I recently appeared on The Poetry Detective on BBC Radio 4 to discuss ‘Going Without Saying’ by Bernard O’Donoghue, a short poem that has always meant a great deal to me. You can listen again here.
Speaking of poetry, I thought I’d re-share something I wrote about Philip Larkin on my old Tumblr blog. I’d just read Somewhere Becoming Rain, Clive James’s brilliant book about Larkin, and it prompted me to go back and read the poems that had had such a profound effect on me when I was younger. I wrote it in January 2020, hence the reference to ‘Brexit Day’ (barf). I have tidied it up a bit here and there (and elsewhere).
It is very sad that this is Clive James’s final book, but appropriate that it should be devoted to the poet he admired so much. James is brilliant on Philip Larkin’s wit and astonishing craft, and, yes, he also wrestles with the poet’s posthumous reputation. Speaking of which, I’m writing this on Brexit Day and it isn’t difficult to guess how Larkin might have voted. But equally it isn’t difficult to imagine Aaron Banks and Nigel Farage as the ‘cast of crooks’ from ‘Going, Going’, and maybe Larkin would have recognised that too?
Reading Somewhere Becoming Rain has made me go back to Larkin’s poetry and remember how much of an impression it made on me as a teenager. ‘High Windows’ was a total revelation. It felt shocking – not just because of the swearing, although that was a factor – but because of the sudden elevation in that last stanza, a moment of sheer transcendence. It felt like a kind of mainlining of everything I wanted to get from poetry; unashamedly beautiful, revelling in that image of the ‘deep blue air’, framed by the window’s ‘sun-comprehending glass’. (Interestingly James finds this image to be one of desolation, but he admits the range of interpretations it offers; his secretary finds it hopeful, like I do.)
Larkin captured the strangeness of the modern world in a way that I recognised – who hasn’t felt a vague sense of unreality in a Marks & Spencer? Larkin’s juxtapositions of ancient and modern, high and low are everywhere you look nowadays: shops side-by-side with churches, billboards adjoining Victorian terraces, the countryside beyond the new town, centuries-old pubs showing Sky Sports (one of which, in Coventry, the poet’s place of birth, is called The Philip Larkin) – even that sickening rollercoaster of bathos, social media. There’s something laughable about this!
Reading ‘High Windows’ felt like Larkin was pre-empting the beauty and brutalism that Joy Division would aim for a few years later, but my God, how he would have hated that comparison. But there’s something in it (and ‘High Windows’ does sound like the title of a great lost post-punk 7"). Larkin’s poems are full of sudden shifts and changes in tone, as if he’s trying to master the complex beauty of the world. Because there is beauty in Larkin’s world as much as there is bleakness and despair. And he can’t stop noticing it: the ‘Unhindered moon’ in ‘Dockery and Son’; the big sky draining down the estuary ‘like the bed / Of a gold river’ in ‘Livings’; the hothouse window that ‘flashed uniquely’ in the sun in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (an image I’m reminded of whenever I’m on a train journey in bright sunlight, seeing the sun reflect off the windows of passing houses). He’s able to summon the entire English countryside in just one vivid line in ‘Going, Going’: ‘The shadows, the meadows, the lanes’. He can’t help himself – even a poem as bleak as ‘The Old Fools’ contains a description of life as ‘the million-petalled flower / Of being here’.
There are also moments of great mystery and inexplicability in Larkin’s poems. The exultant abstraction in ‘Absences’: ‘Such attics cleared of me!’; the strange and brilliant description of snowfall in ‘Livings’: ‘O loose moth world’; the enigmatic last words of ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’: ‘Waves fold behind villages.’ His best poems are mysterious; they exist in zones of ambiguity, neither here nor there but elsewhere (an important word for Larkin). There are no easy answers in these poems, the truth is between – think of the fantastically equivocal last lines of ‘Talking in Bed’: ‘It becomes still more difficult to find / Words at once true and kind, / Or not untrue and not unkind’.
Clive James rightly celebrates ‘The Building’ as one of Larkin’s finest poems. Formally it’s astonishing. The stanzas are made up of seven lines but the rhyme scheme runs to eight lines (ABCBDCAD). These two patterns go out of phase with each other before resolving at the end of the eighth stanza – but, significantly, the poem does not end at this point of harmony. Instead there is another seven-line stanza which initiates the dual pattern again, necessitating a concluding single-line stanza in order to satisfy the eight-line rhyme scheme. Why did Larkin go to such extraordinary lengths to engineer this virtually subliminal effect? Because he wanted it to mean something. And so, shadow meanings reveal themselves in this already brilliant poem – and we lose ourselves in finding analogies for its formal innovation. Does the unseen rhythm creep towards its conclusion just as we edge closer to, well, the inevitable (‘nothing contravenes / The coming dark’)? Do the phasing and the out of sync ending suggest that something is out of joint (‘It must be error of a serious sort’), that last line reconciling the two patterns like the ‘propitiatory flowers’? Does the intricacy of the poem somehow reflect the architecture of the hospital itself (‘Higher than the handsomest hotel’)?
I listened to Larkin’s Desert Island Discs recently. His favourite song, brilliantly, is ‘I’m Down in the Dumps’ by Bessie Smith. (I also love the fact that as a teenager he subscribed to the jazz magazine DownBeat.) However, Larkin thinks, ‘a more misleading title I can’t imagine, she sounds full of life and… vitality’. A fitting description of Larkin himself. Far from the dour, morose caricature we have of him, Larkin’s poems are full of complicated joy; as Clive James writes, ‘Larkin could deal in exaltation because he knew despair’.
It’s 2024 me again. If you want to hear more of me going on about Larkin, John Robins and I appeared on the excellent Philip Larkin Society podcast Tiny In All That Air a couple of years ago. Listen below (or wherever you get your podcasts)!