem stands out as Larkin's cri de coeur and carries with it an unusual hint of disorder. (pp. 85-6)

Larkin's "preoccupation … with mortality" is both a specific and a generalized concern. The poems illustrated … show the specific interest in the "subject" of death, as an inevitable departure or process, as the mysterious experience of our second and final oblivion. Many of his other poems, as I have already indicated, discover the presence and spirit of death in the habits and routines of our ordinary daily lives. Our ways "Of building, benediction, // Measuring love and money" are all "Ways of slow dying." Life, as Larkin says in "Arrival", impounds itself until it becomes a "style of dying only."… What makes death so difficult to prepare for, and certainly to transcend, is the absence of fulfillment in life, and the omnipresent shadow of failure. (p. 87)

The fear of death which seems so acute in "Going" and "The Old Fools" is only a recognition that in this secularized world we can only approach that blankness with the definition of self which comes from the relationship between who we are and what we can achieve. In an unpublished poem about Autumn and the decay of Nature's year,… Larkin hints in one line at a predicament which is identifiable in his later work and especially so in The Less Deceived: "I am ashamed to face death with empty hands." There is a shadow of heroic endeavour in this confession, a remnant of a long dead faith in an ordered and coherent universe where death could indeed promise reward for virtue and effort—and success. In Poem XX in The North Ship the poet prays that he may keep the "image of a snow-white unicorn" and that it may descend and put into his hand "its golden horn". But from the moment of Larkin's conversion and commitment to the kind of poetry which exacts a "full look at the worst", the reader is made consistently aware of empty hands; the "golden" horn seems never to be grasped.

Throughout The Less Deceived the weight and authority of those prescriptions italicised in "Vers de Societé" …—"All solitude is selfish" and "Virtue is social"—is illustrated relentlessly. The poet dwells on separation, loss, and the sense of a life lived apart from the lives, with all their social, sexual, and familial commitments and choices, of most other people. With this sense of difference comes guilt, unease, and self-consciousness…. In detecting, with effective satire, the misjudgments and self-deceptions of others, Larkin moves toward a final reckoning with these same weaknesses; the lie he has exposed may be his own. (pp. 88-9)

The Whitsun Weddings, for the most part, carries over the habit of self-scrutiny from the second volume and re-echoes the mood of self-doubt. Poems like "Self's the Man", "Wild Oats", "Send No Money", and the more substantial "Dockery and Son" pursue the old debates and worry still about who might, after all, really be the less deceived. There is noticeable, however, a shift towards an awareness of a shared disillusionment, shared with people who made, perhaps, very different choices in their lives…. Fulfilment, in its various personal and social forms, may indeed be a "desolate attic", but Larkin now seems to realize increasingly that desolation and disillusionment await us all no matter what paths we tread. The urgency of comparison—my life and the lives of others—seems to give way now to an interest in survival—how do we allcope, what measures may be taken? In moving from a struggle to ascertain the inadequacies of self by setting up comparisons of choice in the lives of those around him to a more generalized curiosity in a common plight, Larkin is able to come to terms with a good deal of the habit of his own life…. He is also, consequently, far less conscious of all the possible ramifications of social and personal failure. In the title poem he can look upon these Whitsuntide weddings with a compassionate interest and not become preoccupied with himself as the solitary traveller cut off from experience; there are no "reasons for attendance" given, no comparison suggested. And in the volume's last poem, "Arundel Tomb", he can address himself to the subject of death, his perceptions uncluttered by examples of life's "slow dying". (pp. 89-90)

In ["Arundel Tomb"] he records the "sharp tender shock" at seeing the Earl's hand withdrawn from its gauntlet, "holding her hand". Admittedly this death has taken place across the centuries but something new is registered here in Larkin's response: it is his first poem about death which seeks to suggest the possibility of some form of meaningful survival. Larkin is careful to separate the dead couple from any awareness of their own "supine stationary voyage"; what matters is that countless survivors "through lengths and breadths / Of time" have seen the effigy of their "faithfulness", and have borne witness to their love. In the final stanza Larkin is still circumspect and cautious, but what he finally concedes, in the context of his work to this date, is significant:

             Time has transfigured them into
             Untruth. The stone fidelity
             They hardly meant has come to be
             Their final blazon, and to prove
             Our almost-instinct almost true:
             What will survive of us is love.

Two deaths in the distant past have been rendered something less than inexorable; a present-day observer can confirm that death has been cheated. A past love and a past death are translated in the final line into an assertion about the future, a belief in some kind of spiritual survival.

Larkin's most recent volume, High Windows …, is still illustrative of his "preoccupation with mortality" and his belief in the "inevitability of his own extinction", but the tendency suggested at the conclusion of The Whitsun Weddings, this need to "transcend the thought of dying", this quest for means of survival, becomes more apparent…. There is a discernible movement outward and upward in some of these poems, including the title piece which, in its last lines, as one critic has suggested, escapes "suddenly and involuntarily from an oppressive sense of bafflement at human sexuality to what might almost be called a vision of pure spirit"…. The last poem in the volume, like "Arundel Tomb" in The Whitsun Weddings, returns us to Larkin's abiding subject and the theme of this investigation. As with "Arundel Tomb" Larkin registers the same faith in spiritual survival, but here the affirmation is stronger if not complete. "The Explosion" recounts a mining disaster whose victims "in beards and moleskins, / Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter," pass before us on the way to their work "on the day of the explosion"…. The poem's narrative is interrupted in the sixth stanza, and a voice from the scriptures places the reader in a chapel funeral service: "The dead go on before us, they / Are sitting in God's house in comfort, / We shall see them face to face—"…. The faith and the vision of the dead miners' wives is not questioned; the mystical proof of survival, a survival which has its source in love, is presented uncritically. (pp. 90-2)

Larkin has throughout his career as a poet refused to back away from exploration of [the word death], and his attempts to "grasp" the word and the idea have lent force and direction to a major part of his work. To concentrate on this quest for the unknowable is to illuminate the problem of divided poetic self…. To view Larkin's oeuvre to date it would probably be fair to say that the definition of the poet as a modern anti-hero governed by a sense of his own mortality seems … justified. But, beginning with some early signs in The Whitsun Weddings, and considerably more evidence in High Windows, a sense of vision and a quiet voice of celebration seem to be asserting themselves. This is not a return to the Yeatsian imitations of The North Ship, but something new and earned. (pp. 92-3)

Roger Bowen, "Death, Failure, and Survival in the Poetry of Philip Larkin," in The Dalhousie Review, Vol. 58, No. 1, Spring, 1978, pp. 79-94.