UNIVERZITA KARLOVA V PRAZE, FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA

ÚSTAV ANGLISTIKY A AMERIKANISTIKY

STUDIJNÍ OBOR: ANGLISTIKA-AMERIKANISTIKA

TEREZA REJŠKOVÁ

“PHILIP LARKIN AS A LOVE POET”

VEDOUCÍ PRÁCE: DOC. JUSTIN QUINN

2008

Prohlašuji, že jsem diplomovou práci vypracovala samostatně s využitím uvedených

pramenů a literatury.

Ráda bych poděkovala doc. Justinovi Quinnovi za ochotu, vlídnou podporu a bezmeznou

trpělivost, které významně napomohly vzniku této práce.

I would like to thank Dr. Justin Quinn for the help, encouragement and patience he has shown

during our collaboration on the thesis.

ABSTRACT

This thesis examines to what extent it is justifiable to classify Philip Larkin as a love

poet. It finds that love is indeed one of the central themes in the work of this poet, who is

usually associated with other, much bleaker, themes such as death. Through detailed close

reading of his poems and reference to his prose, it explores the nature, the possibility and

different aspects of human relationships and love, whose significance in Larkin’s work is

never taken at face value and whose treatment is unconventional. In order to understand

love’s place in his poetry, more general themes are discussed, such as the place of illusions

and ideals in people’s lives, possibility of choice, the question of desire, and personal identity

in relationships. In order to discuss these themes in depth, the thesis also investigates the ways

in which Larkin’s poems about love fit into the tradition of English poetry. It further presents

an extensive outline of Larkin’s development as a love poet showing how the themes

connected with love and their formal treatment changed throughout his writing career.

ABSTRAKT

Diplomová práce si klade za cíl zjistit, zda a do jaké míry lze o poezii Philipa Larkina

hovořit jako o poezii milostné. Zjišťuje, že navzdory tomu, že básník je běžně spojován spíše

s odlišnými tématy, například se smrtí, láska zaujímá v jeho díle ústřední pozici. Metodou

detailní analýzy textů jeho básní i prózy práce nastiňuje, jakými nekonvenčními způsoby

Larkin na lásku nahlíží. Práce zkoumá, jak je láska, jejíž význam autor nikdy nechápe jako

předem daný a samozřejmý, chápána a jaké jsou její projevy a možnosti. Práce se tak nutně

zabývá i obecnějšími tématy, která jsou důležitá v Larkinově poezii a která úzce souvisejí

s láskou, jako jsou například iluze a ideály, možnost volby, role touhy v našich životech a

ohrožení osobní identity ve vztazích. Debata o Larkinově milostné poezii je dále rozšířena o

její vztah k anglické poetické tradici. Detailnější pozornost je také věnována vývoji Larkinovy

(nejen) milostné poezie, proměně témat a formy během básníkova tvůrčího života.

CONTENTS/ OBSAH

Abbreviations .............................................................................................................................6

1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................7

1.1 Organization of the thesis .................................................................................................7

1.2 A Note about Sources .......................................................................................................8

1.3 General Introduction.........................................................................................................9

1.4 Critical Standpoint of the Thesis ....................................................................................15

2. Philip Larkin and the Tradition of Love Poetry ...................................................................24

3. Philip Larkin’s Development as a Love Poet .......................................................................39

3.1 Larkin’s Earliest Poetry ..................................................................................................39

3.2 The North Ship................................................................................................................48

3.3 Jill and A Girl in Winter .................................................................................................62

3.4 The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows ....................................69

4. Philip Larkin’s Love Poetry .................................................................................................78

5. Conclusion..........................................................................................................................136

6. Shrnutí v českém jazyce/ Czech summary .........................................................................138

7. Works Cited........................................................................................................................145

ABBREVIATIONS

CP: Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. London: The Marvell Press and Faber &

Faber, 2003.

CP1988: Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. London: The Marvell Press and Faber &

Faber, 1988.

EP&J: Larkin, Philip. Early Poems and Juvenilia. Ed. A.T. Tolley. London: Faber &

Faber, 2005.

FR: Larkin, Philip. Further Requirements – Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and

Book Reviews 1952 – 1985. Ed. A. Thwaite. London: Faber & Faber, 2001.

GiW: Larkin, Philip. A Girl in Winter. London: Faber & Faber, 1975.

Jill: Larkin, Philip. Jill. London: Faber & Faber, 2005.

RW: Larkin, Philip. Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955 – 1982. London:

Faber & Faber, 1983.

SL: Larkin, Philip. Selected Letters: 1940 – 1985. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. London:

Faber & Faber, 1993.

7

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Organization of the thesis

This thesis aims to discuss to what extent Philip Larkin can be considered a love poet

and to outline the many ways of Larkin’s treatment of the topic of love throughout his poetry.

In order to answer the many possible questions lingering under the title “Larkin as a love

poet”, this thesis will approach its topic from several points and is therefore divided into five

parts. The introduction will make a brief note about the choice of the analyzed texts (1.2), it

will further try to summarize the reasons justifying the choice of the topic in general (1.3) and

it will outline main critical responses to Larkin’s poetry and will try to establish its own

critical standpoint within the existing streams of criticism (1.4). Chapter 2, Philip Larkin and

the Tradition on Love Poetry, will focus on the tradition of love poetry written in English and

on Philip Larkin’s place within it and it will try to assess to what extent Larkin’s verse fits

into the tradition. Chapter 3 will examine the chronological development of themes and

formal features in Larkin’s love poetry. Chapter 4, the principal part of the thesis, will

concentrate rather on the role of love in Larkin’s poetry than on the role of Larkin in love

poetry and will examine Larkin’s different views of and approaches to love. Chapter 5 will

briefly conclude the thesis.

8

1.2 A Note about Sources

This thesis makes use of most of Philip Larkin’s primary material published to date

(all material except for the unfinished juvenile prose – Trouble at Willow Gables and Other

Fictions, [2002]). The method of the thesis is to read closely those of Larkin’s poems which

were published during his lifetime, i.e. poems included in Philip Larkin: Collected Poems

(2003) and originally published in four collections: The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived

(1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974), or published separately

elsewhere. To these poems the most detailed attention has been paid. I have attempted to

consider these poems exhaustively, to try to find in them everything relevant to the topic of

the thesis. There are, however, many other poems which were not published during Larkin’s

life and which have been published only later in Collected Poems (1988) or in Early Poems

and Juvenilia (2005). These I analyze only when they seem to make or illustrate a point that is

crucial to the points found already in the poems published during Larkin’s life, the attention

paid to these poems has been therefore only limited. Although it deals with Larkin’s love

poetry, the thesis makes occasional use of his prose writings, namely the two complete and

published novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), his Selected Letters (1993), and the

two collections of Larkin’s journalistic writing, Required Writing (1983) and Further

Requirements (2001). These are used again rather to offer a context or development of the

ideas present in the published poems than to be subjected to a thorough analysis. This thesis

works also with a selection of secondary material.

9

1.3 General Introduction

At first glance, it may appear that to couple Philip Larkin and love poetry is to force a

rather improbable and incompatible combination. Certainly, if one knew Philip Larkin’s

poetry only from what is said about it in encyclopaedias, dictionaries or concise literary

histories, one would not open a Larkin collection when wanting to enjoy sweet verse about

love. One would rather expect poems that are sarcastic, bored, bleak, sad (Whalen 11),

“bitterly cynical” (FR 57) - to name just a few adjectives used to describe Larkin’s verse. Just

to give some examples, the Longman Dictionary describes Larkin’s work briefly in this way:

“He often wrote about death and loneliness and his poems are sometimes very sad”

(“Longman Dictionary” 738). Or The Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature

qualifies his verse as showing a “preoccupation with death and transience” in “a range of

melancholy urban and suburban provincial landscapes” (Drabble 326). The Encyclopedia

Britannica concedes that Larkin’s “own verse is not without emotion, but it tends to be

understated”. This last statement is quite daring considering the fact that Larkin saw the whole

of lyric poetry as an affair of emotion whose “concentrated effect [...] is achieved by leaving

everything out but the emotion itself” (RW 95).

A list of similar statements could be expanded further and it must be said that all these

concise and therefore simplistic statements are undoubtedly true, but they are only also true

and not only true. One could certainly agree with Michael Gearin-Tosh saying in a radio

programme “Love Poetry II” that Larkin would not necessarily belong to the “top ten of

people we associate with love poetry” (“Love Poetry II”) and no doubt that Larkin’s

prominent and most often quoted themes are death, the passing of time, failure, weakness and

other dismal affairs, but the theme of love has its stable place next to, or together with, these.

It is indeed possible to talk of Larkin’s love poetry, and not only because he has a

couple of poems featuring the word ‘love’ in their titles (as in “Love”, “Love Songs in Age”

10

or “Love Again”) or because in his poems, especially the earlier ones, he uses the word

“heart” with a frequency similar to that of the indefinite article. Nor is it because of his

provocative and unreserved lines concerning love or sex, such as “They fuck you up, your

mum and dad”, supposedly Larkin’s “best-known line” (RW 48), or “Love again: wanking at

ten past three” (CP1988 215)1. The area of Larkin’s poetry about love stretches far and is very

rich indeed. However, the core of Larkin’s love poetry is often well disguised: it seldom

advertises itself as such. Nevertheless, the presentation and contemplation of love in its many

forms and meanings runs through the vast majority of Larkin’s poems. Poems that have

nothing at all to say about love are a rarity in Larkin’s work.

Larkin himself was aware that he could not easily be put into the category of love

poets; about “Broadcasts”, one of his poems showing a loving affection, he commented that it

is “about as near as I can get [...] to a lovesong (It’s not, I’m afraid, very near)” (qtd. in Martin

60). This, however, suggests the unconventionality of his love poetry rather than its

nonexistence. It is indeed impossible to find in Larkin’s mature oeuvre conventional love-

song verses extolling straightforwardly the greatness of a beloved, or of being in love, or

lamenting the loss of a beloved or the state of being out of love spilling tears all over the

verses. As Andrew Motion asserts in “Philip Larkin and Symbolism”, “none of Larkin’s

poems register the achievement of complete calm success in love” (Motion, “PL and

Symbolism” 37). If readers are looking for such one-dimensional poems, they should look

elsewhere. Of course that the themes just mentioned can be found in Larkin, and indeed are,

but Larkin’s mature poems are never one-dimensional exposures of an emotional state that

1 Wherever the 1988 publication of Larkin’s Collected Poems (Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. London: The

Marvell Press and Faber & Faber, 1988.) is referred to, the in-text citation uses the abbreviation CP1988, as

opposed to the 2003 publication (Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. London: The Marvell Press and Faber &

Faber, 2003.) which is referred to as CP.

11

could be described by a word or a phrase in common language; they always take a feeling (of

love) and plant it in a broader emotional context. Larkin stated that “good writing is largely a

matter of finding proper expression for strong feelings” (FR 3), which only further supports

the emotional quality of his poetry, but these feelings can be rather complex. Larkin’s poetry

never bestows on the reader a simple feeling or a simple statement, nothing in the poems can

be taken at face value and for granted. Their complexity makes it harder for readers or critics

to label the poetry in any way, for example as love poetry. But luckily, the task of this thesis

is not to label things, but to explore the richness of themes and expression relating to that

vague label of love poetry.

Larkin’s poems often combine themes, thus to isolate the theme of love as the only or

most important one for a poem can be rather difficult. Moreover, there is no unified message

that Larkin would like to convey in his love poetry. One has to argue here with what the

Encyclopaedia Britannica says; emotion, including love, is not understated, it is only

questioned, scrutinized and investigated. The complexity of Larkin’s verse creates two

dangers for readers and critics. First, as has been already mentioned, there is the danger of not

seeing a theme at all, as Larkin does not present it as pure extract in transparent phials. The

second danger is seemingly the opposite, but its cause is the same, i.e. not seeing the poems in

their complexity. This is the danger of not seeing an observation or a perception in its context,

of not hearing the comments of the apothecary handing us over the supposedly transparent

phial of clear essence. Falling into such a trap can lead to simplistic critical statements, such

as that Larkin thought all marriage wrong or that he was a misogynist. But hardly anyone

could be better at disputing Larkin’s supposedly decisive statements than Larkin himself. One

might only repeat here what Brooks said about Marvell and what Larkin approvingly quoted

in one of his essays, that he “was too good a poet to resolve [an] ambiguity” (RW 248). In this

way, he creates a wonderfully elusive and therefore rich body of poetry.

12

Larkin is indeed a diverse and subversive poet, as James Booth explains: “If we set out

to trace one of Larkin’s more explicit ‘themes’ through his work, say death, or love, or

marriage, we find a range of different, often contradictory positions and attitudes. The reader

might be tempted [...] to simplify Larkin’s work. But no [...] consistent programme governs

his work” (Booth, “PL: Writer”, 78). Larkin does not aim to create a solid ideological system

into which it would be possible to fit all his ideas about love. He always writes with a

disbelief in the possibility of a fixed ideological framework into which one could fit all his

ideas and experience of love, and with a disbelief in such a disbelief, he was an “original, [...],

deep-feeling poet who consistently refused the consolations of conventional belief” (qtd. in

Swarbrick 6-7), as Blake Morrison put it, or who had “no faith in inherited and reliable

absolutes” (Motion, “PL and Symbolism” 33). With what Kingsley Amis called “frightening

honesty” (qtd. in Hope 23) and with endeavour to search always for the (or one should rather

say a) truth, Larkin sets off to map the different seeds that love, the reality or the idea of it,

sprinkle throughout the human world, both outer and inner, and to trace what they yield. He

infinitely searches for the meaning and possibility of love within one’s self, among people

and in the environment.

There are also some dangers of overseeing Larkin’s love poetry hidden in formal

reasons. The poetry is often seemingly impersonal, which is due to the fact that Larkin often

employs the “perspective of an outsider” (Swarbrick 30). The love which appears in a poem

often happens somewhere else to someone else. This, however, does not diminish the

understanding of love in any way as “even to feel outside it one must know what it is; and

[Larkin] does” (Thwaite, “Introduction to Larkin at Sixty” 14).

Larkin’s poems are far from being a confessional, emotional outpouring of a lover

either in love, or out of love, or refused, or just married. There are only a few private poems

that could be labelled, if it was necessary to label, confessional (as for example “The Dance”),

13

and most of these were never published during Larkin’s lifetime. This does not mean that his

poetry is an impersonal, scientifically detached commentary on the sociology of love in

modern society; on the contrary, his poems often deal with concrete situations and present real

people in real places and they “express a surprisingly wide range of emotional nuances”

(Booth, “PL: Writer” 126). Larkin indeed touched readers’ hearts “by showing his own” (RW

67), but not in the sense that his heart would be the only object worthy of his attention, but

rather in the sense that whatever he said had been processed through his heart and in this way

had been rendered true.

The low visibility of Larkin’s love poetry should not discourage readers from paying

attention to it; on the contrary, it is exactly this elusiveness which makes Larkin’s love poetry

so valuable. It is the task of this thesis to uncover and discuss the different approaches to love

in Larkin’s poetry and the results they touch upon. So it is not only the variety of topics which

can be subsumed under the heading of love - such as falling in love, marriage, break-up, to

name but a few - but the variety of their poetical rendering. Moreover, it is not only that

readers can learn a great deal about love through searching Larkin’s poetry, it is also possible,

through analyzing the theme of love, to notice some more general principles and ideas

underlying the whole of Larkin’s poetry. To learn, for instance, how much of Larkin’s view of

the world around him is determined by his understanding of our lives as being lived on the

blunt edge where ideals and reality do not meet, or how much of his poetry tries to solve the

strange position of an individual in the society of other people and of their relationships and

also to learn in a more general sense that a mode of doubt, disbelief and careful

uncompromising scrutiny is a default mode for all of Larkin’s poetry, including that about

love, as Larkin was aware of the fact that “nothing is absolute” and that that is “the most

difficult thing we have to learn about life” (RW 96).

14

Love poems or poems about love definitely have a stable place in Larkin’s poetry and

Larkin can be without doubt, and contrary to popular belief, considered a love poet. Once,

when judging at a poetry competition in which the number of entries was cut down before the

poems were passed onto the judges, Larkin read through the poems and asked: “Where are all

the love poems? [...] And they said, Oh, we threw all those away.” This he comments: “I

expect they were the ones I should have liked” (RW 76). We can only feel lucky that nobody

threw Larkin’s love poems away, as I expect those are also the ones readers should like.

15

1.4 Critical Standpoint of the Thesis

Philip Larkin’s poetry, including his love poetry, has been given a lot of diverse

critical attention. This part of the thesis will try to outline briefly some of the main critical

approaches to Larkin’s poetry, especially those elements in it which are analyzed in Chapter

4, and try to define the critical viewpoint of the thesis among these approaches.

Despite the fact that Larkin “prided himself on the idea that his poems required no

commentators, critics or interpreters” (Hope 10) and that he explicitly said: “I should hate

anybody to read my work because he’s been told to and told what to think about it. I really

want to hit them, I want readers to feel yes, I’ve never thought of it that way, but that’s how it

is” (RW 56), there is a large and diverse body of criticism of Larkin’s poetry. However,

Simon Petch in his 1981 book The Art of Philip Larkin noticed that there was “a complete

lack of consensus as to what does or what does not constitute a good Larkin poem, and the

disagreement, sometimes real contradiction, as to the essential nature of the poet as a writer”

(qtd. in Everett, “Larkin and Dockery” 143).

It is therefore possible to see that Larkin’s poetry inspired diverse critical literature

already during his lifetime. This is hardly surprising as Larkin was very popular with his

readers and esteemed in the literary world. He was “acknowledged as the nation’s unofficial

poet Laureate” (Regan 1) and indeed could have become one if he had not declined the post;

his “reputation as a writer seemed unblemished and secure” (Regan 1).

Until the 1970s, most of the criticism noticed in Larkin’s poetry mainly its realist

quality, The Times Literary Supplement called Larkin’s first major collection, The Less

Deceived, a “triumph of clarity after the formless mystifications of the last twenty years” (qtd.

in Everett, “Poets in Their Time” 230). Larkin’s verse allegedly created an accurate portrait of

the English countryside and towns, of the English people and their lives. This was either

16

appreciated for its verisimilitude, the beautiful and faithful presentation of “naturalistic data”

(Heaney 27), or criticised for being “‘naif’ or ‘faux-naif’ or ‘genteel’ or ‘suburban’ or

‘parochial’ or ‘provincial’ or downright Philistine” (Everett, “Poets in Their Time” 230).

Larkin’s poetry was seen in opposition to modernist poetry. As Lawrence Lerner writes,

“Larkin emerges from these statements as the typical Movement poet – matter of fact,

contemporary, and direct in manner, rejecting pretentiousness, cloudy verbiage and learned

allusions – the poet as ordinary man” (Lerner 44). James Booth remarked of this chapter of

Larkin criticism: “a great deal of early criticism of his work now seems to be preoccupied

with transient inessentials, particularly the attempt to identify his work with current literary

and social fashions” (Booth, “PL: Writer” 68).

The 1970s witnessed the arrival of new methods for analysis of the poetry, which

added to the understanding of Larkin’s poetry. Some critics started to see that next to the

realist dimension, there was also a symbolist one, identifying in Larkin’s verse instances of

“vision” next to those of “experience” (Heaney 24) and linking thus Larkin’s work with the

tradition of symbolism and modernism. The previous concealment of this dimension had been

supported also by Larkin’s own deliberate dismissal of modernism, which were for him

“irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it” (RW

297).

Among those critics who analyzed Larkin’s verse as symbolist, were Seamus Heaney,

Andrew Motion or Barbara Everett, among others. Heaney, for instance, finds that many of

Larkin’s poems “have openings at their centre which take the reader through and beyond”

(Heaney 23) the things how ‘they simply are’, he calls these “symbolist hole[s]” (Heaney 25)

“visionary” (Heaney 24) and connects their occurrence with “streams of light” (Heaney 24).

In this way he speaks about the closeness of Larkin’s poetry to James Joyce’s Dubliners in the

effective use of epiphanies in both writers. Everett links Larkin’s verse with a number of

17

French symbolist poets, such as Baudelaire, Gautier or Mallarmé. When analyzing why recent

critics have found Larkin’s verse obscure (Everett, “Poets in Their Time” 230), she claims

that Larkin uses symbolist methods of writing and at the same time subverts them: “his poems

appear to have profited from a kind of heroic struggle not to be modernistic” (Everett, “Poets

in Their Time” 232) and that he uses symbolism “negatively, in a post- or even anti-Symbolist

fashion” (Everett, “Poets in Their Time” 240) with “special non-symbolic symbols” (Everett,

“Poets in Their Time” 243) only “to record its unavailability” (Everett, “Poets in Their Time”

241). Against what Larkin liked to say about his own poetry, she identifies “learned” and

“esoteric” (Everett, “Poets in Their Time” 234) qualities in it which associate it with (French)

symbolism or modernism. She argues that his subversive use of symbolism of his “willfully

modest” poetry is “peculiarly potent” (Everett, “Poets in Their Time” 243).

Andrew Motion also agrees that “Larkin’s poems are not as narrowly circumscribed as

has often been claimed” (Motion, “PL and Symbolism” 32), he also finds those moments in

Larkin’s verse which rise above the “rational, empirical” discourse symbolist (Motion, “PL

and Symbolism” 53) and says about a particular poem that Larkin there “flickers from symbol

to symbol” (Motion, “PL and Symbolism” 47). After all, Larkin himself said of his poem

“Absences”: “I fancy it sounds like a different, better poet than myself. The last line sounds

like a slightly-unconvincing translation from a French symbolist. I wish I could write like this

more often” (FR 17).

Despite Larkin’s own “antiformalist” creed: “Form holds little interest for me, content

is everything” (qtd. in Lodge 120), structuralist methods of analysis were introduced and

closely investigated Larkin’s form and the structure of his poetical language. In this light

David Lodge defined “the formal character of Larkin’s verse by regarding him as a

‘metonymic’ poet” (Lodge 120) explaining that “such poetry makes its impact by appearing

daringly, even shockingly unpoetic” (Lodge 120) and that the alleged lack of metaphors in the

18

poetry is an “‘experimental’ literary gesture” (Lodge 120). Lodge in this way claims that

Larkin’s being an “antimodernist scarcely needs demonstration” (Lodge 119). He however

also concedes to the fact that Larkin often transcends the ‘readerly’ nature of his poetry

(Lodge 126).

Feminist criticism has also had its say about Larkin’s poetry, and there is much the

critics can focus on in terms of issues concerning gender or sex. The feminist voice often

criticized Larkin for holding fast to the male point of view, for his sexism and even misogyny.

Janice Rossen, for instance, claims that “women tend to play a role in [Larkin’s] writing

which finds him not far from misogyny, at the least, he capitalizes on the energy which

derives from seeing sexual politics solely from the man’s point of view” (Rossen, “PL: His

Life’s Work” 70). Further, it claimed that many issues central to Larkin’s poetry, such as

desire, unjustly try to disguise their anchorage in society based on the unequal distribution of

power between men and women by appearing more general. Feminist criticism strove to

break this appearance (Holderness 90). Moreover, it claimed that Larkin often projects

negative ideas onto women and that “deprivation often takes a uniquely feminine cast for

him” (Rossen, “Difficulties with Girls” 135). In the world of Larkin’s poetry, “men are seen

as victimised while women are powerful and able to hurt them or control them” (Rossen,

“Difficulties with Girls” 139). Rossen, despite acknowledging the various tones and contexts

of Larkin’s poetry, insists that their “underlying subtext still seems to express resentment

towards women” (Rossen, “Difficulties with Girls” 154).

Psychoanalytical criticism, represented for example by Steve Clark, focused mainly

on Larkin’s sexual politics, trying to derive from the Freudian and post-Freudian analysis of

Larkin’s verse and life the specific approaches to women, sex, paternity and desire. The way

Larkin “demystif[ies] sex [...] exposes many of the myths and stereotypes associated with it”

(Clark 132). Clark repudiated some of the feminist claims about Larkin’s misogyny.

19

Some critics looked at Larkin’s poetry from the standpoint of historical and

postcolonial criticism which saw in Larkin’s poetry “the product of a profoundly conservative

political ideology, marked by nostalgia for past imperial glories and despair over the decline

of modern Britain” (Booth, “PL: Writer” 3). The most outspoken representative of this critical

trend is Tom Paulin who grafted his strict historical reading onto poems that most critics

would not associate with such political issues at all, such as “Afternoons” which according to

him is a “metaphor for a sense of diminished purpose and fading imperial power” (Paulin

161) or “At Grass” where he identifies the retired horses with “famous generals” (Paulin 163)

of the British Empire. He claims that Larkin’s “populism and his calculated philistinism”

(Paulin 175) speak for a traditional, isolated and masculine England and against everything

new, foreign or feminine in an almost propagandist way.

James Booth or Andrew Swarbrick conscientiously opposed these political, moralist

(Booth, “PL: Lyricism” 194) readings, as well as radically feminist ones, and considered them

reductionistic. Booth set off to show that Larkin was “a poet and not a propagandist” (Booth,

“PL: Lyricism” 195) and that “Larkin’s imaginative scope is broader than such a sexual-

political reading allows” (Booth, “PL: Writer” 3) or that “such political interpretations are

inadequate, and that the beauty and the truth of Larkin’s poems are not to be explained in

terms of his ‘political unconscious’”(Booth, “PL: Writer” 4). Quite interestingly, Booth saw

in Larkin “an aesthete, dedicated to recording ‘the experience. The beauty’” (Booth, “The

Turf Cutter” 372). Booth also based much of his criticism on biographical evidence,

discussing, for example, which poem about love was addressed to or focused on which

woman, but also taking his criticism much beyond that.

All these critical streams, and others, too, had their proponents and opponents, the

elaboration and reactions will be mentioned also throughout the thesis wherever they are

found relevant. This brief outline is far from exhaustive, but it suffices to show that Larkin is

20

“a far more various and more complicated poet than one would expect him to be” and that he

“arouses surprising difficulties of agreement among [...] readers and critics” (Everett, “Larkin

and Dockery” 141).

It is nevertheless necessary to mention one important event in the history of Larkin

criticism, which gave rise to substantially confrontational and dramatic changes in the

criticism. Some radical and unexpected turns took place after Larkin’s death and transformed

the academic debate about his poetry. This dramatic change was especially connected with the

reaction to three cornerstone publications by or about Larkin: of the Collected Poems (1988),

which included many of Larkin’s so far unpublished poems and their precise dating, with the

publication of Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992), which in Tom Paulin’s words

uncovered “the sewer under the national monument Larkin became” (qtd. in Regan 4), and

Andrew Motion’s biography Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993). These three publications

cast a new light on Larkin’s personality and life and through that on his work. As if Larkin

foresaw this when he wrote in an essay about Wilfred Owen: “A writer’s reputation is

twofold: what we think of the work, and what we think of him. What’s more, we expect the

two halves to relate: if they don’t, then one or the other of our opinions alters until they do”

(RW 228). This is exactly what happened.

A revised critical debate which newly incorporated the discussion of Larkin’s texts

with details of his biography or with privately expressed opinions, which were often

“offensive and disturbing” (Regan 4) was launched and remained vigorous for some time. For

some critics, Larkin’s poems suddenly acquired different meaning from what had been held

before. It could no longer be viewed as showing “fundamental decency and tolerance” (Regan

1). It seems that some critics decided that everything that was said by Larkin, the private man,

was more true of him and expressed his innermost ideas better than whatever was said, or

rather written, by Larkin publicly. Andrew Motion in the preface to the biography anticipated

21

the change of the critical reaction when he said: “Describing this ground must necessarily

alter the image of Larkin that he prepared so carefully for his readers” (Motion, “PL: A

Writer’s Life” xx). Not only has it altered the image of Larkin as a person, but it also altered

the image of his poetry. One could encounter such sweeping dismissals as Germaine Greer’s

claim that his verse expresses attitudes which are “anti-intellectual, racist, sexist, and rotten

with class-consciousness” (Regan 3), or in Paulin’s words that Larkin’s poems are influenced

by his “racism, misogyny and quasi-fascist views” (Regan 5). Alan Bennett in his review of

Motion’s biography felt “[a]las! [d]eceived” by Larkin’s showing a different face in the public

from what it was (or what the biography claims it was) in private, and he expressed that to

know the details of Larkin’s life must inevitably blemish our appreciation of the poems, but

should not make us neglect them completely.

Some of these accusations had much to do with the themes relevant to this thesis, such

as issues of gender, sex or selfishness. Philip Larkin suddenly ceased to be just the author of

poems such as “Wedding-Wind”, “Broadcast” or “Faith Healing” and started to be the

questionable man who said: “all women are stupid beings” (SL 63) or “What is love? Shite”

(SL 16). Some critics took the whole issue very far calling for practical consequences of these

‘unpleasant’ discoveries. For example, Lisa Jardine wanted to erase Larkin from the accepted

canon of English poetry and called for the removal of Larkin from school and university

curricula. Also Bryan Appleyard, James Wood or Peter Ackroyd regarded Larkin’s reputation

as undeserved and untenable.

Of course, this was not the only side of the critical reaction. It contained many

opposing streams, reactions and reactions to the reactions. But much of the critical debate was

concerned with whether it is possible, desirable or necessary to link somebody’s art with the

evidence of his or her life. Many critics found the likes of such above-mentioned opinions too

simplistic in their view of the relationship between the poems and the private texts as

22

absolutely close and tight and criticized the application of political correctness as the only

factor determining the quality of the poetry. There were many voices, such as Andrew

Motion’s or Ian Hamilton’s, speaking in favour of Larkin’s preserving his greatness as a poet

despite the above-mentioned revelations.

Overall, it can be said that the outcry caused by the publication of the three books has

made in its provocative and often exaggerated way its indelible mark on Larkin criticism as

Larkin’s “reputation as a poet continued to be questioned” (Regan 4). It stirred, but also

clogged the critical debate, as too much energy was spent on this almost political fight. It

affected both the academic and the popular view of Larkin’s poetry and of Larkin, which can

be seen from the changes in the meaning of the word ‘Larkinesque’, as Ian Hamilton

specifies: “A few years ago, ‘Larkinesque’ suggested qualities both lovable and glum. Today,

it means four-letter words and hateful views” (qtd. in Regan 6); or as Martin Amis adds that

in 1993 “Larkin is something like a pariah, or an untouchable” (qtd. in Regan 6). This

illustrates how much an academic critical response can influence the reception of art. Larkin’s

poetry, nevertheless, survived all the accusations. It still continues to be read at schools and

universities, there is a lot of cultural interest dedicated to Larkin (such as theatre productions

staging his life and work). In 2003, Philip Larkin was even voted “the nation’s best-loved

poet of the last 50 years” in a survey carried out by the Poetry Book Society (“Larkin is

nation’s top poet”).

The aim of this brief and incomplete list of critical approaches to Larkin’s work was to

place the critical approach of this thesis in a broader critical context. This thesis does not

follow closely or consciously any of the mentioned ideological streams. It will try to explore

the theme of love in Philip Larkin’s poetry through detailed close reading using some of the

mentioned views as inspiration. I am, however, aware that no matter how hard I strive to

present the themes connected with love in their complexity, the result will always be only a

23

fragment, as my sight must necessarily be limited. It will always be at least partly true that

“poems tell you what you know already” (Bennet, “Instead of a Present” 72). My readings of

Larkin’s love poetry will always be influenced by my limited knowledge and capacity to feel,

for which I apologize deeply, especially to Mr Philip Larkin.

24

2. PHILIP LARKIN AND THE TRADITION OF LOVE POETRY

As has been shown already in chapter 1.3, Larkin’s love poetry has not always even

been identified as such; and if it has, it has been claimed that it is unconventional. The

question of conventionality or unconventionality relates closely to the question of tradition.

This section would like to outline the place of Larkin’s poetry in or out of the tradition of

(mainly) English poetry, with a special regard to love poetry. It will discuss Larkin’s place

within the tradition from three angles. First, it will present what Larkin himself thought of his

poetry’s place within the tradition and it will outline which general trends in literature

Larkin’s work was linked with. Second, it will briefly discuss the formal features of Larkin’s

poetry and their indebtedness to previous verse. The third subsection will pay attention to how

the content, themes and views, of Larkin’s poems may have been inspired by works of other

poets within the poetical tradition.

First of all, it is interesting to have a look at some of Larkin’s own views on tradition

and its significance for poetry, including his. Larkin provided us with quite a substantial

number of ideas about it in his essays and although none of Larkin’s statements should be

taken at face value, there are many which can disclose his ideas of tradition. Although, in

practice, Larkin acknowledged the influence of a number of writers, in theory, he liked to

dismiss the whole idea of tradition. In his gentle and humorous manner he explained that he

saw no point in the endeavour to reproduce or at least use other writers’ poems in one’s work

when he said that “one reason for writing, of course, is that no one’s written what you want to

read” (RW 76). Larkin believed that literature should be “unliterary” (Hope 11) in that respect

that it should communicate “in words experience which is initially non-verbal” (Lodge 120),

which is inspired and deals with life rather than with literature and therefore tradition. As

Barbara Everett noted, this belief made Larkin seem philistine in the eyes of some critics, but

25

it was exactly this belief put into practice which was a continuation of “a great tradition that

has for centuries refused to avail itself of the self-indulgent securities of ‘Art’ that made itself

philistine for the good of the soul of literature” (Everett, “Art and Larkin” 130). Larkin

asserted many times in his critical writing that his poetry, as well as every good poetry, stands

on its own without being dependent or derived from a tradition.

He summarized this view for D.J. Enright’s anthology Poets of the 1950s: “As a

guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and

therefore have no belief in ‘tradition’ or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to

other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers

letting you see they know the right people” (RW 79). This slightly accusatory statement was

meant most of all as a reaction to modernism as it is represented by Ezra Pound or by T.S.

Eliot and his notion of tradition articulated in the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

in which he claimed that all literature worthy of the name must, apart from its contemporary

issues, incorporate the whole body of previous literary tradition. Larkin objected to this as the

heavy load of allusions to cultures of the past necessarily entailed intellectualism rendering

literature understandable and available only to a “student audience” (RW 81). He also

doubted the genuineness of the art which applied such a theory: “to me the whole of the

ancient world, the whole of classical and biblical mythology means very little, and I think that

using them today not only fills poems full of dead spots but dodges the writer’s duty to be

original” (FR 20). Elsewhere, he expressed the opinion that to use “properties or personae

from older poems” (RW 69) does not work and that these should not be used “as a substitute

for securing the effect that is desired” (RW 69).

He also found that the intellectual demand placed on a reader by modernist writing

went against the basic principle in literature, the pleasure principle as he called it in his essay

of the same name: “at bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving

26

pleasure, and if a poet loses his pleasure-seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth

having” (RW 81-82). Thus it can seem that Larkin distanced himself completely from any

notion of tradition especially in order to distance himself from modernism. But as Booth

rightly notes, one should not take Larkin’s anti-modernism absolutely seriously as “a

consistent theory of literature”, or “a key to his poetry” (Booth, “PL: Writer” 5).

Larkin doubted the possibility of continuing a tradition also when speaking

specifically about love poetry. Larkin in theory maintained that contemporary love poetry

cannot connect to the previous tradition of love poetry and its conventions. He “finds the

notion of conventional love poetry a little dated at present” (FR 274) especially due to

noticeable changes in society, in love-relationships and sexual behaviour: “Personally, I doubt

whether the average meed of sexual satisfaction per head varies perceptibly from century to

century. But ideas on how to get it may, and these in turn render the love poetry of one age

meaningless or even antipathetic to the next” (FR 274). Already in a very early poem of his

called “Evensong”, he pronounces the idea that the notion of love has changed significantly

and that the only thing possible to do with love as it once was conventional is to read about it;

to share it or write about it is no longer possible as the reality of love is now completely

different: “ ‘I think I read, or have been told, / That once there was a thing called love; /(The

pages of the manuscripts/ Give lyrics to a lady’s glove). // ‘Today we pace the sexual stones/

And coyish shrieks we cutely utter; / Sexual laughter rings along/ The cynic echo of the

gutter” (EP&J 53).

Despite these renouncements of tradition as an obsolete, intellectual, harmful and

unnecessary burden to contemporary poetry, and despite the fact that Larkin’s verse has not

designed for its critics such a delightful treasure-hunt for allusions such as that of some

modernist poets, there are obviously many links between Larkin’s poetry and the poetry of his

predecessors. Larkin himself would probably admit to that, as he openly acknowledged the

27

influence of Keats, Auden, Yeats, Hardy, Edward Thomas or Betjeman, especially in

connection with his early work. Later in his career he shook off the influence of some,

especially of Yeats. Although Larkin almost denounced Yeats after a youthful period of

complete “infatuation” (RW 29), Edna Longley claims that Yeats had a lasting influence on

Larkin’s form in that Larkin “learnt the music of his phrasing [from Yeats]. This was a

permanent and indelible lesson” (qtd. in Booth, “PL: Writer” 67).

Hardy, whose influence Larkin himself liked to advertise, bequeathed rather his tones

and themes to Larkin than his form. This is supported by what Larkin himself said about

Hardy’s influence: “Hardy taught one to feel rather than to write” (qtd. in Booth, “PL: Writer”

67) and by Booth’s claims that Larkin “rarely echoes Hardy’s style” (Booth, “PL: Writer” 68)

and that “he never approaches the homespun unliterariness of Hardy’s most distinctive

poems” (Booth, “PL: Writer” 67). The critic further finds Hardy’s influence rather in “the

commonplace, everyday situations of many of [Larkin’s] mature poems” (Booth, “PL:

Writer” 67).

Since Larkin’s verse is so diverse and since many different trends and qualities have

been identified in it, it has been connected with several streams of poetical tradition which is

evident from the variety of critical response presented in a nutshell in chapter 1.4. Larkin’s

poetry has been put by critics into different categories, often very different.

First, a realist (Lodge 122) poetry of “the poet as ordinary man” (Lerner 50) which

classed him, despite his objections, with The Movement poets who “centered around the ideas

of honesty and realism about self and about the outside world” (Martin 29) and with those

who preceded them in the proclaimed principle of poetry being “written by and for the whole

men”, such as “Owen, Hopkins, Hardy, Edward Thomas” (SL 241). Larkin admired these

“plain-speaking poets” whose verse is “local, well-made, modest and accessible” (Motion,

“PL: A Writer’s Life” 503), most of all Hardy, whose “poetic language is familiar and, if not

28

ordinary, then positively laboured rather than ornate” (Swarbrick 35). David Lodge takes this

link even further and associates Larkin with Wordsworth’s idea that a poet must “choose

incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them [...] as far as was

possible in a selection of language really used by men” (Lodge 121). But also symbolist

tendencies have been identified in Larkin’s poetry in his “repining for a more crystalline

reality” (Heaney 24).

Andrew Motion calls this diversity “a dialectic between the lyrical and the prosaic”

(Cooper 123) and Andrew Swarbrick “the often unresolved conflict between a romantic,

aspiring Larkin and the empirical, ironic” one (Swarbrick 19). All this increases the number

of possible links to tradition. Further, there is also the bitterly ironic verse, such as in “Annus

Mirabilis”, reminiscent of the tradition of light verse. So it is possible to identify many

influences in Larkin’s verse, there are “modernist influences [...] from the imagist minimalism

of “Going” and “Coming” to the symbolist abstraction of “Absences”” (Booth, “PL: Writer”

4), there are poems whose mixing of registers and self-reflexiveness “invite the description

‘postmodernist’” (Booth, “PL: Writer” 4). To give Larkin a fixed place within the tradition of

English poetry is indeed very difficult and is partly due to his “refusal to adopt a consistent

self-defining personal myth [...] or an ideological programme such as that supposedly adopted

by The Movement” (Booth, “PL: Writer” 76). As has been shown, Larkin’s poetry was not

carved from one monolithic tradition but rather from one monolithic and integral soul.

However, what might seem slightly paradoxical in view of the elusiveness of Larkin’s

placement within the tradition is that to some critics and readers he appeared to be quite

traditional in both his views and verse. This may be caused partly by his proclaimed

opposition to avant-garde modernism, but also by his seemingly traditional usage of poetical

form.

29

Larkin’s use of form and its link to the tradition will be focused on now. The fact that

Larkin commonly used metered and rhymed verse was considered by some critics “a kind of

defiant antiquarianism, a reactionary reassertion of traditional forms” (Groves). Of course,

one cannot deny that Larkin’s verse is usually rhymed and mostly makes use of some kind of

regular meter, but the question is if that is enough to label him traditional. He certainly did not

adopt fixed poetical forms of pre-modernist literature; he did not just copy Victorian poems,

exchanging only horses for trains; he rather “built upon the more flexible [...] pentameter of

Yeats and Auden” and reshaped it to suit him, breaking often the pentameter as a “fit vehicle

for a poetry of loss and absence, of lives with holes in them” (Groves). As will be shown

later, the way he played with form is paralleled in the way he played with content, too. His

rhyming scheme is also not as formally traditional as might appear from received opinion; he

often uses slant rhymes and other irregular rhymes.

As far as the whole shape of a poem is concerned, Martine Semblat argues that,

contrary to the common first-sight view, closed traditional poetical forms are scarce in

Larkin’s work. It is possible to find only a few sonnets there, especially towards the beginning

of Larkin’s career in The North Ship, and even those are often disguised by the structure of

the stanza. In his later verse “the range of forms [...] shrinks, as not only the sonnet

disappears, but the stanzas become of equal lengths and the iamb dominates” (Semblat 94).

So what makes the poems seem traditional formally is actually only a slight connection with

traditional form: “regular stanzas, the use of rhymes and a binary rhythmical regularity based

on metre” (Semblat 94), and perhaps also the fact that Larkin hardly ever writes in free verse,

as even his unrhymed poems with irregular metre tend to have at least “the same number of

beats in each line” (Semblat 96). The form of the poems that play with the tradition of light

verse (e.g. “This Be the Verse or “Self’s the Man”) is much more fixed - rhyming scheme and

metre are comically regular.

30

But again, it is not possible to say that Larkin has just borrowed from tradition, as he

takes this traditional form in order to subvert or ironize the associations traditionally linked

with it. So here he uses a comic form for not such comic content, it is hard to imagine anyone

arguing that the lines “Man hands on misery to man/ [...]/ Get out as early as you can” (CP

142) are straightforwardly funny, however well the rhyming and metric qualities resemble a

nursery-rhyme. The same could be said of the neatly rhymed last quatrain of “Self’s the

Man”. Larkin in this way takes a traditional form and fills it with what would from the

tradition’s point of view seem incongruous content in order to achieve a completely new

effect; he thus renovates the tradition rather than follows it.

He plays with this method also in those poems whose title denotes or connotes either a

specific literary form or literary environment and to which he juxtaposes content that mightily

overthrows the readers’ expectations created by the title. This is the case of “Vers de Société”,

where Larkin subverts readers’ expectations not so much by style and tone but definitely by

the content, which speaks above all about solitude; or of “Aubade” where instead of parting

lovers readers meet a solitary figure horrified by death and wishing for the arrival of morning,

which at least brings the “work to be done” (CP 191); or of “This Be the Verse” whose title

connotes a religious environment but whose already second word is “fuck” (CP 142). Stephen

Cooper sees another example of this in the poem “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph

Album” whose title is at the same time “reminiscent of polite, eighteenth-century poetic

convention” (Cooper 126) by its form and incorporates such a contemporary phenomenon as

photography. Larkin again uses (or abuses) the tradition in an idiosyncratic and ironic way.

This is, however, not true of all the poems. According to James Booth, such an

approach to tradition is characteristic of those poems which employed a first-person persona

in which Larkin found most notably his own voice. Those are the poems in which he most

often and most wittily plays with the inheritance of the tradition. Contrary to these, the poems

31

which use “the familiar anonymous elegist” as their speaker (e.g. “An Arundel Tomb” or

“Next, Please”) only follow up on a tradition “whose history goes back through Keats and

Gray to such seventeenth-century lyricists as Herbert and Vaughan” (Booth, “PL: Writer” 92),

however their poetic form is untraditional. They are traditional in the voice and tone they use.

But as will be shown below in the example of “An Arundel Tomb”, even these poems tend to

mix untraditional elements with the traditional.

The content, and especially the content connected to poetry about love and its place in

the tradition will be focused on now. And again, we can find several possible influences in it.

Terry Whalen, who dedicated a whole monograph, Philip Larkin and English Poetry, to

Larkin’s place within the tradition of English poetry, searched for the predecessors of the

speakers of Larkin’s poems. He could find in them: “Hardyesque fatalists, Swiftian cynics,

Audenesque blasphemers, Yeatsian bards and Betjemanesque local historians” (Whalen 10).

From statements like these, it might seem that Larkin was a well educated plagiarist showing

off his knowledge in his verse. Nothing could be further from the truth as is apparent from

Larkin’s own views quoted towards the beginning of this chapter. Again, it can be shown that

despite detectably common formal features, themes or speakers, Larkin in his mature verse

did not just copy the works of his older colleagues, but reworked the tradition to suit his

needs.

One can start by taking the example of the tradition of romantic poetry in his work.

There seems to have been an extended argument about Larkin’s being or not being a romantic

poet. John Bayley, for example, considered him “the last Romantic” (qtd. in Pritchard 75) and

Janice Rossen claimed he “remains something of a romantic” (Rossen, “PL: His Life’s Work”

34). Edna Longley thought that “it is now generally accepted that Philip Larkin was a

Romantic who covered his tracks” (Longley 120). Barbara Everett was, however, strongly

opposed to such declarations, she argued that “the term [Romantic] explains too little without

32

qualifying questions and explanations. The presence of feeling, and the attribution of feeling

to familiar objects doesn’t itself constitute Romanticism, unless we are Romantic every time

we stroke a cat” (Everett, “Art and Larkin” 131). She goes on to say that Larkin’s presentation

of feeling is far from a spontaneous confessional flow associated often with romanticism and

that “[f]ew English Romantic poets have ever said ‘I’ as little as Larkin” (Everett, “Art and

Larkin” 131). It is not, however, only the absence or presence of feeling that contributes to the

argument of Larkin’s potential romanticism; what could have been also leading to such

labelling is Larkin’s use of elegiac tone, of natural imagery, and very importantly his often

pronounced desire to escape from one’s own situation and the get-away-from-it-all tendency,

and the fear of unattainability of one’s goals that can be detected in his poems.

Although there are undoubtedly poems which strike a romantic note (and this is true of

many of Larkin’s earlier poems, including those from The North Ship, or some of his more

mature poems, such as “Coming” or “An Arundel Tomb”), in order to identify Larkin as a

straightforward Romantic, one must ignore a great deal of what his poems try to say. Again,

he often uses romantic ideas or romantic imagery in order to turn it inside out, to question it

or to show something new, something Larkinesque. For example, the poem “I remember, I

remember” plays with several “clichés of romantic poetry” (Martin 70) at once. Larkin here

hits romantic ideas with a slap of “unspent” (CP 68) and dull reality of life. There is the idea

of the importance of one’s roots of origin (“‘Was that [...] where you “have your roots?’/ No,

only where my childhood was unspent” [CP 68]), of one’s first love (“and ‘all became a

burning mist’” [CP 68]), of childhood full of freedom, fantasy and religious revelations

(“where I did not invent/Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits” [CP 68] )2, of nature as an

bottomless source of inspiration (“Our garden”), or of finding one’s own true self (“where I

could be/ ‘Really myself’” [CP 68]). The negation and the use of inverted commas shows

2 Moreover, as far as childhood is concerned, his multiple disparaging views as he presented them both in prose and in poetry (e.g. “Take One Home for the Kiddies”) go counter to the romantic glorification of childhood.

33

Larkin’s playful and effective use of tradition. He often juxtaposes romantic ideals and

dreams with doubts about our beliefs in them or with disillusionment of dull reality, thus

changing very much the usual response of romanticism.

A good example of the former juxtaposition is provided by “An Arundel Tomb”

whose diction, tone and theme - love, could make it seem a prototypically romantic Larkin

poem; furthermore its well known last line: “What will survive of us is love” (CP 117) has

acquired its own life independent of the poem spreading in the world its beautiful and

romantic belief. However, the poem as a whole is much less affirmative and much more

complex. The last line is ushered in by doubts in its truth and by doubts of these doubts

(“Time has transfigured them into/ Untruth” and “to prove/ Our almost-instinct almost true”

[CP 117]). Furthermore, as Christopher Ricks claims, the whole poem cannot be said to be

purely romantic, as it combines “the understanding both of classicism and of romanticism”

(Ricks 121). Ricks explains this argument on the basis of more possibilities of intonation of

the last line. The “us” in the line can be either stressed or unstressed. If it is stressed, it

purports to accentuate the romantic reading which is concerned with the survival of love in

particular people, “of us, too” (Ricks 122). If it is not stressed, it refers to the notion of

“humanity at large” which is classical “because of the transcending of individuality with

commonalty” (Ricks 121). Ricks praises Larkin for being able to combine these two

dimensions: “Romanticism’s pathos of self-attention, its grounded pity for itself, always risks

self-pity and soft warmth; classicism’s stoicism, its grounded grief at the human lot, always

risks frostiness. What Larkin achieves is an extraordinary complementarity” (Ricks 121).

Ricks summarizes that “though Larkin’s convictions are classical, his impulses are romantic”

(Ricks 123).

As an important romantic impulse, Ricks names self-pity. But it can be shown that

Larkin’s poems, and not only “An Arundel Tomb”, do not indulge in it in a romantic way,

34

that they rather scrutinize it and often dismiss it. So for example a failure in love is not staged

with a display of “Byronic despair” (Martin 62) but is rather confronted with a more general

attention to all humanity’s predicament of “the dull existence making up most of life” (Martin

62), in what could perhaps be called a shift towards the classical.

Nevertheless many poems work with Romantic ideas and ideals, which often act as

their springboard, they are what the poem’s argument starts at. So in “Poetry of Departures”,

“the voice [which] will sound/ Certain you approve” of somebody “chuck[ing] up everything”

(CP 64) and launching a free life elsewhere is an implicitly romantic voice, whose ideas (and

ideals) are questioned in the poem. “Toads revisited” starts off from the same romantic

assumption of the ideal of living in nature: “Walking around in the park/Should feel better

than work:/ The lake, the sunshine” (CP 89) but develops it unexpectedly elsewhere. And

even if Larkin does accept a romantic concept, as in “Latest face” where there is a preference

of dreamy and illusory relationship to the actual one, he is never completely convinced and

subverts his ideas in many subtle ways. Such a specific approach to the romantic tradition is

crucial for the understanding of some of Larkin’s core themes, especially of those which

examine the place of ideals and illusions in our lives and in our loves.

Larkin speaks about ideals in his poetry and especially in his love-poetry, but does not

sigh after them, but rather examines where they originate and how they influence our lives.

Most of his poetry is about being less deceived and it is exactly through dissecting ideals and

illusions that Larkin tries to achieve it. And romantic ideas help him very much in this

endeavour; he first must have them in order to fight them, and this incessant questioning and

struggling is what contributes greatly to Larkin’s own poetic identity. Larkin incorporates the

inheritance of the romantic tradition as a target of his more mocking and ironizing self and

this “creative conflict” (Swarbrick 9) bears very valuable and very Larkinesque fruit.

35

The heritage of Symbolist poetry has been discussed already in terms of form, but

there are also other Symbolist features connected with content which can be detected in

Larkin’s poetry. James Booth for example sees Larkin’s common use of a “self-mocking

persona” as an inheritance of the French Symbolist poet, Jules Laforgue, and as a feature

which connects him with T.S. Eliot. Moreover, “both Eliot and Larkin frequently dramatise in

their poems their intimate diffidences and failures. Both adapt from Laforgue ‘a wilfully

defeatist identity’ [...and] show ‘a kind of seriousness in the rejection of all serious-

mindedness’” (Booth, “Resistance and Affinity” 201).

Elsewhere, Booth praised Larkin’s poem about sexual desire “Dry-Point” for creating

“the kind of exact objective correlative of emotion [“wet spark”, “the bright blown walls

collapse”] sought by the poets of the Symbolist and Imagist movements, while not sounding

at all derivative in tone or manner” (Booth, “PL: Writer” 104). Another modernist influence

on Larkin can be found springing from D.H. Lawrence, and not only because he mentions

Lady Chatterley’s Lover in “Annus Mirabilis” or because of his open discussion of sex, but

because of his dispersed and faint, but still real, endeavour to get at the ‘real life’ under the

sediments of habit and everyday meaninglessness and because of “the first and most

rudimentary” similarity with Lawrence: “strategy of evoking the living presence of the world

and shaping such evocations into moments of passing wonder” (Whalen 56). Swarbrick views

Larkin’s early poem “Oils” as “represent[ing] that symbolist, Lawrentian side of him”

(Swarbrick 54).

However, it is obviously possible to find in Larkin’s poetry inspiration in tradition

older than that of the twentieth or nineteenth centuries. There are both direct allusions to some

Renaissance poems or there are themes common with the tradition. For example, several

critics have noted the direct allusion of Larkin’s “Sad Steps” to Sir Philip Sidney’s thirty-first

sonnet from Astrophel and Stella which begins “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st

36

the skies” (Sidney 464). Here again as before, Larkin uses the contrast of both the style and

the content in an ironic way. Sidney’s moon is personified and addressed as an intimate,

understanding and sympathetic companion to the disappointed lover, the moon itself is

endowed with feeling (“thou feel'st a lover's case/ I read it in thy looks“ [Sidney 464]). Larkin

mocks the personification of the moon, the elevated style used to address it and the grand

expectations with which the Sidney speaker looks at it when he writes: “Lozenge of love!

Medaillon of art!/ O wolves of memory! Immensements” (CP 144). However beautiful such

names are, they cannot be taken seriously and accepted at face value. The exaggerated and

incongruous use of “O” and of the exclamation marks reflect Sidney’s sonnet, so when the

whole sequence of the names is rejected by the “No” at the end of the two lines, what the

sonnet believes in as a whole seems to be also rejected. Earlier in Larkin’s poem, Sidney’s

trusting view of the Moon is rejected explicitly by: “There is something laughable about

this,// The way the moon dashes through clouds” (CP 144). Larkin’s persona, unlike the

speaker in Sidney’s poem, cannot accept the symbolic value of the moon and cannot find

consolation in it. This contrast is no accident, as one of the messages of the poem is perhaps

that the moon, as well as “being young [...] is for others undiminished somewhere” (CP 144).

Among these others there is also the speaker of Sidney’s sonnet. So nothing is the moon’s

fault, the moon has always been there, but its significance changes with the person who sees

it. The fact that the Larkin speaker cannot see it as anything other than the moon, cannot

invest it with any feeling, is what makes the steps “back to bed after a piss” (CP 144) sad, or

one should say very sad.

The 17th-century tradition echoes in another of Larkin’s themes connected with love

poetry, in that of sex. In some poems (most notably in “Dry-Point”) Larkin writes “about

sexual activity as a biological affair” between the speaker and his body (Booth, “PL: Writer”

104). Booth finds this quite singular and sees its parallels only as far back in time as

37

Renaissance. He ties this theme to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 or to Rochester’s “The

Imperfect Enjoyment” and says that “[a]ll three poets evoke the demanding, biological nature

of male sexual desire” (Booth, “PL: Writer” 105). Rochester’s poem is similar only in the

frank description of the biology of male sexual activity, but Shakespeare’s sonnet shares with

“Dry-Point” at least four things.

First, the feeling of helplessness and disgust at our bodies’ demands and lusts which

are “Bestial, intent, real” (CP 49) in Larkin or “perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, /

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust” (Shakespeare, “Sonnet 129” 820) in Shakespeare.

Second, the theme of desire is closely tied to time, almost a function of it. Desire cannot exist

outside of time which suggests that until there is time, there will be desire, but also that the

desire’s fulfilment is limited in time; time proliferates the vicious circle of desire endlessly

and this is lamented in both poems. In Larkin, desire is “time-honoured irritant” operating

“[e]ndlessly” which “will grow again” until the end of our time, i.e. “until we begin dying”

(CP 49); in Shakespeare it lasts as long as time does: “Had, having, and in quest to have”

(Shakespeare, “Sonnet 129” 820). The third common theme is a more usual one - post-coital

depression: “What ashen hills! What salted, shrunken lakes!” (CP 49) in Larkin; in

Shakespeare: “and no sooner had / Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait / On purpose laid to

make the taker mad“ (Shakespeare, “Sonnet 129” 820). The last, but very important, theme

these two poets share is the desire to break out of the endless cycle, to escape desire, and the

impossibility of doing so. Both poets stress this theme by putting it at the end of their

respective poems. In Larkin: “And how remote that bare and sunscrubbed room, [...] Where

you, we dream, obtain no right of entry” (CP 49). In Shakespeare: “All this the world well

knows; yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell” (Shakespeare,

“Sonnet 129” 820).

38

One could find many more influences and many more direct parallels linking the

English poetical tradition with Larkin’s poems and this outline cannot claim to be anywhere

near exhaustive. Its aim was to show that the tradition of English poetry has influenced

Larkin’s work in many ways despite the fact that Larkin liked to claim the contrary. However,

the influence was not consistent or limited to only some streams within the tradition. Larkin’s

verse incorporated many different and contrasting influences and, what more, subverted them

or reshaped them to its own needs. The undertow of tradition below Larkin’s lines has often

enriched the potential of his poems. Nevertheless, it is necessary here to agree with Larkin’s

proclaimed view that his poems are whole and complete in themselves and that in order to

enjoy them it is not necessary to be well-read in the works of past authors.

39

3. PHILIP LARKIN’S DEVELOPMENT AS A LOVE POET

3.1 Larkin’s Earliest Poetry

Philip Larkin wrote poetry over almost five decades (his first known poems date from

1938, the last poem which was published during his lifetime dates from 1984), so its

heterogeneity comes as no surprise. This chapter will try to outline the general development

of Larkin’s verse through time as well as pay extra attention to his treatment of themes

subsumed under love poetry. Although it is perhaps not possible to say that love was the

major or the most emphasized theme in Larkin’s poetry, it is definitely possible to say that it

was a lasting one, as it stayed with Larkin throughout his writing career. Already in 1938

Larkin in his first attempts at poems addressed a “darling” in “Butterflies” (EP&J 8) or wrote

lines such as “I loved you more than I have ever loved before” (EP&J 10); and love was

explicitly the subject of one of his last poems “Love Again”, written in 1979. However, the

treatment of the topic developed greatly as can be shown by the striking difference between

the above-quoted early line, which could be turned into a pop-song lyric in no time, and

between “Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt” or “this element // That spreads through

other lives like a tree” (CP1988 215) of “Love Again”. This chapter will try to look at some of

the changes that took place in the development.

In his teens and early twenties, Larkin was an amazingly prolific writer who “wrote

ceaselessly” (FR 11); later throughout his mature career, he was “a meagre poet” (Thwaite,

“Introduction to Collected Poems” xviii), in his early years he found writing easy, perhaps too

easy, later he elaborated on his verse with great fastidiousness. This is reflected in the depth

of the poems which is why chapter 4 of this thesis will discuss mainly Larkin’s mature, much

more interesting, poems, and which in consequence will mean that this part will focus in more

detail on the poems not analyzed in chapter 4. This part of the thesis will focus

40

chronologically on the different stages of Larkin’s career and will try to examine in what

ways they differ and in what ways they complement each other.

It is of interest to glance at Larkin’s earliest poems, i.e. those that he wrote before The

North Ship and which he never published in a collection. Larkin himself was highly critical of

the earliest poems and called them “pseudo-Keats babble” (qtd. in Thwaite, “Introduction to

Collected Poems” xviii), they indeed seem quite derivative, the influences of Eliot (e.g. in

“The Ships at Mylae” or “Stanley en Musique”) and Auden (e.g. “Ultimatum”) are also

evident. It seems that the poems are often not sure what they want to say. Moreover, they

have the tendency to create poetry out of what is already considered poetical rather than to

recreate a feeling in poetry, which is apparent from some formal features of the poems, e.g.

from word-choice. So there are archaic forms of pronouns, as in “The Days of Thy Youth”

(EP&J 17), there is Latin (“Alvis Victrix” [EP&J 20]), or French appears without any reason

other than to render a poem more exotic and poetical (e.g. the line “Quand vous serez bien

vieux...” in “Erotic Play” [EP&J 51]), there are specific literary allusions (e.g. to The Waste

Land) which however only show off the writer’s knowledge and do not enrich the outcome of

a poem as more mature poems would do (see chapter 2). Larkin’s mature diction is very much

unlike this: it adopts a colloquial, seemingly ordinary diction and never mentions any

allusions in a merely pretentious way.

Those of the early poems which deal with love usually present a speaker in love (“A

Study in light and dark”, “Through darkness of sowing”), or out of love, remembering past

love, being able or unable to fulfil his love; lovers meeting or lovers parting (“A farewell”), a

poetic self whose past, present or future is overcast by some terrible trouble (“Within, a voice

said: Cry!”) which, however, the reader has no way of getting at. They often speak about

issues quite conventional in love poetry. However, most of these poems only present or

describe a feeling without taking it any further. This constitutes a crucial difference from

41

Larkin’s mature poems, which never only present a one-dimensional feeling or experience,

but which always dramatize or problematize every experience they introduce. Larkin also

does not mix registers in the early poems - some of them are humorous, but most of them are

straightforwardly melancholy and elegiac and could be classed as romantic, as for example

“Young Woman Blues” whose speaker cries in a desperate tone: “All days/ Are vain [...] O

there can be no second love/ For me [...] I shall remain, the hills to rove, And stay/ Away/

Letting the cold night cover me with stars” (EP&J 44).

It is often the case with the early poems that their task is to preserve a personal feeling

which is of interest only to the person who felt it, but with which readers cannot identify as it

is not presented in any other than a strictly personal context. So readers can congratulate the

speaker of “Has all history rolled to bring us here?” (EP&J 34) on finding his love, or listen

patiently to somebody’s surprise at the return of long forgotten memories of past loves (“Why

did I dream of you last night?” (EP&J 54) or “In a second I knew it was your voice speaking”

[EP&J 35]), but their own feelings are not affected by it. This is manifested partly also by the

common use of the pronoun ‘I’. From the analysis of Larkin’s juvenilia, Barbara Everett

could hardly argue her point about Larkin’s sparse use of the pronoun (Everett, “Art and

Larkin” 131).

Much of the early poetry in general has a self-pitying tone, and as Larkin claims in

“The question of poetry, of course” to pity oneself is actually the reason for writing poetry:

“Myself, I think that poetry is merely/ The Ego’s protest at the world’s contempt” (EP&J

125). Although this is probably deliberately exaggerated, it betrays the overall tendency of

Larkin’s early verse. Another poem which is a reflection of the process of writing and of the

role of a writer, “A Writer”, offers another comment which betrays something about Larkin’s

early poems. It presents a poet who “realised/ It was a gift he possessed alone:/ To look the

world directly in the face;/ The face he did not see to be his own” (EP&J 151). The focus of

42

the poems on individual personal feelings and situations is one of the major characteristics of

Larkin’s early verse and one of the major contrasts to his later poetry.

As for the tone of the early poems, it is pervasively a deeply melancholy tone which is

however not always matched by what the poem is trying to say so the readers know they are

supposed to be sad but the reason for it eludes them. Later poems use very many different

tones; often within one poem there are more tones present. An integral part of many Larkin

poems in general and most of his early poems is the reference to nature. In the latter ones,

nature often acts as consolation or refuge to the self-pitying speaker or it acts as a vehicle of

knowledge and wisdom, so that the speaker realizes something important through nature.

There are many objects of nature found in love poetry across centuries, such as stars and

flowers. Nature plays an important role in Larkin’s verse throughout, but in the mature period,

the role is much more complex than here. So for example in “The Days of thy Youth” it is the

crumbling rock, clouds on the horizon and the rising wind which suddenly reveal to the

speaker the knowledge of death (“And some have already gone before,/ Some will soon go”

[EP&J 17]).

Interestingly enough for someone so young, Larkin already makes a connection

between death and love, which is also developed in many of his later poems (e.g. “An

Arundel Tomb”, “Next, Please”, “Love Songs in Age” etc.). In “The Days of thy Youth”, the

speaker realizes that the moment of happiness between the two lovers will soon mean nothing

and the same fate awaits two lovers - they will be “less than a name/ Chipped upon a stone,

washed by November rains” (EP&J 17). The theme of death and time obliterating people’s

identity and existence is followed up most closely in “An Arundel Tomb” where the couple’s

identity is “wash[ed]” also and where there is snow instead of rain. But where the later poem

is doubtful, the older poem is not. It doubts neither the love between the two lovers, in which

the lovers are “for the second [...] safe”, nor it doubts that their love cannot survive death:

43

“And nothing will be left to show/ Why I am standing here” (EP&J 17). “An Arundel Tomb”,

on the contrary, is suspicious of both the certainties of its predecessor; it doubts the quality of

the lovers’ love (“The stone fidelity/ They hardly meant” [CP 117]) and it doubts whether the

survival of love is true or only almost true. This comparison shows well one of the most

apparent distinction between Larkin’s early and mature verse. The latter poems never “say

one thing” (Everett, “Poets in Their Time” 244), they always question what they say and are

in this way more ambiguous, whereas the former poems are often quite content with one

message only. Another poem which connects the passing of time and the passing of love in

death sighs in a conventional way: “Falling of these early flowers/ Under winter clouds of

rain/ Rends the lover’s heart” (EP&J 40).

There are many more themes connected with love poetry which accompany Larkin’s

poems in the long poetical run of his career and which originated in this period. Some of them

will be discussed now. One theme already mentioned is loneliness or solitude which Larkin

discusses in many of the poems in The North Ship (solitude and loneliness is indeed one of

the prominent themes of this collection, as will be shown later), e.g. “Winter”, “The horns of

the morning”, “Ugly Sister” and others, and in many of the poems of the still more mature

collections, e.g. “Reasons for Attendance”, “Wants”, “Mr Bleaney” to name but a few. But

where solitude or loneliness is problematized in later verse by being both praised and

condemned, in early verse it is mostly only sighed at. To take one example, the poem

“Founder’s Day, 1939” basically only states that the speaker is unwanted and lonely (“O, I

hoped for your smile/ I met a blank wall”) and how sad that is: “Save the wind’s moan/ And

the rain’s whirl/ I was alone” (EP&J 12). Or, in “A bird sings at a garden’s end” the only

company of the speaker is his shadow.

Another very important issue of Larkin’s love poetry - that of the place of choice or

chance in love - can be found to have its seeds planted already in the juvenilia. Larkin often in

44

his mature poetry examined to what extent it is possible to decide how to live or how to love

and whom (“Places, Loved Ones”, “Ignorance”, “Dockery and Son”, “No Road” to name but

a few). He often concluded that the choice and the power to shape our lives according to our

wishes and to influence our love relationship is very limited and that the only thing left to us

is to accept that resignation silently, as he already expressed in a very early poem, “When the

night puts twenty veils”: “So. Let me accept the role, and call/ Myself the circumstances’

tennis-ball:/ We’ll bounce together/ Or not, whether/ Either, let no tears silent fall” (EP&J

23). Another fatalistic poem in which the speaker cannot influence the way his life unwinds is

not concerned with love as such, but the attitude it presents is very important to many of

Larkin’s poems about love. The speaker of the poem called “Address to Life, by a Young

Man Seeking a Career” (EP&J 108) speaks to the personified Life: “My predestined fate I

quietly await,/ The choosing is all up to you [...] But the earth’s getting colder, and I’m

growing older- / So please won’t you make up your mind?” This paradigm of predestination

and consequent passivity is closely linked with the issue of responsibility for one’s life,

successes and failures, but where in mature poems such as “Wild Oats” or “Love Again”, the

poetic subject is at a loss about what went wrong and whose fault it was, an early poem

“Chorus from a Masque” is certain that everything is the subject’s fault: “The fault’s with you

[...] You are the misfit/ All along/ Though you don’t think it/ You are wrong” (EP&J 55). In

Larkin’s mature verse there are no instances of such self-accusatory charges; the fault’s origin

is never so precisely localised in a self, the culprit is never positively asserted.

Another theme that recurs is illusion and dreams. Many of Larkin’s poems throughout

his life touch upon illusion, delusion or disillusionment, e.g. “Faith Healing”, “If, My

Darling”, “Latest Face” or “Deceptions”. Many of these poems try to see through illusion and

overcome deceptions of imagination and false hope, but on the other hand the question

whether it is not perhaps better to live with illusion remains unresolved. Such a question,

45

posed later in “Latest Face” or in “If, My Darling”, was already asked in a 1939 poem “A un

Ami qui Aime”. But where the mature poems failed to give an answer, the slightly pretentious

French-titled poem is quite assertive about the advantages of life in illusion: “I could

elaborate this theme/ But think that I shall not;/ If one can accept the dream/ The rest is best

forgot” (EP&J 24).

Larkin in later poems always searched “for illusions like a monkey looking for fleas”

(SL 154), but the young Larkin here chose to deny fleas even if he was bitten. Another poem

which deals with this topic is “Out in the lane I pause”. It is a more elaborate poem which

already offers some openings available for equivocal interpretation, but which seems to

suggest that lasting love and happiness are nothing but illusion. The speaker sees a couple of

lovers full of “happiness/ Plain as a book” (EP&J 137), suggesting their happiness is a kind of

fantasy; however, the speaker knows that they owe their happiness only to their refusal to see

reality and its consequences: “Each in their double Eden closed/ They fail to see the gardener

there/ Has planted Error” (EP&J 137). The passage from illusion to reality happens through

doubt, and although the doubt may show them more of the truth, which is known to the

speaker (“They must pursue their separate ways”), it has disastrous side-effects: “the bleak

escape/Through doubt from endless love and hope/ To hate and terror” (EP&J 137). The

speaker who is told by a transcendental authority, which here also resides in nature (“The

open sky”, “withered air” [EP&J 138]), that the reality is indeed bleak, is however also told

that in order to live a peaceful life, it is necessary that people believe in the possibility of

happiness and in the goodness of others, however it might be an illusion. The poem concludes

thus: “This must everybody learn/ For mutual happiness; that trust/ Alone is best” (EP&J 138)

which, despite its obvious pun on the separate “Alone is best”, seems to constitute the poem’s

central message.

46

Another poem, “Quests are numerous; for the far acrid strand”, suggests that love is

illusory and limited in its nature. The speaker here looks at the world and at “the mirage of

desires [...] through/ The limited telescope/ Of a prejudice or a love” (EP&J 75). This unusual

parallel between love and prejudice, the latter of which interestingly enough has always

negative connotations, shows that love, like prejudice, gives away only a part of the truth,

only the part we decide to see through our limited telescopes; it can be therefore argued that

love is an illusion as it can never exist in complete truth. The idea that it is dangerous to try to

change what is illusory into something real, which is later contemplated in “Latest Face” or

which appears also in Jill, is elaborated in “To a Friend’s Acquaintance” where an admired

person who seems “the/ Latest in ideals” may prove “a divinity/ Dead as all grails/ When the

defence fails” (EP&J 41), the defence here being the fortification built from illusion and the

divinity is murdered by reality.

A theme that is close to illusion, is the theme of ideals: of their role in our lives, of

their availability and of the contrast between them and reality. As will be shown in chapter 4,

this theme permeates Larkin’s poetry throughout his career (to name just a tiny portion of the

poems: “Sunny Prestatyn”, “Essential Beauty”, “Next, Please”, “High Windows”) and was

already sprouting in the early verse.

The poem which was last discussed in connection with illusion, “To a Friend’s

Acquaintance”, also speaks about ideals. The speaker here is aware (as many of his later

successors are not) that the points where the world of ideals and that of reality intersect are

merely illusory: “Remote as even the nearest star/ That I see flutter/ In the pool, in the gutter”

(EP&J 41). The ideal can be seen only as a passing reflection which can be easily destroyed

by stepping into the pool or by its evaporation. The contrast between the reality (gutter) and

the ideal is striking and the effect it produces is later taken up in “Essential Beauty”: “High

above the gutter/ A silver knife sinks into golden butter” (CP 113).

47

The “New Year Poem” urges its readers to discard ideals, “The Eden that all wish to

recreate” (CP1988 255) and pay attention to reality and the needs it creates, as “the voice of

the living be heard: ‘It is to us that you should turn your straying attention; Us who need you

[...] Us you should love’” (CP1988 255). The poem makes an almost moral appeal that it is

better not to dream but to live in reality. Unlike in other poems, however, here reality is not so

bleak.

A conviction that is never broken in Larkin’s verse, i.e. that love is only for the young

(in “Sad Steps”, “Love Songs in Age” etc.) was probably born already at an early stage in

Larkin’s writing career. In “Song with a Spoken Refrain” it is asserted that: “Love does

distress the young/And plague the old” (EP&J 278). The old cannot feel distressed or excited,

they will always be plagued by what might have been and will never be given the hope that

they might love again.

There are, however, also themes which are central to Larkin’s later verse but about

which the poet is silent in his early verse. One of them is his later preoccupation with desire

and with the desire to abolish it. Something else that does not haunt the early poems yet is

marriage, its advantages and disadvantages, its virtues and vices. It seems that the young

Larkin was simply not bothered with it as yet. The same applies to the theme of children. The

question of a binding relationship is associated in his later career often with the problem of

selfishness versus selflessness, so no wonder Larkin’s early verse is not preoccupied with this

either. The idea that love and relationships constitute a threat to a person’s identity is also

very important in later verse and nonexistent in the early poems.

48

3.2 The North Ship

Most poems which appeared in Larkin’s first major collection, The North Ship, were

written only a few years later than the poems discussed above. With the exception of

“Conscript” which was written in 1941 and “Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her

hair” which was written in 1947 and added only to the republished edition, all were composed

in 1943 and 1944. They share some characteristics with the earlier poems, but introduce also

some new. Larkin had not found his own style as yet; in the 1965 introduction to the reissue

of the collection, he explained: “This search for a style was merely one aspect of a general

immaturity” (RW 28). The outcome of Larkin’s quest for style can be seen in what Lolette

Kuby holds against the collection: that “[t]he poet poeticises, the poems advertize themselves

as poems” (qtd. in Martin 128). This characteristics may be the reason for Swarbrick finding

the opposition and contrast in Larkin’s mature verse in the “language of prose” (Swarbrick

38). A new parameter in this search for style was the influence of Yeats whose

“predominance” (RW 29) in this volume was caused by Larkin’s admiration for Yeats’ style,

by the “infatuation with his music” (RW 29) which indeed is “pervasive as garlic” (RW 29) in

the collection.

It is not, however, only the music of the verse that would be reminiscent of Yeats as

most poems seem to follow the Irish poet also in the idea of “continuous indefinable

symbolism” (qtd. in Swarbrick 35), as they introduce many symbols or what is possibly

supposed to be symbols. With the exception of number XX which is prescient of Larkin’s

style of The Less Deceived in being much less symbolist and much more realist (it tells a story

– or most of the story - in plain, as opposed to ornate, language), the majority of the poetry in

the collection cannot be explained rationally and there are many objects and phenomena (most

49

often natural) which seem to be hiding some deeper meaning in themselves which “have the

power of myth and subconscious meaning” (Swarbrick 35).

The importance of Larkin’s use of symbols in this collection is further supported by

Stephen Cooper’s claim about the influence of Auden and MacNiece’s Letters from Iceland.

He claims that in both collections, “gulls, breezes, rocks, ice and waves symbolise how nature

gives solace to those maddened by human codes” and that “[a]ny interpretation of The North

Ship must take into account Larkin’s adaptation of [Auden’s and MacNiece’s] symbolic

framework” (Cooper 88).

What Swarbrick says about a symbolist writer in general could be applied to Larkin of

The North Ship, too: “The symbolist writer explores occult truths and uses the connotative,

associative and aural attributes of language in order to suggest rather than state” (Swarbrick

35). This is in contrast with Larkin’s later poetry, even to what was identified as symbolist

tendencies in the three mature collections. The main difference is that where in later poetry

Larkin opened “symbolist holes” (Heaney 25), here he tightened symbolist knots. In other

words, some of the poems in this collection seem to be overloaded with esoteric meanings

unlike the later poems which only every now and then create a flash of a transcendental

dimension. The North Ship could not be called a “triumph of clarity” (qtd. in Everett, “Poets

in Their Time” 230) as The Less Deceived was, and it is its wilfulness to sound symbolist that

renders it so. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to say that this contrast is absolute, as there are

also close links.

Heaney claims that the influence of symbolism is most apparent in the mature poems

where “that [Yeatsian] sweetness flows most reliably as a stream of light” (Heaney 24);

already in The North Ship the imagery of light and darkness and their possible symbolic

meanings is very common. It is true that in later work light comes into play very often at

exactly those transcending moments, as can be seen from multiple examples (“Here”, “Dry-

50

Point”, “Solar”, “High Windows” etc.). A large number of poems in Larkin’s first collection

use the imagery of light. Several poems take place at a moment where the quality of light

changes, usually in the morning, at dawn. Light is often a medium of some revelation or

recognition.

Sometimes the recognition is positive as in VII (“The horns of the morning”) where

the world full of light which “the dawn reassembles” is the reason for joy: “For never so

brilliant,/ [...] has/ Earth grown before” (CP 10), or in I (“All catches alight”) where light

acquires an almost mythical quality when symbolizing the renewal of life in spring or the life

itself and the sense of unity of everything living (CP 3). The negative recognition can be

found in “Dawn” where the new light of the day makes the speaker realize the

“loveless[ness]” of his heart; when the speaker decides to “pull the curtains back”, to let the

light in and sees “the clouds flying” (CP 7), clouds that are as cold as the heart. This sequence

is used by Larkin a quarter of a century later in “Sad Steps” in which the speaker realizes

something crucial (about his heart) when noticing the moonlight. The way the moment is

rendered here evokes its predecessor: “I part thick curtains, and am startled by/ The rapid

clouds, the moon’s cleanliness” (CP 144). The moon plays its role also in III (“The moon is

full tonight”), its light suggests that there on the moon might be a “paradise”; in other words

that the moon is the ideal whereas the earth from which “all quietness and certitude” (CP 6)

have disappeared is the reality. This terrible contrast is the reason why the moon “hurts the

eyes” (CP 6), i.e. it reminds the speaker of what could be and is not. As has been shown

above, this theme is almost as old as Larkin’s poetry.

Slightly conventionally, II (“This was your place of birth”), connects light with

innocence and untroubled youth which is “this daytime palace,/ This miracle of glass, whose

every hall/ The light as music fills” (CP 5), and darkness with experience and death - “The

clouds cast moving shadows on the land. // Are you prepared for what the night will bring?”

51

The idea of purity and innocence was again taken up much later in “Water”, itself a rather

symbolist poem, which crowns the list of different processes of purification (“fording”,

“sousing”, “devout drench”) by an image of light: “A glass of water where any-angled light/

Would congregate endlessly” (CP 91). By the way, “endlessly”, a word very popular with

Larkin, appears several times already in this collection (e.g. in VIII, IX, XVII).

But light is not the only phenomenon used as a symbol in The North Ship. There are

many others: flowers, birds, moon, wind to name but a few, and the ship, of course (which

will remain as a symbol also in later poems). The title poem, “The North Ship” is exemplary

in its symbolism using the ships, the weather and the sea to create a compact myth; the

mythical quality is underlined by an old-fashioned balladic form with a refrain. However, the

most frequent symbol, which is blatantly traditional and conventional, is the heart. It is almost

laughable how often it pops up in the poems: it appears in IV, X, XVIII, XXII, XXIII, XXIV,

XXV, XXVII, XXIX, and usually acts as a symbol. From this it is evident that Larkin did not

have any objection to the use of conventional symbols then, which is in strong contrast with

his later collections. In the whole of The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High

Windows it is possible to find the word ‘heart’ only in three poems and only two of these uses

can be considered symbolic (moreover playfully verging on idiomatic); in “Lines on a Young

Lady’s Photograph Album”: “you/ Contract my heart by looking out of date” (CP 44) and in

“Essential Beauty”: “the boy puking his heart out in the Gents” (CP 113); one instance is

merely idiomatic (in “Home Is So Sad”: “Having no heart to put aside the theft” [CP 88]). It

shows that Larkin in his mature period was very cautious about using conventional symbols

or symbols which would stand for some consistent ideology or myth.

As can be seen from the excessive use of the word ‘heart’, much of the poetry in this

collection is concerned with love (or its absence), which as has been argued is true about the

whole body of Larkin’s poetry. However, unlike later, here it is still possible to find a small

52

number of poems (e.g. X, XII, XXI, XXIV, XXV) reminiscent of the tendencies of Larkin’s

earliest poems, namely the tendency to present a personal feeling or situation without going

beyond it - somewhere the readers could relate to what is presented in the poem and not just

appreciate a few well chosen words or pretty rhymes. The excessive use of such pretty

expressions and apt symbols can be explained by the collection’s overall tendency to pay

“greater attention [...] to [the] style than to [the] experience” (Martin 128). Most of the poems

are narrated from the speaker’s perspective and tend to be quite egocentric, the pronoun ‘I’ is

here still common. However, none of these speakers is a dramatized or characterized persona

(with a partial exception in XX, whose speaker even manages to be ironic about himself when

he describes himself as “a sack of meal upon two sticks” (CP 24); self-irony is also a very

important feature in the later poems). The speakers rather act as a focal point of

consciousness. The reader cannot imagine the speaker as a character (as it is possible later in

“Livings”, “Church Going”, “Posterity” etc.). There is nothing to disclose the personality of

the speaker in terms of linguistic idiosyncrasies, opinions, behaviour. Bruce Martin

characterizes this nicely: “Because the speaker [of the poems] can have no life outside the

poems, and because Larkin gives him so little inside the poems, his feelings seem shallow and

perhaps even unjustified” (Martin 127). The same applies to most people of whom the poems

speak in the second or third person, with possibly the exception of the “Polish airgirl” (CP 16)

in XII. It is noteworthy that there is not a single poem in Larkin’s oeuvre expressing love

which would be addressed to a woman or describing a woman who would neither be

completely vague, as for example the ‘you’ in X - which could actually be a man anyway, nor

“empirically true” (CP 43), as in “Broadcasts” or “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph

Album”. In other words Larkin never employs a prototypical or idealized female figure in his

love poems. The absence of these dramatized personae is significant as it can be claimed that

53

their introduction in The Less Deceived and their use ever since is one of the marks of

Larkin’s mature poetry.

But the fact that the speakers of the poems in The North Ship are not particular does

not mean that the poems can be related to all humanity, or to a group within a society. On the

contrary, here, unlike later, there are not many poems that would look at a problem, at a

feeling, at a situation which would concern more people or humanity in general, as is often

the case in the subsequent collections (e.g. “The Building”, “Faith Healing”, “Essential

Beauty”); the poems from The North Ship are not “classical” in Christopher Ricks’ sense (see

chapter 2).

Sadness and grief are the pervasive tones in the collection which is overall much less

varied in tones than the three collections to come. As if here Larkin himself together with his

personae tried really hard to “write one song [...]/ As sad as the sad wind” (CP 21) or as if he

himself assessed the whole collection in one of the poems: “There has been too much

moonlight and self-pity” (CP 29).

As for setting, most of the poems are set in the natural environment, as nature often

answers perfectly to the feelings presented in the poem in a quasi pathetic fallacy, or it

influences the feelings. Certainly there is tacit understanding between the personae and their

natural environment. Moreover nature often gives the speaker strength, as is the case for

example in IX. It is divided into two stanzas; the first stanza takes place in nature, the speaker

is “Climbing the hill within the deafening wind” and despite the rough weather, he feels

satisfied and free: “the blood unfurled itself, was proudly borne” (CP 13), the speaker here

becomes a part of nature and gladly so: “Submission is the only good/ Let me become an

instrument sharply stringed/ For all things to strike music as they please” (CP 13). However,

the second stanza is set in an urban landscape and there the speaker feels completely alienated

from the ‘unnatural’ environment and feels lonely and dismayed: “How to recall such music,

54

when the street/ Darkens? Among the rain and stone places/ I find only an ancient sadness

falling [...] The heart in its own endless silence kneeling” (CP 13). This romantic distinction

between the natural and the urban landscape and their impact on the human world is in later

poetry abandoned. Poems in The Less Deceived and after are set, if anywhere, more often in

urban environment than in natural one. It is interesting that in The North Ship the poem which

is most distinctly set in town is the one which was above labelled ‘realist’ (number XX), as if

it heralded both in setting and in form the change that was about to happen in Larkin’s poetry;

so it perhaps is not a coincidence when Cooper claims that this poem’s “desire to see simply

anticipates the ‘clear-eyed [...] realism’ of The Less Deceived” (Cooper 99).

As far as different themes of love poetry are concerned, it is again possible to find

many which will appear in the mature poems, too. However, the only topics that seem to be

treated markedly differently here are going to be given deeper attention. One of these themes

is solitude and loneliness, which is also the collection’s most dominant theme. The speakers

of the poems are usually alone, which is, however, true of most of the later poems, too.

Nevertheless here loneliness is often regretted in one way or another. In poem XXII, the

contrast between the misery of a solitary figure and between those who live together is given

clear contours in the distinction between the outer space of the “one man walking a deserted

platform” where “the wind runs wild” and the homes of the families and lovers which are

protected by the “shuttered house, that seems/ Folded full of the dark silk of dreams,/ A shell

of sleep cradling a wife or child” and where “lovers re-embrace” (CP 27). The readers cannot

see inside the solitary figure’s conscience and can guess at the misery of his loneliness rather

from the imagery of the poem, but in poem VI there is a speaker who explicitly speaks about

loneliness and who does not know how to cope with it. Once company is gone, everything

becomes bleak and not because of the absence of someone, but rather of anyone. The speaker

does not miss the person gone, he just dreads the solitude, and cannot cope with it at all:

55

“Who can confront/ The instantaneous grief of being alone” (CP 9). Any immediate

possibility of the future is dissolved in the shadows of energy-less passivity: “the sad increase/

Across the mind of this prolific plant,/ Dumb idleness” (CP 9).

This poem is the pure essence of the horror of solitude, unlike the later poems which

introduce this horror as well (e.g.“Vers de Société”) but always only as one part of a poem’s

possible message; this poem makes do with it. But there are poems which take the subject of

loneliness a bit further and ponder the possible reasons for it. What is very interesting is that

the speaker is sometimes more saddened by his inability to feel love for someone which could

abolish the solitude than by the fact that he is unloved. The sorrow in “Dawn” is not the result

of the speaker seeing two doves cooing on the windowsill, but of hearing one cock and seeing

the cold clouds - they remind the speaker of his heart which is “loveless, and as cold” (CP 7),

as if it were acknowledged that the fault lies within rather than without. The speaker,

however, does not understand it (“How strange it is” [CP 7]) and certainly is not happy about

the situation. Such bafflement about the possibility of one’s own emotions can be traced in

later poems, too.

Number XX also speaks, in a very different voice, about the inability to feel. The

speaker here sees “a girl dragged [playfully] by the wrists” (CP 24) by a boy and is

completely struck by this, and not because he would feel jealous of her or of the boy, but

because he cannot comprehend her feeling of happiness or rather is overwhelmed by the

apparent contrast between other people’s ability to be happy and his complete inability. He

knows that this cannot change - “To be that girl! - but that’s impossible” (CP 25), or rather

gives up hope on the grounds that he has no faculty to be like her: “nothing as glad as she/

Rears up in me” (CP 24). However, what is new here in contrast to the earliest poems is the

method of rationalizing of one’s unfavourable situation - looking for all possible reasons and

consequences of the current state, which Larkin masterfully develops later in poems such as

56

“Reasons for Attendance”, “Poetry of Departures” or “Mr Bleaney”. Here the speaker accepts

his situation as his destiny and the excuse he finds for it is not quite dissimilar to that of the

speaker in “Toads”: “I must repeat until I live the fact/ That everything’s remade/ With shovel

and spade” (CP 25); he must accept “each dull day and each despairing act”, as only in that

way he can be released by the “snow-white unicorn” (CP 25), which can be the symbol of

final release, perhaps death (the end of the poem plunges back into the symbolist waters

prevalent in the whole volume).

The lonely subject can find a companion in nature which can confer feeling (as also in

later “Coming”, for example), the one in VII in whom “no love is” (CP 10) is cheered up and

changed by “the dawn [that] reassembles”. Another solitary figure which finds consolation in

nature is the “ugly sister” of number XIX. Nature and human love are here considered

complementary and since she “was not bewitched in adolescence/ And brought to love,/ [She]

will attend to trees and their gracious silence” (CP 23); the sadness of this is further

exaggerated by the fact that she will do so from her room lying on her bed. This seemingly

reconciled escape to nature or music from loneliness among people is later much more

intriguingly discussed in “Reasons for Attendance”. It is further interesting that the blame for

her failure in love is located in adolescence, which is hinted at as a problematic period in life

in some other texts (“I Remember, I Remember”, “Study of Reading Habits” or both the

novels).

The solitude in company, which is later discussed in much subtler terms in “Talking in

Bed”, is already hinted at in X although only in the realization that to be close to somebody

and to have sex with somebody does not entail real understanding and real sense of

togetherness and promising future; once the speaker is initiated into this knowledge, the

ability to love freezes: “There was no [...] frost-encircled root/ As cold as my heart” (CP 14).

Interestingly, the heart here is cold again. Another poem talking about this is XVI, it takes

57

place in bed where “lovers lie apart,/ Love and its commerce done” (CP 20) but which speaks

about solitude nevertheless as the speaker is troubled in the dark night and hopes for the

morning and for “The first steps going down the unswept street/ Voices of girls with scarves

around their heads” (CP 20). Such a moment is also paralleled in A Girl in Winter.

There is also a poem discussing the breakdown of a relationship - XXIV starting with

“Love, we must part now” (CP 29). Here the speaker advises that the separation not be taken

bitterly or too seriously as he is sure that solitude will be better for both of the lovers: “But it

is better that our lives unloose” (CP 29), the speaker here is almost unbelievably self-

composed: “There is regret. Always, there is regret./ But...” (CP 29). Due to its topic, this

poem is a direct predecessor of “No Road” and the contrast between these two poems

indicates another general characteristic of The North Ship - its frequent emotional immaturity.

In “No Road” the speaker cannot take the separation so lightly or unequivocally, despite the

fact that he agrees with it, which will be discussed in depth in chapter 4. Loneliness and

solitude is a crucial theme in The North Ship and is discussed from many different angles.

Nevertheless the perspective of solitude which is missing here is the one which can be found

in later poetry, the one praising solitude as opposed to the bonds of relationship (e.g. in

“Self’s the Man”, “Wants” or most explicitly in the unpublished “Counting”). In this

collection Larkin was still “offering the sense that relationships, however unsatisfactory, are

more satisfying than isolation” (Martin 124).

Beside solitude, there are also other themes that have a prominent place in this

collection and some which appear here for the first time. Among the former themes is the

question of choice and chance. Again most poems are pervaded by a sense of fatalism and

fate’s arbitrariness. The title poem, “The North Ship – Legend”, can be almost considered the

declaration of this. There are three ships whose journey’s success is completely dependent

upon the sea and weather: for one ship the sea is “running”, for one “quaking” and for the

58

third one it is “darkening”, “unfruitful”, “unforgiving” (CP 36). Something happens to the

first two ships and whether it is lucky or unlucky it seems still better than the stillness of “no

breath of wind” (CP 36) of the third ship. This poem suggests in its symbolic manner that

some are lucky, some are unlucky and some are not really living, but only wait for the end of

their long journey. As if “Nothing, like something, happens” (CP 69) to any ship or to any

person and it is not up to them to change it. This idea is echoed many times in later poetry.

Wind, as has been mentioned, is one of the dominant and frequent phenomena in these poems

and Swarbrick rightly sees it as evidence of “an imagination preoccupied by chance and

arbitrariness” (Swarbrick 25).

Another poem, XIV “Nursery Rhyme”, presents a speaker also knowing his fate

always leads him “to some new ambush, to some fresh mistake” (CP 18). In one thing Larkin

is consistent throughout his career: his fatalism always brings the bad things, the sad things;

all his subjects have hard luck, and that if the fate is ever generous to anyone it is always

someone else. Poems that deal with choice or lack of it and with fate are never cheerful in

Larkin. Although the possibility or impossibility of choice is not thematized here as explicitly

as in some later poems, The North Ship is an overture to the later works in this respect.

The themes of illusion, dreams and ideals are present in all of Larkin’s work and in

The North Ship as well, although their treatment is not by far as complex as it will be later.

The distinctive difference here is that dreams are often and above all introduced in their

primary sense, i.e. dreams in sleep, which never happens in the mature collections where

nights are dreamless and very often also sleepless. In The North Ship, however, there are

several instances which would certainly make all psychoanalyzing critics happy. X (“Within

the dream you said”) speaks about a dream about a love relationship, but contrary to

expectations the whole situation is desperate, as the sex which is offered is either completely

loveless or cannot last. Ironically enough the dream is cruel as if the sleeper dreamt reality

59

instead of dream. The dream is troubled, and so is the dream in XXI (“I dreamt of an out-

thrust arm of land”), in which also two lovers appear in a rather sinister and bleak setting with

a disquieting story to tell. The sleep of the speaker in “The North Ship – Songs – 65°N” is

also “made cold/ By recurrent dream/ Where all things seem/ Sickeningly to poise/ On

emptiness” (CP 37). This troubling dream also influences reality and slowly merges with it -

“that dream draws close” (CP 37). In XXV, a former lover comes “unbidden, in a dream” (CP

30) and reawakens memories; this poem also wonders if love does not always come in dreams

before it comes in reality: “I wonder love can have already set/ In dreams, when we’ve not

met/ More times than I can number on one hand” (CP 30). Although there are also positive

night dreams in the collections, as in XXII where the “dark silk of dreams” (CP 27) feels

rather cosy, they form only a small minority.

Larkin follows up one of his earlier (and lasting) themes and that is the connection of

the passing of time and of love. Surprisingly, Larkin here is also quite optimistic, as for

instance in poem number I where despite the “wintry drum” (CP 3) that taps under

everything, lovers do not pay attention to the passing of time as they are absorbed in the

present moment: “What lovers worry much/ That a ghost bids them touch” (CP 3). Poem

XXVIII comes to the same conclusion that it is better not to worry about the passing of time,

that it is better not to try to view a moment from a long-term perspective as the first two

stanzas do, but rather, as the last stanza suggests, to try to seize the moment, “For always is

always now” (CP 33). But of course, already in the next poem, XXIX, Larkin calls for the

knowledge of time’s passing and its end, as it is wiser and truer than the belief in the lasting

of youth’s bright moments: “Pour away the youth/ That overflows the heart/ [...]/ Take the

grave’s part,/ Tell the bone’s truth” (CP 34).

One more theme deserves to be mentioned here as it is new in The North Ship, and that

is desire, but not desire for something particular, but desire itself. But unlike later, there is still

60

no desire to escape desire present here. Desire is viewed as positive, as in XXIII which praises

desire as being better than desire-less passivity, despite its possible painfulness. The first

stanza ponders the possibility of setting the heart, or the desire, free to “fly [...] beyond every

part/ Of [desolate] earth” (CP 28) and therefore not to be entangled anymore in desires and

wishes. But such an option is discarded in the second stanza as unwanted: despite the negative

side-effects it is still better to feel desire, it is still better to be in a relationship: “I would not

lift the latch [as...] I should find no bent arm, no bed/ To rest my head” (CP 28). A poem

which equates desire’s fulfilment with death and which is therefore very important for

Larkin’s later discussions of desire is “70°N Fortunetelling”, death here is in the form of a

beautiful “dark girl [who] will kiss you/ As softly as the breast/ Of an evening bird” (CP 38).

Other themes unidentified in the earliest poems are not present here either.

It is true that overall the collection seems rather monotonously gloomy as most critics

have commented, however in order to do the collection justice, it is necessary to say that there

are flickers of optimism and even happiness. However, as has been pointed out, the majority

of the collection’s poems could be characterized in Andrew Motion’s words as “langurously

drooping in their rhythms and uninventively romantic in their references. They frequently

borrow directly from Yeats [...] their mood is invariably gloomy” (qtd. in Cooper 84). Philip

Larkin himself later in his career was rather dismissive of the collection blaming most of all

his inability to stand on his own feet and to write about things that he felt and thought about

which was caused by his attempts at imitating Yeats. In a way characteristic for him, he

exaggerated his criticism both of Yeats and his early poetry: “I don’t think I had anything

serious to write about in The North Ship; or at least if I had I couldn’t see it. I think that’s

perhaps one of the baneful influences of Yeats. The worst thing about a poetic influence [...]

is not so much that it dominates the words you pick, it dominates your view of what you can

write about. [...] Yeats really prevented me from writing poems about things I could see, and

61

which I should have been writing about, much dingier and less glamorous things. [...] as soon

as you begin to see your own subject, then the style is nothing. You find your style. The

influence of another poet is not primarily on the choice of words but on the choice of subject”

(FR 30-31). As will be shown later, the fact that he started to look with his own eyes, see his

own subjects and speak his own tongue determined the creation of his three mature

collections.

62

3.3 Jill and A Girl in Winter

Larkin’s only published novels were Jill and A Girl in Winter. They were published in

1946 and 1947 respectively, so the time of their writing covers roughly the period of The

North Ship and just after. Both of these novels are closely related through their stories and the

way they are narrated to the themes discussed in connection with Larkin’s love poetry and are

therefore crucial for the understanding of the development of Larkin’s love poetry. This

section will therefore concentrate on a brief analysis of some themes linked to those discussed

with poetry as well and will not pay any attention to the novels’ form for obvious reasons.

Both novels focus on a character and a particular part of their growth, particularly on

their emotional growth, on the passage from a kind of innocence to experience. In this respect

they have features of a Bildungsroman, but what the characters learn is in neither case

positive, and this is not only caused by the fact that both novels take place during the Second

World War by which both characters are affected. In both cases the problematic passage to

maturity has to do with love and in both cases the passage equals the shift from dreams to

reality, from illusion, belief and hope to disillusionment and resignation. Further, it could be

said that both novels are about loneliness, both main characters, John Kemp in Jill and

Katherine Lind in A Girl in Winter, try to abolish solitude through a love relationship and

neither is successful; both learn that loneliness is the condition of their lives. As can be seen,

both novels are thematically close to the poems discussed and also to the poems to be

discussed.

It could be argued that John’s and Katherine’s passage to maturity was paralleled with

the passage of Larkin’s work from immaturity to maturity. Larkin through focusing on a

particular character (as the genre of the novel demands) managed to overcome his

preoccupation with strictly personal issues and managed to say things with a more general

63

validity and introduced issues and expressions which will be later considered typical of

Larkin’s poetry. Both novels are on the whole extremely sad, but where The North Ship often

failed to justify its predominantly sad tone, the two prose texts do almost too good a job.

At the beginning, both John and Katherine have their dreams and hopes about the

future, they believe that something substantial will change in their lives and they both

associate it with a love relationship. Where in Katherine’s case the belief is only a usual

adolescent dream about love between her and a boy, namely her English pen-friend Robin,

and for whom such dreams are a common topic of discussion among her friends, in John’s

case the dream is much more deeply elaborated. Its origin can be found in John’s loneliness.

John was not a passive loner: he tried to make friends, but they only bullied him to their own

advantage. This realization that all his friendships have a “reverse side [of...] scorn and

derision” (Jill 93) contributed to the passage to maturity, and obviously to his loneliness,

which was for him the prevalent and the most powerful feeling: “Loneliness made any

emotion he suffered impotent. No feeling he had could possibly affect anyone else” (Jill 94),

this overpowering quality of loneliness can also answer for the feeling’s domination in The

North Ship.

His pitiable situation has spun a perfect thread for his dreams to be woven from. Since

it was not possible in loneliness, in order to be able to feel some emotions he had to abolish

the solitude by means of his fantasy so he made up Jill who “came to his mind [...] whenever

his emotions were stirred” (Jill 101). He cherished this dreamt-up girl, at first wrote letters to

her and from her and later started to write her diary. He was completely enthralled by his

fantasy and often forgot about the real world, for example “about mealtimes” (Jill 114). She

was for him the complete opposite of the “cynically common” (Jill 90) world of his peers at

Oxford whose desires he “could not connect [...] with any desire of his own” (Jill 169-170).

What differentiated her from them was also her loneliness, but most of all her innocence and

64

the innocence of her relationship with John, the fact that she was “a hallucination of

innocence” (Jill 117). When describing the purity of this feeling, of Jill’s innocence, he used

imagery of light, which as has been shown is very important in Larkin’s poetry as well: “The

sensation he had was of looking intently into the centre of a pure white light: he seemed to see

the essence of Jill [...] the word was innocent” (Jill 117). John in this way was trying to

preserve his dreams of innocence and avoid the passage to experience, whether cynical or just

real, which however was not possible once his dreams came true, i.e. once he met a Jill in the

real life. When he could no longer direct everything she did in his mind, when he started to be

dependent on the actions and reactions of the outside world, he was shocked that not

everything went as he would (and could) imagine - “He had not realized till now that his

intense desire to see her was no reason for her to appear to him” (Jill 143). And on the

contrary, Jill sometimes appeared when he did not expect her and therefore could not act

accordingly. The disappointment with disobedient reality, with both Jill’s and his own

behaviour slowly crept on him and he started to feel the contrast between dreams and reality.

Reality demanded actions from him and his inability to perform them well made things also

unexpectedly difficult for him, he started to find fault with himself as many of Larkin’s

poetical personae do, too.

However, it takes John some time before he realized that even the real Jill, Gillian, led

an ordinary life as all those from whom John wanted to escape through her in order to “enter

this life, this other innocent life she led” (Jill 152). However, all this was shattered when he

discovered that Jill was related (literally) to the world of his peers from which he wanted to

escape and when their meetings were prevented by Jill’s cousin and by Jill’s wishes. This

constituted the passage from John’s innocence to experience, from illusion to disillusionment.

The few of illusions he was granted were the memories of the past which he realized could be

changed but could never become part of the future. But what he was mostly left with was “a

65

great well of aloneness inside him that could never be filled up” (Jill 162) but that would still

leave enough space for the “misery [which] was imprisoned in him” (Jill 217).

But the most characteristic change in John is not from a happiness to misery or from

childhood to adulthood; what John Kemp changes into is something that generalizing

statements call the typical Larkin persona: the bored, disillusioned and sceptical speaker who

cherishes his failure like a favourite pet. However imprecise this definition is of the typical

persona, it is quite true of John Kemp and his complete loss of idealism. What he learns is

how little and ungenerous life is and how difficult or even unlikely love is. This indeed

heralds much of what can be later found in Larkin’s poetry (it echoes distinctly in e.g.

“Dockery and Son”, “Send No Money” or “Toads Revisited”). John’s experience was “like

being told: see how little anything matters. All that anyone has is the life that keeps him

going, and see how easily that can be patted out. See how appallingly little life is” (Jill 202).

His passage is not from the hope of a love to be fulfilled to the disappointment of love

unfulfilled but rather the recognition that the difference does not matter anyway and that it is

not possible to choose the course our lives take and influence it. The essence of the passage to

maturity is summarized in the following quotation, which is given in full as it is closely

related to ideas appearing in Larkin’s later verse which matured also by the means of this

realization (this could not appear in The North Ship). What is so wonderfully Larkinesque

here is that the bad wisdom is rendered still worse by not being declared but rather posed as

questions:

Then if there was no difference between love fulfilled and love unfulfilled,

how could there be any difference between any other pair of opposites? Was he not

freed, for the rest of his life, from choice?

66

For what could it matter? Let him take this course, or this course, but still

behind the mind, on some other level, the way he had rejected was being

simultaneously worked out and the same conclusion was being reached. What did it

matter which road he took if they both led to the same place? He looked at the tree-

tops in the wind. What control could he have over the maddened surface of things (Jill

226)?

Katherine’s story in A Girl in Winter has much in common with John’s. Where her

dream lags behind John’s in intensity, her experience of reality catches up. Her belief in

Robin’s affection for her dissolves in Robin’s lack of interest and on being told that Robin

invited her to spend the summer holiday with them only because he was told to do so. Despite

the knowledge that Robin does not love her, she falls in love with him and it is very

interesting here that her falling in love contributes to her disillusionment also. First of all she

was surprised that, contrary to her beliefs, love did not need two people to occur, that “she

had gone into it alone, while he remained undismayed” (GiW, 127). Secondly, to be in love

did not prove itself to be a pleasant affair with “romantic background” (GiW, 127) as she had

imagined, but rather it brought a “cloudy and shameful” consciousness of her body that “made

her feel guilty” (GiW, 128). This sense of shame and guilt connected with love pops up in the

poetry too, as is the case in “Annus Mirabilis” where the realization of erotic love is described

as “A shame that started at sixteen/ And spread to everything” (CP 146). Katherine Lind, by

the way, is sixteen at this stage of the novel.

The fact that her love is not fulfilled and that Robin plays recklessly with her affection

contributes greatly to her passage to disillusionment, but the change is not as dramatic and

sudden as in the case of John. It takes Katherine a few years before she fully realizes the cruel

and cold truth - she is back in England as a war refugee and it is a cold winter. The opposition

67

between summer and winter here is symbolic; the passage from illusion or at least confusion

to utter disillusionment is the passage from summer to winter, or -if expressed in the manner

typical for The North Ship- the change of a warm heart into a cold, almost extinguished one.

Larkin describes the theory behind this change: “For she knew, now, that in most lives there

had to come a break, when the past dropped away and the maturity it had enclosed for so long

stood painfully upright” (GiW 183). For her and for most Larkin speakers, maturity is painful.

There are others whose life “would be one long unintelligent summer” (GiW 183), but

she (and all her Larkin colleagues in a sense) was a girl in winter and had the intelligence, i.e.

the experience, the “knowledge, but no additional strength” (GiW 183). She no longer could

rely on other people and she had tired of trying to please them; and nothing replaced this

absence. Although her starting point was different, she ended up where John did too: in

loneliness. She did not choose it, but had to live with it as one lives with “a medical

diagnosis” (GiW 184); she had to learn to reconcile herself with the fact “that when the time

came for her to die, she would die not only without having done anything worth while, like

most other people, but without having done anything she wanted” (GiW 184).

The terrible change in her, as in Kemp, was not in that she would learn about

unhappiness but in that she learnt about indifference: “she could see herself hardly aware that

she was unhappy, because her feelings had so nearly atrophied” (GiW 185). However, her

passage to experience is gradual and is not concluded until she meets Robin again, this time in

winter, during the war. When he comes, they cannot rekindle any friendship, the only thing he

is intent on doing is to sleep with her and when Katherine points out that it “wouldn’t mean

anything”, he only retorts: “Damn it! [...] What does that matter? I don’t see that anything

means very much” (GiW 242). Neither of them see in their act any promise for the future, but

Katherine is “too tired” (GiW 248) to argue with him and her tiredness is more the result of

her final steps on the passage to disillusionment and resignation than of a weekday’s work.

68

The novel ends with a beautifully sad image of the passage of all dreams and hopes to

resignation and death, or of (some) people’s passage to experience. It is an illustration of

Larkin’s idea that “[a] novel should be a diffused poem” (qtd. in Booth, “PL: Writer” 41) and

it deserves again to be quoted in full:

Into its shadow dreams crowded, full of conceptions and stirrings of cold, as if

icefloes were moving down a lightless channel of water. They were going in orderly

slow procession, moving from darkness further into darkness, allowing no suggestion

that their order should be broken, or that one day, however many years distant, the

darkness would begin to give place to light.

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 (GiW 248).

The change that both Katherine and John have undergone is very poignant, what they

have got to know, despite its “useful to get that learnt” (CP 112) is unwelcome and cheerless

wisdom. Although the stories of this change did not, strictly speaking, concern more than two

particular characters, they can be considered to be powerful enough to affect and to concern

many more people, the sad message can be viewed as in a way universal. The change from a

personal self-obsessive outpouring to the concern with a more general truth about the human

condition witnessed in these two novels parallels and marks also the point of change in

Larkin’s work.

69

3.4 The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows

The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows are three collections

which Larkin published in 1955, 1964 and 1974 respectively. He did not publish any other

collections during this time so, with the exception of a few poems which were published

separately, these three thin collections constituted everything that there is of Larkin’s mature

work; but it certainly is not little. It was not until 1988, three years after the author’s death,

that readers could get to know some of Larkin’s formerly unpublished poems with the first

publication of Larkin’s Collected Poems. Apart from many essays and journalistic writings,

Larkin did not publish in this period of his life anything else.

The poetry discussed so far, i.e. the earliest poetry (including that of XX Poems and of

the never published collection In the Grip of Light) and The North Ship, is not

straightforwardly recognizable as Larkin and was therefore mainly discussed in contrast to

these three collections, which were in turn discussed directly or indirectly in chapter 1.4

concerning criticism and chapter 2 concerning tradition and which will be further analyzed in

chapter 4, especially with regard to different themes. This is the reason why the poems will

not be discussed in much detail here. This subsection will mention a few of the formal and

general features of Larkin’s mature work, but its main focus will be on the differences

between these three collections with respect to love poetry.

These three collections are much more consistent in their styles and the differences

between them are much subtler and much less noticeable than the difference between the

aggregate of the earlier poems and these three collections in total. As has been suggested

before, an important change took place between the publication of The North Ship and of The

Less Deceived. The novels, which were published in the gap between these two collections,

can be considered partial testimonies to this change, and not only because they parallel the

70

passage from immaturity to maturity, but also because they perhaps affected the style of the

later poetry; Cooper called The Less Deceived “a volume which is heavily reliant on a range

of novelistic ploys”, the reason for which he sees mainly in “the construction of voices and

personae” (Cooper 11) common in the collection as well as in the two subsequent collections.

Several shifts have already been hinted at, such as the shift from personal “emotional

fervor and wounded sensibility” (Martin 29) to poetry which is more generally applicable,

which shows “a very personal concern for the things which personally concern most people

living in the modern world” (Martin 31). So it makes sense when Terry Whalen says that it is

“standard practice to view Larkin as a poet who develops away from [...] ‘self-conscious

lyricism’ of The North Ship to a more mature, ‘spare tone’ in The Less Deceived, a tone which

is then sustained in the volumes which follow” (Whalen 2). It could perhaps even be argued

that many of the features of the mature poetry developed as a reaction, as a denial of Larkin’s

previous style. Swarbrick gives an example of this when speaking about the metamorphosis of

Larkin’s lyricism: “his sense of having been betrayed by his earlier lyrical intensities

become[s] the real subject[ ] of his poems as a kind of anti-lyricism which can then persuade

itself into a chastened lyricism” (Swarbrick 50).

What seems to have contributed to the change is the influence of Hardy’s poetry which

was very strong during these transformational years; it is not, however, necessary to discuss

this influence here in detail as it has been done in previous chapters (1.4, 2), but it is

important to locate it in time as it probably affected Larkin’s development as a poet. It can be

seen in the arrival of what Barbara Everett called “a pursuit of truth which is also a flight from

‘Art’” (Everett, “Art and Larkin” 130) which influenced both the form and content of Larkin’s

poems. But what is important to realize is that Hardy never influenced Larkin in the way

Yeats did, in the sense that Larkin would try to imitate Hardy, he was rather freed by him to

find his own style and he incorporated from it what suited his own already existing poetic

71

universe. So he found his own style by also learning from other poets. So Swarbrick’s idea

that “the special achievement of Larkin is, eventually, to have developed an idiom in which

the influences of both Yeats and Hardy are integrated” (Swarbrick 35) is true only if we admit

that the synthesis of these influences is understood to be completely Larkin’s own.

So blatant symbols of The North Ship become commonplace objects, the high-flown

and ornate language becomes a “more mutedly natural mode of expression [in the] acceptance

of plainness” (Swarbrick 36), the prevalent setting turns from nature to town. Tones get much

more varied: either completely new tones, such as irony, mockery or satire are introduced -

indeed “mockery, and in particular self-mockery [...] becomes an important and profitable

strategy by which Larkin released himself from the poeticising postures of The North Ship

[...] His mockery of all pretentiousness, and particularly of artistic aspiration [...] ridicules and

ironises the lyrical ego”(Swarbrick 48); or the old tones are changed so sadness continues to

be one of the major tones, but it is not the self-pitying sadness anymore, but rather “a careful

interplay [...] between bleakness and beauty” (Whalen 31).

Themes proliferate and diversify noticing things which are not directly connected with

the subject’s ‘heart’. Larkin no longer tries to drown his readers in layers of symbolic or

esoteric meanings, but presents what seems to be a clear-cut argument. His poems do not just

present a feeling. They are not static in this respect as their predecessors sometimes are, but

rather develop an argument, try to uncover different approaches to what they present. The

difference is certainly striking and no wonder some critics have commented about “the

seemingly irreconcilable divisions” (Cooper 122) between the two periods, as Stan Smith who

imagined the bewilderment and misunderstanding between two potential readers, one of

exclusively pre-1950 and one of post-1950 Larkin: “a mystifying gap would open between

them, as one spoke of a tremendously exciting social poet full of energetic unliterary knock-

about and unique lucidity of phrase, and the other of an engaging, bookish talent, too verbose

72

to be memorable and too intellectual to be moving” (qtd. in Cooper 122). However, it is not

possible to define these two periods as completely opposing: there is much vocabulary, many

themes and ideas that can be found in both periods, as has been argued in subsections 3.1 and

3.2; and if before 1950 Larkin could not be identified as Larkin, then he could certainly be

identified as pre-Larkin.

Moreover, it is much easier to describe the contrast or to say what Larkin’s poetry of

the fifties, sixties and seventies is not than to say what it is, if one wants to avoid such crude

generalizations such as “Larkin is a poet of reality” (Whalen 95). The trouble is that many of

the poems are more complex in what they say and in how they say it than they seem to be on

first reading and that if readers do not manage to get less deceived through the poetry they

might end up getting more deceived by the poetry and its clever disguises. For example, it is

not always possible to assert whether a perspective is ironic or nor, or the complexity of a

poem’s syntax often subverts the most obvious meaning. Therefore any generalizing

statement can be always overthrown by an unsuitably suitable example.

A good (i.e. suitably suitable) example of this can be found in the general critical

debate assessing Larkin’s style as it was presented in chapter 1.4: whether a poem is lucidly

‘realist’ and literal, or obscurely ‘symbolist’ or indeed lucidly ‘symbolist’ and literary. It

would be wrong to declare one of these qualifications as the only true one, Larkin’s poetry

does not let itself to be easily pinned down, it always refutes any definite assertion. Larkin’s

work is a work of a secret poet. As Barbara Everett explains: “Larkin’s great art is to appear

to achieve the literal while in fact doing something altogether other; his three volumes of

major verse are the odd reticent triumph of a self-undercutting artist whose skills make him a

‘secret poet’ as some men are secret agents” (Everett, “Poets in Their Time” 245). Similarly,

it is impossible to try to attach the above-mentioned labels to specific periods in the

development of Larkin’s mature work. One cannot for example claim that The Less Deceived

73

is metonymical, literal or clear whereas High Windows is metaphorical, symbolist and

obscure. In the former collection there are poems such as “Absences” with its symbolist last

line, or “Dry-Point” with its many metaphors and a symbolist ending; in the latter collection,

there are such narrative and literal poems as “Show Saturday” or “To the Sea”. Nevertheless,

the three mature collections are not the same. So to say that there is no distinction between

them would be also wrong, as some differences can be identified, especially in relation to

poems about love.

The most obvious distinction is given by the frequency of poems directly concerned

with love. The number of such poems in The Less Deceived is greater than in The Whitsun

Weddings and by far greater than in High Windows. Nevertheless, one should not simplify this

fact into Andrew Swarbrick’s generalization that it would be too simplistic and unjust to

claim that “[w]here The Less Deceived was tormented by questions of love and The Whitsun

Weddings by loneliness and death, High Windows is charged with anger [...] the collection

also lays bare feelings of [...] rancour which show Larkin’s lyrical impulse being threatened

by its twin: a mocking philistinism” (Swarbrick 122). First of all, to pick one theme or one

mood for a Larkin collection as a whole is impossible (certainly after The North Ship), and

secondly, there are poems about death and loneliness in all the collections just as there are

poems in High Windows which are in their gentleness as far from anger as possible (e.g. “Cut

Grass” or “The Explosion”). Chapter 4 will show that neither of Swarbrick’s arguments is

true: neither that “Larkin’s love poems are more usually poems about lovelessness”, nor that

“in High Windows there is a deafening silence about love” (Swarbrick 143).

Nevertheless, one should not let these relativizations mist over the fact that The Less

Deceived speaks about love more than any other volume. There are at least seven poems

which deal directly with a love relationship, whether factual or imagined (“Lines on a Young

Lady’s Photograph Album”, “Wedding-Wind”, “Reasons for Attendance”, “Maiden Name”,

74

“No Road”, “Latest Face” and “If, My Darling”); in addition there are still more poems which

deal with a topic related to love closely, although not exclusively, such as desire, choice,

solitude, illusions and ideals (“Deceptions”, “Dry-Point”, “Places, Loved Ones”, “Spring”),

and poems which contribute to the understanding of all these themes despite not being

directly connected with love (e.g. “Absences”, “Church Going”).

What is specific about the first category is that all the poems without exception acquire

a sense of immediacy through a first-person persona. It is as if all the poems were spoken

from inside one person who gives a short narrative, often double-edged explanation or

argumentation. So the readers meet a persona pondering the advantages and disadvantages of

solitude versus sexual relationships in “Reasons for Attendance”, thinking over a broken

relationship as in “No Road”, trying to assess one’s own approach to the past of a beloved

person as in “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph” or in “Maiden Name”, or contemplating

a brief and chance meeting in “The Latest Face”.

The way this narrative or argument is developed ensures that the poems are both

immediate and impersonal (in the sense in which The North Ship poems were personal). This

is partly due to the fact that the speaker does not only describe a feeling, nor does he merely

present an objective correlative or state an idea, but rather explores a complex feeling with the

use of rational arguments, most often contradicting himself. James Booth claims that “[t]he

dynamic of Larkin’s first-person works derives, not from any satire against others, but from

the poet’s [or the speaker’s] quarrel with himself” (Booth, “PL: Writer” 47). Such an

argumentation often turns into a psychological rationalization of a problem and “involve[s]

attempts somehow to justify unsatisfactory states of affairs” (Martin 63); or explores a

“thought as experience, thought as living reality and not as dry idea” (Whalen 88). This

seemingly rational quality is one of the factors which can mislead one into thinking that the

poetry is straightforward. But the common changing of perspective and angles from which a

75

feeling or a thought is discussed, and subtle poetical devices, such as inconspicuous slight

shifts in tone or on the contrary exaggerated jumps from one end of the tone spectrum to the

other (e.g. from mockery to lyricism), make the straightforwardness more complicated.

The predominance of this first-hand perspective in poems about love in The Less

Deceived is unique among the three collections. The subsequent two collections usually use

the perspective of an observer in poems directly connected with love (with the exception of

“Broadcasts”, “Wild Oats” and “Talking in Bed”; or later of “Sad Steps” or “Annus

Mirabilis”). Either the ‘love-affair’ is viewed and processed by an observer who appears in

the poem (as in “The Whitsun Weddings” or “Love Songs in Age”) or the perspective through

which the whole poem is narrated is concealed, i.e. the voice does not have specific identity, it

is a third-person voice (e.g. in “An Arundel Tomb”, “The Large Cool Store” or

“Afternoons”).

The observer’s voice, which is typical for The Whitsun Weddings, is often the voice of

an outsider, of someone who is not directly involved in the things he describes as can be seen

well in the example of the title poem of the collection. This outsider status is also

characteristic of Larkin’s writing which manages “to deploy [it] wittily, ironically, and to the

advantage of his reader as he ceaselessly compares his own situation with the situations of

those he sees around him” (Punter 8).

The first-person perspectives, both of the feeler and the observer, have one thing in

common: that predominantly there is “a distinct loner quality visible in many of [the] poetic

characters” (Whalen 17). As for tone and perspective, what High Windows bring in as

innovation are the sarcastically mocking poems such as “Annus Mirabilis”, “This Be the

Verse” or “Vers de Société”. Maybe it is the lack of the first-person love poems in the last two

collections that contributes to the fact that the significance of love in the poetry of these two

volumes is often overlooked.

76

It is true that in High Windows there are only very few poems which talk about a love-

relationship and probably no poem which could be positively called a love poem. It is

nevertheless interesting that around the publication of the collection, especially in the late

seventies, Larkin wrote several poems which are distinctly love-poems. All these poems are

again spoken from the first-person perspective and moreover, unlike all of those in the

published collections, they tend to be quite confessional. This is something very

uncharacteristic of Larkin’s mature verse as it is known from the published collections and it

can be linked back to The North Ship - however, only in the confessional dimension, certainly

not in poetical quality, as these poems are much improved by the decades of amazing poetical

precision. One can only guess and wonder why Larkin decided against the publication of

these poems which include “When first we faced, and touching showed” (written 1975),

“Morning at last: there in the snow” (written 1976), and most notably “Love Again” (written

1979). Another poem which shares the confessional characteristic and which describes the

poetic subject’s feelings with great care and in meticulous detail is the long unfinished poem

“The Dance”, which was abandoned just after the publication of The Whitsun Weddings and

never finished, which could only be expected as Swarbrick suggests: “A poem so nakedly

exposed to the moment-by-moment intensities of recollected feelings looks therapeutic, and it

is no surprise that Larkin could not finish it” (Swarbrick 144). Larkin did not abandon the

theme of love in his poems later in the career; it seems he just found it harder to express

himself on this topic or to accept what he has written.

The specific themes connected with love poetry in Larkin’s mature work seem to

permeate all the collections in one way or another changing sometimes the angle of the focus.

So for example, The Less Deceived, despite talking about marriage (as in “Wedding-Wind”),

never deals with it with such distrust and never introduces the problematic feeling of

obligation towards marriage as in The Whitsun Weddings (e.g. “Self’s the Man” or

77

“Afternoons”), which in turn seems to be the collection most focused on the topic of marriage.

Or, The Less Deceived, as all the collections, seems to discuss love and the passing of time,

but not so much with regard to old age and death as the two subsequent collections do. But

most themes – such as love as illusion or ideal versus love in reality, love as commitment and

threat to identity, the place of selfishness and selflessness in love, marriage and family versus

singleness and childlessness, solitude and loneliness, desire and sex, the role of choice and

chance in love, the passing or enduring of love, love related to age – run through all of

Larkin’s mature poetry creating different patterns and portraits of love. Love in Larkin’s

poetry is viewed from many angles and is given many original and rare dimensions. Perhaps,

such richness would not be possible without all the struggles of the poet’s development.

78

4. PHILIP LARKIN’S LOVE POETRY

In the previous chapters, the thesis has concentrated on the context of Philip Larkin’s

love poetry, be it the context of critical response to it, or of the context of the poetical

tradition or the context of Larkin’s own development. However, the love poetry itself has

acted rather as a reference point than as the real focus of the text. The aim of chapter 4 is to

make up for this and analyze Larkin’s mature love poetry with special accentuation of the

different themes present in it. This chapter will try to show in what ways Larkin’s treatment of

love in his poetry is special and will try to discover and present some of the themes running

through Larkin’s poems about love. Due to limitations of the form of the thesis and especially

due to the limitations of the reader’s vision and insight, the list of the themes which will be

discussed is not complete. However, the list has been inspired by the poetry itself and had not

been decided beforehand ensuring thus hopefully that the most prominent themes will not be

overlooked.

All these themes are governed and predetermined by the never-ending and

inconclusive questioning of love itself, its substance and the significance in human lives. For

Larkin, the word love has no clear and solid definition that one would learn at school and

know for the rest of the life. It is never asserted uniquely what is meant by love and yet (or

maybe because of it) it seems to be omnipresent. Although love is “much-mentioned” (CP 83)

and taken into account in people’s actions, it is not easy to pin down. Larkin’s endeavour to

get closer to the understanding of love and its power to affect our lives for the better or worse

is one of the motivations of all his poetry. However, his incessant determination to find the

truth, which results in Larkin’s default mode of his treatment of love, i.e. in scrutiny, in the

endless uncovering of all the possible untruths that lie under the layers of supposed truth

(here, Larkin’s own vocabulary helps to explain his own methods), can cover up tracks of his

79

love poetry. Love is never the starting point or the conclusion of a Larkin poem, love is what

creates the process of it. It is the question mark under, beyond and above the poems. In short,

one can say that Larkin’s poems about love are really about love.

This is reflected also in the choice of themes discussed in the thesis. Larkin’s

dissecting inspection of love brings in the following question: to what extent is love an

illusion and how it can be harmful through its falseness or beneficial through the hopes it

confers, and the question whether there is anything about love that can be called real. The

opposition between reality and illusion is paralleled by a similar opposition of reality and

ideals. The border between illusion and ideal is not always clear-cut, but a working definition

can distinguish between them in the sense that ideals are what might be or might have been,

they are “the stuff/ That dreams are made on” (CP 62), they are what we, for some reason or

other, strive for; whereas illusions are something we already believe to exist, which is,

however, not real and true but illusory and false. Ideals haunt our world and despite their ideal

and therefore unreal nature, they affect reality considerably. Larkin tries to disclose the

sources of the idea of love in our world, how love enters our hearts and what role ideals play

in this welcome, or unwelcome, arrival.

Another source of love can be found in desire, mostly in sexual desire; however

Larkin does not stop at such obvious truth but again tries to uncover further the sources and

the consequences of desire. Another, quite different, source of love may lie right in the centre

of reality, in society and in the habits it dictates to us. To what extent all these sources of love

are also forces which dominate and shape our lives and decisions is also one of the crucial

questions. Many poems seem to ask if people are just tugged about in their lives by all these

forces, be they illusions, ideals, the society’s expectations, or mere chance, or if they have

free will and choice in such important matters as love is (or seem to be). Moreover, they ask if

either case is desirable and what are its difficulties and dangers. These themes are closely

80

connected with a question that after all seems to be the core of it all: whether it is possible to

attain happiness and reach fulfilment in our lives through love, and if that possibility is

granted to everyone equally or whether it is just a question of mere luck or whether it, for

example, diminishes with age and the nearness of death. Death - the subject that in critical

writing seems to be most important for Larkin - and its connection with love is also a

prominent theme in the poems. All these questions view love from a somewhat philosophical

point of view, asking what love is, what its place in the human world is and what people can,

could, should, should have or might have done with it.

Larkin’s poems about love, however, also adopt a more psychological and sociological

dimension when they concentrate on the relationships between a person and others. Much of

Larkin’s poetry is obsessed with the question of what kind of life is personally and morally

better - whether in a relationship or in solitude, and this is mirrored in Larkin’s extensive

debate about selfishness and selflessness and their relation to love and about the possibility or

impossibility of retaining one’s identity and integrity in a relationship. The question of

relationship versus singleness closely touches upon the question of marriage and parenthood

and is also reflected in the poems’ approach to women, which has been much, and often

unjustly, criticized. The theme that was so prominent in Larkin’s earlier work, solitude and

loneliness, is much discussed in the mature verse, too. These are, in a nutshell, the themes and

ideas that are going to form the frame of the discussion in this chapter. But of course, none of

the themes can be found isolated in a distilled form in the poems - they are an integral part of

the poems’ content whose particular wealth will broaden and enrich the analysis.

Much of Larkin’s work is concerned with trying to be less deceived, which can be in

the most general terms explained as trying not to be victims of illusion and to remain, with the

help of a kind of realist sobriety, on the ground. This is certainly true, but the image of Larkin

as the “tough-minded interlocutor” (Grafe 178) who devised through his poetry a special “lie

81

detector” (Grafe 178) which would uncover to the people both in and outside the poems the

illusory nature of what they hold as real is much simplified. Of course, there are poems whose

primary sense can be derived from the refusal of a commonly-cherished illusion, e.g. of

freedom (as in “Toads” or “Poetry of Departures”), but Larkin’s approach to illusions is much

more complex than that.

Illusions are dangerous as they lie about reality and in this sense, if people let an

illusion delude them, then the realization of its falseness can be very painful. So it could seem

that all illusion is undesired. But it would be wrong to imagine that Larkin in his poems

always identifies an illusion, points his finger at its falseness and discards it with justified

rage. His approach to illusions is much more complex especially when the question of

happiness comes into play, as illusions can both mar every chance of happiness or on the

contrary help us to gain it. Because illusion makes it possible for us to escape reality, and

since reality can be very bleak or blank, “man’s proneness to illusion is at least a mixed

blessing, since it affords him temporary escape” (Martin 48). In some poems Larkin embraces

illusions, these “appropriate falsehood[s]” (CP 87) and welcomes them, as in “For Sidney

Bechet”. Here it is music that opens the door through which people can escape to fantasy, to

their own “Crescent City”, everyone is free to imagine what they will: “And in all ears

appropriate falsehood wakes,// Building for some a legendary Quarter/ Of balconies, flower-

baskets and quadrilles,/ Everyone making love and going shares” (CP 87). It does not matter

that all this is not real but illusory, the speaker still calls: “Oh, play that thing!” The illusion,

whether created by music or love (which is here likened to the sound of Bechet’s instrument)

is then “greeted as the natural noise of good,/ Scattering long-haired grief and scored pity”

(CP 87), while it lasts.

The whole matter is further complicated by the impossibility of distinguishing for sure

between illusion and reality, or rather by the fact that the reality is itself out of our grasp, in

82

other words, it is not easy to state what is real and what is not. In this way, trying to be less

and less deceived by everything that seems at first to be more real than what was considered

illusory but which in the end proves to be illusory as well can result in complete exhaustion of

the truth-searching candidate and therefore illusion might be the better option.

Although these principles are valid for illusion in general, they also apply to illusion in

love. After all, the very name of Larkin’s The Less Deceived, a collection which according to

Lerner “explores [the] theme of the deceptions of the imagination with a richness and variety

unsurpassed in postwar English poetry” (Lerner 13) has its origin in a text discussing illusion

in love. It was taken and adapted from Scene I of Act III of Hamlet where the following

exchange between Ophelia and Hamlet takes place:

Hamlet: [...] I did love you once.

Ophelia: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

Hamlet: You should not have believed me. [...] I loved you not.

Ophelia: I was the more deceived (Shakespeare, “Hamlet” 688-689).

Ophelia is so shocked on realizing that Hamlet’s love for her may have been untrue,

may have been only an illusion that she even forgets to call the prince ‘my lord’ or another

honourable title which she otherwise has always done. It is clear from the scene that she is

more shocked by the illusion turning untrue than by Hamlet’s outrageous behaviour and his

disloyalty to her which had been manifest already before. The deception lies in her having

believed in love that is claimed to be untrue. It would imply that to be less deceived means

not to believe in anything that may prove illusory, which in effect means to be sceptical about

everything. But already here it is made much more complicated and not only because Hamlet

is most likely lying when proclaiming that he did not love Ophelia, but also because Ophelia’s

83

undeceived state is much harsher to bear than when she was happy believing in Hamlet’s

love. Larkin’s adapted motto already hides in itself the ambiguity of illusion. Larkin’s point

about being less deceived certainly did not mean to be always sceptical about everything, and

as will be shown now, his discussion of illusions is much more complex.

The poem “Deceptions”, whose name was to be originally “The Less Deceived”,

parallels in a way the essence of Ophelia’s case. In both instances, the evil acts committed on

the women by the men, despite being horrible and “bitter” (CP 67), are never as terrible as the

harm illusions can do. Where Ophelia was “more deceived” (Shakespeare, “Hamlet” 688) by

the illusion than by Hamlet abandoning her, the poor woman who was raped and “ruined” is

considered to be “less deceived” (CP 67) than her rapist who was deceived by the illusion of

fulfilment. The illusion that he might get satisfaction by raping the woman is what drove him

“up the breathless stair/ To burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic” (CP 67); the “desolate attic”

can be here the illusion, either disclosed to be false or not. The man was deluded by his own

desire and the illusion of fulfilment more than anyone can be deceived by other people. The

moral of the story can be that the most important thing is to remain unillusioned, but things

are made complicated by the fact that Larkin is perfectly aware that those who are

unillusioned and indeed disillusioned are not any happier for being so and can suffer terribly.

The raped woman’s life is full of “grief/ Bitter and sharp” and her mind “lay open like a

drawer of knives” (CP 67). That is certainly not a desirable state.

Another mind that is exposed to the reader like an opened drawer, this time with rather

mixed and messy content, is the mind of the speaker in another poem from The Less Deceived

which is about illusion, “If, My Darling”. In the poem readers are invited to have a look inside

the head of a lover and be stripped of all the illusions while conspiring together with the

speaker against the lover’s darling in not showing her anything of the true content of the

84

mind’s drawer. This poem could be a textbook illustration of the contrast between reality and

imaginative illusion.

In one of Larkin’s rare uses of literary allusions, it is implied that the darling imagines

the landscape of her lover’s mind to be similar to that of Alice’s Wonderland (or at least that

is what the speaker believes). She would “jump” into his head trustingly and joyfully with a

“floating skirt” expecting to find everything that is found in the gentle fairy-tale and

everything that is negated in the poem: “tables and chairs”, “undisturbed embers”, “fender-

seat cosy” and the butler being cutely “bibulous” (CP 72). The allusion to Carroll’s book here

further stresses the idea that as we can imagine a completely unreal fairy world, we can

imagine the world inside other people; neither has to have anything in common with reality,

and if it is taken further still, it can suggest that as the fairy-tale is harmless and as the

wonderland is wonderful, perhaps our illusions about other people, however unreal, are

harmless also.

What the darling would find, however, is none of the quoted objects, but an

expressionistic reality resembling rather a nightmare than a children’s story; a shift from the

innocent world full of concrete objects to a world of experience full of abstractions (“an

adhesive sense of betrayal”) and shady metaphors (“the skin of a grave”), to a world which is

“[i]ntoned by reality” (CP 72). In such a world it is not Alice who shrinks and expands, but

“[d]elusions […] shrink to the size of a woman’s glove,/ Then sicken inclusively outwards”

(CP 72); the false illusions shrink under the attack of reality, “the woman’s glove” may

further suggest the limitations of the lover’s interest in his darling, i.e. he is not interested in

her as a personality, something as partial as a glove would do. But the delusion might be also

his and not only hers suggesting that the illusion of a woman in the aggressive environment of

his mind might shrink into a negligible detail, the state of being deluded further “sickens” the

environment, the mind and possibly through his behaviour the outer world also. The mind is

85

dirty, its floor is “unwholesome”, all noble things are overthrown and ridiculed: the “Grecian

statue” is “kicked in the privates” and “finer feelings” end up in a “swill-tub” (CP 72). It

seems morally decrepit, full of unfaithfulness and untruthfulness “[f]rom which ascends an

adhesive sense of betrayal” (CP 72). It is a world quite unlike a fairy-tale world, it is not

idealistic but full of “money” and cynical: “the past is past and the future neuter”; it is not

poetical but rather “larded with technical terms”, it is a world where things are not clear and

unequivocal, but “double-yolked with meaning and meaning’s rebuttal” (CP 72).

However, the “darling” never enters this world, never “find[s] herself looped” (CP 72)

in the nightmare of his mind; she is left with illusion springing from her affection and from

the fact that her lover does not disclose the much plainer reality to her. This testifies to the

fact that it takes two to tango which further suggests something about illusions. Because it is

not only the speaker who decides to be deceitful and lies to his darling, but it is in part also

the darling’s decision not to see the truth.

The whole poem starts with an if-clause: “If my darling were once to decide/ Not to

stop at my eyes,/ But to jump, like Alice, with floating skirts into my head”, in other words it

does not say: ‘If once I decided to let my darling jump into my head’ - it is therefore the

woman’s decision to “stop at [his] eyes” (CP 72). This can be read in at least two ways: first,

she is full of affection for him manifested by the (clichéd) looking in his eyes, she looks

straight into his eyes, she decides to trust him. The eyes are very cleverly chosen as they

exaggerate her belief in him; because although she looks into his eyes, she does not see what

his eyes see, she only sees what she decides to see. Since the sight that he sees through his

eyes must necessarily be much infested by what is present in his mind, by “the creep of

varying light,/ Monkey-brown, fish-grey” (CP 72), the eyes are the windows to the soul and

yet she decides to stop there and not go any further, as she is happy to retain her belief.

86

And secondly there is one more suggestion that it is not all the man’s fault and

immoral action. The speaker decides to leave his darling with her illusion, as the reality of his

mind “Might knock [his] darling off her unpriceable pivot” (CP 72). Although the speaker

could be chastised for his immoral behaviour as he is led to it by selfish motives – his

apparent indulgence in her admiration for him and the fear that she might leave him if she

knew the reality of his mind, Larkin’s clever choice of words makes it unclear whether the

speaker is not led to his untruthfulness also by kindness and whether he should not be also

praised in the same sense in which parents are praised for protecting their children from

seeing the worst sides of reality. Since who would prefer to live in the weird and terrible

world of his mind rather than in a wonderland? The pivotal phrase which allows both readings

is “her unpriceable pivot” (CP 72). The possible meaning depends on how one imagines the

pivot and for whom one imagines the pivot to be unpriceable.

The pivot could be the crucial and central point on which either the stability of the

relationship or the stability of the woman’s life depends. So either the pivot is fixed by the

speaker’s desire to preserve the relationship or the pivot is well hammered-in by the woman’s

belief in her lover, i.e. by her illusion. In the former case the pivot is unpriceable for the

speaker as the relationship is useful and beneficial for him; in the latter case the pivot is

unpriceable for the woman, as without it her world would be shattered. So the danger is either

for the speaker or for the darling. If the first is true, the speaker acts only selfishly, he lies to

her in order to meet his own needs. If the second is true, he does not reveal the truth in order

to protect her and is therefore driven by unselfish reasons. Despite the terrible display of his

mind’s bowels or maybe exactly for his sincerity towards the readers, one cannot condemn his

action completely. Moreover, in both cases it can be said that he conceals something in order

not to kill the love between them (or at least in her) and from the ambiguous nature of the

argumentation the poem may suggest that whatever the price, however its basis is only in

87

illusion, the presence of love is always better than its absence. It indeed seems that illusion

can be sometimes better than realistic insight, that it might be better to stay somewhat

deceived. So the speaker chooses the illusion and pushes the truth aside to be abandoned

together with all the never-to-be ‘ifs’. The two poems discussed so far show that in Larkin’s

poetry illusion is both condemned and praised, and there are many more examples of that.

Another poem that advocates illusion as opposed to reality in love is “Latest Face”.

But in this poem the decision in favour of rejecting the state of unillusionment does not

protect reality, does not protect the actual relationship as in “If, My Darling”, but is intended

to protect exactly the opposite, the illusion. The whole poem plays with the romantic idea of

the desirability of unattainable things, but goes deeper than that and asks if it is at all possible

to transplant dreams into reality without their being eaten away or cauterized. In a chance

encounter, the subject of the poem notices a face, the latest face, which captivates him entirely

for the moment; a kind of unexpressed relationship immediately develops. The woman is

granted a place in the speaker’s mind and he offers his heart for her to inhabit as her “beauty

had no home till then” (CP 71).

But despite the beauty of this metaphor of falling in love, the speaker is against any

kind of development. He advises the owner of the latest face in his thoughts to “recognize”

and retain his look and the moment of their encounter, but not to act upon it in any way, not to

“turn again” (CP 71). She must remain an illusion, a “precious vagrant” which means she

must be “vagrant” in order to stay “precious”, and if she stays, she cannot be either. The

illusion would then burst in the “untidy air” of reality with its relationships full of complex

motives and desires, “[b]argains, suffering, and love” (CP 71). Interestingly, “love” is here

coupled with demanding and unpleasant things and its stressed position at the end of the line

further accentuates the burdensome quality of love, once it becomes real.

88

Such a striking context for the word “love”, which is echoed in other Larkin’s poems

as well (e.g. “Wild Oats”), suggests the tediousness and the problematic nature of love-

relationships which are connected more with commitments and responsibilities than with joy.

In order to avoid all the disagreeable demands, including love - in order to keep their

encounter “effortless”, it is necessary to keep their encounter “[o]n a useless level” (CP 71).

So far the poem has spoken in favour of illusions and against reality, but the third stanza

which consists exclusively of questions and ends by “not understand” is much less assertive.

The problem is that in the third stanza reality and illusion do not stay quite apart, but

start to influence each other in several ways. It is not even completely clear which perspective

the stanza adopts, if the one when the illusion is allowed to come into the real world or the

one in which the real world infiltrates the world of illusion. The latter case introduces the

problem that in reality things change as it “[b]rings no lasting attribute” (CP 71), whereas the

illusion does not - it is static, it is a “statue”. And the question is whether a static illusion can

be somehow adapted so that it presents the same “beauty” as before to the changed eyes or if

he must change it - in other words if it is inevitable that “[l]ies grow dark around us” (CP 71).

Can the static moment of the happy encounter keep its perfect lucidity or will it also grow

dark? Can the speaker retain his illusion when he changes, “will/ The statue of your beauty

walk?”

Another question is whether it is not also demanding and burdensome to keep up with

the illusion in order to preserve it as it once was, must he then “wade” behind it with such

effort? And if he does not change, if he does “not shift [his] ground” (CP 71), can he just

cherish his illusion unproblematically? Will not the fact that he has denied the illusory

moment its development in reality haunt him forever using very intricate chasing methods? In

other words, is the illusion’s “power actual” (CP 71), can it destroy his reality by making him

imagine what might have been and remind him of it with great force and brightness at

89

unexpected moments: “can/ Denial of you duck and run,/ Stay out of sight and double round,/

Leap from the sun with mask and brand/ And murder and not understand?” One could

paraphrase this simplistically by saying that he cannot be sure that his decision to keep his

meeting “on a useless level” cannot fight back and influence, if not “murder” (CP 71), his real

life.

But there is also the other perspective, which would suggest that in the third stanza the

speaker after all decides to develop the encounter in the atmosphere of the “untidy air”, not

“useless[ly]” (CP 71) but in reality, and describes the terrible change that happens when he

realizes that the illusion as he imagined it cannot retain its qualities in reality, that it cannot

“walk” and that he only must make effort to gain her and then get entangled in a relationship

from which it is “far too late for turning back” (CP 71). Both readings seem to be possible:

illusions can attack reality and reality can destroy illusions. This leaves the speaker with an

unresolved problem and makes the possibility of choice only another illusion, as is often the

case, as will be shown later.

In order to understand Larkin’s treatment of illusion in love, it is important to consider

for a while illusion as it appears in Larkin’s oeuvre in more general terms. What has probably

given many readers the idea that one of Larkin’s most articulate methods in his poems is to

uncover and discard illusions is the fact that he very often in his poems shows hopes as vain

and wishes as unfeasible suggesting that the longed-for change in people’s lives will never

come. This is probably most clearly stated in “Next, Please”. The poem is narrated from an

all-knowing perspective, from the position of somebody who knows more than those whom

the poem speaks about. The core idea of the poem is that we do not live in here and now, but

that we expect something better to be “always approaching” and we attach our hopes to this

“sparkling armada of promises” (CP 50). But the promises never come true, they are “slow”

and what remains of them is only the time waited. We are victims of this illusion of

90

“expectancy”, as the next “ship” is always sure to come as “nothing balks/ Each big

approach”, we see it coming, but “it never anchors” leaving “us holding stalks of

disappointment” (CP 50) and under what in an early uncollected “Observation” is called the

“Machine-gun practice on the heart’s desires” (CP 161). We, however, readily forget these

injustices with every new and still more irresistible hope. We have the illusion that each new

ship will “unload/ All good into our lives, all we are owed/ For waiting so devoutly and so

long” (CP 50). As will be seen later, in “Love Songs in Age” the illusion of future love will

seem to have such absolute power to change everything into perfection. But here the knowing

voice interferes resolutely with: “But we are wrong”, because the illusion of a better future

will leave us only when we board the “black-/ Sailed” ship with “huge and birdless silence”

behind her and in front of which “No waters breed or break” (CP 50), one of Larkin’s

beautiful and calm metaphors for death .

The knowing voice draws our attention to the falseness of the illusion and tells us

point-blank that what we live by is wrong and that there is no point in hoping for better future.

But the voice is not a reprehensive or maliciously satisfied voice of a sharp critic of people’s

unjustified beliefs, it is rather included in the general ‘we’ and ‘us’ and speaks from the

position of a sympathetic sharer of the sadness of people’s predicament, yet it knows more.

George Hartley supports this argument when he talks about this speaker or the poet as

someone who “sees more clearly through the big ‘illusions’ in life, and perhaps therefore has

a greater sensitivity to the reality of pain and suffering” (Hartley, “Nothing To Be Said” 88).

The position of the knower is perhaps most clearly presented in “Myxomatosis”,

where the persona in the poem knows much more about the reality and the future of the dying

rabbit than the rabbit itself which does not understand what has happened to him - “What trap

is this? Where were its teeth concealed” (CP 61). Since the knower is actually present in the

poem, he can also act, and does. The speaker here decides to kill the rabbit which, as he

91

knows, has nothing else left but incomprehensible suffering in “the centre of a soundless

field” (CP 61) where nothing speaks to it to explain his situation and where “hot inexplicable

hours go by” (CP 61). To “make a sharp reply”, to kill the rabbit, feels justified here, as the

rabbit might otherwise in its ignorance try to prolong its suffering on the pretext of its hope

that “things would come right again/ If [the rabbit] could only keep quite still and wait” (CP

61). But as the knower is aware, the rabbit’s hope is illusory. And the speaker is “glad” that he

“can’t explain” (CP 61) this to the rabbit and that the only thing he could do was to act; since

if he had not acted, it would only prolong the rabbit’s delusion and consequent suffering. One

of the crucial things the poem suggests is that the illusion that things might improve in the

future can be harmful and misleading. The speaker does not kill the rabbit out of cruelty, but

rather out of sympathy, and sympathy is what prevails in Larkin’s approach to other deluded

subjects in his poems (without, of course, its practical accompaniment); he more often feels

sorry for than critical of those who “suppurate” (CP 61) in the jaws of illusion.

In “Myxomatosis”, the one who knows is human and the one who does not know is

the rabbit. But what happens in Larkin’s poems when the rabbit’s place is taken by people:

who is the one who knows then? This is a question that can help us to understand why Larkin

is so often understood as a poet of disillusionment. Personae and observers in Larkin’s poems

hardly ever know something for sure - they can only guess. Larkin gives evidence for this in

most of his poems, and he also carved this principle into language in his wonderfully and

chokingly simple poem “Ignorance”: “Strange to know nothing, never to be sure/ Of what is

true or right or real,/ But forced to qualify or so I feel,/ Or Well, it does seem so:/ Someone

must know” (CP 110). This ‘someone’ is no one in Larkin’s poems. Only the anonymous

voice of many of Larkin’s poems sometimes appears to know a bit more than the protagonists.

But the knowledge is even then limited to the diagnostics of an illusion or what is wrong, but

does not extend as far as the cure. So what a poem can do is to try to disclose an illusion or to

92

suppose the illusion’s existence (but one cannot “be sure” if things are “real” or not) if it can

hint at a diagnosis, but it can never be sure, it can never act (as the person in “Myxomatosis”

acted), it can never comfort us with a definite knowledge, not even a definite belief, as no

belief is definite in Larkin.

A good example of this is given in “Faith Healing”, where the anonymous narrator of

the poem also knows “[w]hat’s wrong” (CP 86) like the speaker in “Myxomatosis”, also

knows the diagnosis but cannot console or comfort anyone with a solution to the problem.

The speaker in his attitudes and insights is in contrast to the healer “in rimless glasses” who

offers the troubled women “[m]oustached in flowered frocks” (CP 86) a solution without the

right diagnosis. The “deep American voice” offers his “loving care” in whose “warm spring

rain” every woman (who has probably duly paid) can “dwell[ ] some twenty seconds” and

solves every problem, “that eye, that knee” by “[d]irecting God” (CP 86) in prayer. The way

his methods are ridiculed in the diction suggests indubitably that he, unlike the general voice

in the poem, does not know, or does not care, what is really wrong. He just provides the balm

without looking at the wound, but the false illusion of improvement or salvation works

because it is invested with faith, he is after all a ‘faith healer’. His faith is the belief that he

can direct god; the women’s faith is different, but it does not matter since it is still faith: they

believe in his “kindness, thinking a voice/ At last calls them alone” (CP 86). Readers are

clearly told by the narrator of the poem that such an illusion is false, but that it works, for the

moment anyway.

In contrast to the American healer, the English disillusionist knows exactly that the

problem lies in the fact that “In everybody there sleeps/ A sense of life lived according to

love” (CP 86) and that this embedded sense is hardly ever fulfilled; this and not “that knee” is

the reason for trouble. Despite knowing the diagnosis, Larkin does not pretend being able to

heal the problem, nor does he inspire the faith in readers. In order to understand Larkin’s

93

approach to illusion better, it is quite important to notice that he does not blame people for

having illusions, he accepts illusions as possibly benign. Illusions are the ground in which our

lives are rooted, they are the “touching dream” in which “conceits/ And self-protecting

ignorance congeal to carry life” (CP 137) as Larkin beautifully sums up in “The Building”.

What, however, Larkin avoids is creating illusions by his poetry - that is why he never says

the equivalent of “Dear child” to his readers; he is never a ‘faith healer’, and that is why most

of his poetry is “intensely sad” (CP 152). Even the moments of transcendence, which have

been discussed in connection with symbolist dimensions in Larkin’s work, are usually more

expressive of longing (or at its most, of hope) than of faith. Even in such a ‘religious’ poem as

“Water”, the substance of the poem is rather a desire for faith than the faith itself, which is

given by the subjunctive that structures the whole poem (“If I were called in…” [CP 91]).

A poem which parallels “Faith Healing” in many respects is “Love Songs in Age”. It

also concentrates on an elderly woman who has missed love or who has been missed by love.

She finds her old music for love songs, which she has forgotten she had as they, like hidden

memories, “took so little space” (CP 83), and is suddenly reminded of the expectations and

beliefs that she had when she played the songs,. It makes her realize how illusory all those

hopes were; in this way she feels cheated in the same way as the women in “Faith Healing”

without perhaps realizing it were cheated by what never came true, by how “they might have

done had they been loved” (CP 86).

However, the woman in “Love Songs in Age” not only realizes that the illusions were

never to come true, she also realizes the absence of illusion in her age, and it seems to be the

most painful thing about it, that she cannot have any hope any more, that it is all reserved for

the young. In this respect this poem as well as several others that follow here contradicts the

idea presented in “Next, Please” that we never wake from our illusions of better future. In

“Love Songs in Age” the woman does wake from her illusion. Illusions seem to be granted

94

mostly to the young (and healthy; as is apparent from “The Building” where people “wake

from [their dreams] separately [...when] called to these corridors” [CP 137]).

Youth is given here much praise: “And the unfailing sense of being young/ Spread out

like a spring-woken tree, wherein/ That hidden freshness sung/ That certainty of time laid up

in store” (CP 83), but it is remarkable that the tree is not in blossom, the tree is “spring-

woken” and its “freshness sung” is still “hidden”. This suggests that “being young” was not so

wonderful in itself; it was wonderful for the “certainty of time laid up in store” (CP 83) and

for all the hopes that promised to decorate this future with all the “Uncalled-for to this day”

(CP 46) wonders (to borrow a phrase from another poem); it was so cherished as it created

convincingly the illusion of a better future.

What love can be or seem to be and what it can achieve through the hopes it attaches

to itself, i.e. what constitutes the illusion of love, is described in this poem in what is probably

the most beautiful and promising direct portrait of love in all of Larkin’s work: “The glare of

that much-mentioned brilliance, love,/ [...which shows] Its bright incipience sailing above,/

Still promising to solve, and satisfy,/ And set unchangeably in order” (CP 83). The ideal of

love is so noble and glaring with brilliance, it is something that sails above for our eyes and

hopes to be raised to, like faith in heaven; it is so perfect and stable and unchangeable...once it

comes. However, it is apparent from these lines that love is still hypothetical and will always

be so, it is “still promising” suggesting both that it is for some time promising as opposed to

delivering and that even the promising is for some time only, i.e. that even the promises will

fade with time. Moreover, this love was not experienced by the woman - it is not internalised,

but rather known from hearsay, it is “much-mentioned” (CP 83).

Just to digress a little here, it is very interesting to note that love is very often

mentioned in a detached way as if the speaker or Larkin wanted to suggest that he knows

nothing about it. A similarly obvious case can be found in “For Sidney Bechet” in the

95

sentence expressing the utmost praise for the music: “On me your voice falls as they say love

should” (CP 87). “Love” is here again something that the speaker knows nothing about beside

that people speak about it.

But to come back to “Love Songs in Age”, the realization that love will never come,

that the buds may never fully sprout, that the “bright incipience” (CP 83) will always stay in

vivo of our hopes and will be born only much later as a dark and dull conclusion, is therefore

also the realization that things will not be solved, that the woman will not be satisfied and that

things will be probably “unchangeably set”, not “in order” but in what Larkin calls elsewhere

“other things“ (CP 148). Not the unfulfilled present, but the future without hope is the hardest

thing to accept: “So/ To pile them back, to cry,/ Was hard, without lamely admitting how/ It

had not done so then, and could not now” (CP 83).

Another poem, very different in tone and diction, but with a similar message about the

connection between illusions and growing up or ageing is “A Study of Reading Habits”. The

parallel is in the fact that the ability of believing in an illusion fades with age. Here, the small

and young reader can employ his imagination to identify with the “cool” goodie (CP 102) or

later with the dark hero unequalled in his success and power in fights and sex; he knew how

to live the illusion that now, or one day, he will be an idol. Later, experience taught him

otherwise, reality squeezed out illusion and he lost the ability to believe that he is better than

his experience tells him or that he might change in the future. He does not know how to

escape anymore. He has reached the stage of utmost denial of ideals, of perfect

disillusionment where even fiction reminds him of painful reality: “the dude/ Who lets the girl

down before/ The hero arrives, the chap who’s yellow and keeps the store/ Seem far too

familiar” (CP 102). Perhaps the reason for him saying that “Books are a load of crap” (CP

102) is hidden in the fact that books are not able to create illusions for him in the same way in

which the love songs could not awaken hope anymore.

96

As has been suggested, Larkin has no poems in which he sketches the possibility of

finding or retaining love in old age; love is the dominion of the young. “Skin” presents

another retrospective, this time, however, the speaker is not suddenly surprised at having

missed love, but rather blames himself for not having enjoyed youth while it was available,

while it was still the “fashion” of the day: “And pardon me, that I/ Could find, when you were

new,/No brash festivity/To wear you at” (CP 73). Old age is no time for relationships, for

spreading out one’s tentacles into the world of other people, but it is rather a time for

enclosing, for getting ready to “work loose/ Into an old bag/ Carrying a soiled name” (CP 73).

“Home Is So Sad” and “Reference Back” are two poems very close in their strategies

to “Love Songs in Age”. They also speak about the irrevocably lost past and the sense of what

might have been and of disillusionment. In “Home Is So Sad”, home “started as” a place

where things were “how [they] ought to be” which by now are “long fallen wide”; with time

the home “withers so” (CP 88) changing slowly into disillusion. But it still offers some

openings through which it is possible to see “how it was”- these are the objects that, like

“songs” (CP 83), can remind us of the chasm between the context in which they used to

appear and the current context of “having no one to please” (CP 88) as no one lets himself to

be pleased, no one has any hope any more. So “the pictures and the cutlery./ The music in the

piano stool. That vase” (CP 88) just testify the past as if they were buried there. The “albums,

lettered/ Our Wedding” (CP 115) in “Afternoons” have a similar function.

The object that links the past with the present in “Reference Back” is a record,

“Oliver’s Riverside Blues, it was” (CP 111), which (what is presumably) the son plays and

which the mother hears. The connection between the present and the past (and in a sense the

future, too) has more dimensions here: the music reminds the mother of her past, but it also

reminds both of them about the fact that they are together in an “unsatisfactory” (CP 111)

present (before the music was played, they felt completely apart and could not communicate,

97

but the music “Three decades later made this sudden bridge/ From your unsatisfactory age/ To

my unsatisfactory prime” [CP 111]); and through such connection and on realizing that there

is no fundamental difference between his mother and himself, he can foresee his future, too.

Moreover, this poem is still more hopeless by suggesting that the speaker, despite being in his

“prime”, has no belief anymore either. The poem, similarly to the other two poems grouped

here, speaks about the openings through which it is possible to view our past: they show us

how things (vases, sheet music or jazz music) were and how they still are the same, and how

our lives and dreams were and are no more, how all our dreams and hopes (e.g. for love) came

to nothing. The blues that used to make us happy and take us to the illusory world described

in “For Sidney Bechet” has no longer power over us; we have changed, and the worst

realization is similar to that in “Skin”- that it is our fault, that perhaps we should have tried

harder making it still possible for the record to create wonderful illusions in us. But Philip

Larkin says it much better when he summarizes the core of all the three poems discussed here

at the end of the poem:

Truly, though our element is time,

We are not suited to the long perspectives

Open at each instant of our lives.

They link us to our losses, worse:

They show us what we have as it once was,

Blindingly undiminished, just as though

By acting differently we could have kept it so (CP 111).

In all these poems, time brings change, and change affects our approach to illusion. It

is testified also in a poem explicitly about time, “Triple Time”, in which our past, or what will

98

once become our past is seen as “A valley cropped with fat neglected chances/ That we

insensately forbore to fleece” (CP 65). In other words, looking back we always realize what

pursuits of chances we have foolishly abandoned so that instead of wool we fleece “our

losses” (CP 111). In “High Windows” this change brought by time is further developed by its

social dimension, there is not only a person ageing, but also a society changing, and both

these lines of alteration have something to do with illusion.

The illusion is here rooted in the idea that the society will change and our lives with it,

or more precisely that social change will directly affect our happiness. The persona speaking

in the poem contemplates both the shift in his life between youth and late middle-age and also

the differences in society that paralleled and also affected these personal changes. He, from

the perspective of older age, sees “a couple of kids” (CP 129) and imagines that their life must

be much happier than his was because they live in time of sexual freedom. Like his colleagues

from the poems mentioned recently, he realizes that his youth did not fulfil its promises, but

unlike the colleagues, he replaces his disillusionment with another illusion, an illusion of what

might have been had society been different and the illusion that for the young of the day youth

must be a “paradise” (CP 129) thanks to the different attitudes to sex. The speaker is,

however, of (at least) two minds.

On one hand, he is completely sure that it is not an illusion, but truth; he says: “I know

this is paradise” (CP 129) in the same way as the illusion of sexual freedom brings absolute

satisfaction and happiness in “Annus Mirabilis”. “Annus Mirabilis” despite its different

diction makes some almost identical points about illusion in this context as “High Windows”.

Here the speaker also seems to “know” that happiness was guaranteed for all those lucky ones

who were born later than him, for those who were young “In Nineteen sixty-three” (CP 146)

and for whom “every life became/ A brilliant breaking of the bank/ A quite unlosable game”

(CP 146). In “High Windows” the illusion that “Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives”

99

(CP 129) has finally come true, although not quite for them. Neither of these personae in their

lives were allowed to see sex as “paradise”. For them it was “A shame that started at sixteen/

And spread to everything” (CP 146). In both poems, the sense of release that the young can

nowadays experience is enormous. Society does not demand any commitments from them and

the old-fashioned institutions are discarded: “Bonds and gestures pushed to one side” (CP

129), and “A sort of bargaining” (CP 146) has ended - people do not have to get married or

pretend anything. The society puts no more pressure on the young, the institutionalized social

mechanism in which all those who are now old had to participate by getting married and

‘producing’ children is now put aside with all the other rusted machines and “outdated

combine harvester[s]” (CP 129). What progress - it all seems wonderful and perfect for the

young.

On the other hand both poems make it clear that it is not so simple, each in a different

way. Where “Annus Mirabilis” employs a humourous tone and absurd exaggeration to

question the illusion, “High Windows” use subtle details in imagery and strange contrasts in

diction. The former poem subverts the illusion paradoxically through extolling and

exaggerating its qualities too much - readers find it too good to believe it in a similar way as

they would not believe improbable advertisement or propaganda. It is just not possible for

everyone to take part in the “brilliant breaking of the bank” or for “Everyone [to feel] the

same” (CP 146). Such crude generalizations are not doubted directly as they are in “High

Windows” but are self-mockingly ironizing themselves through their absurdity; the absurdity

that is deliberately introduced into the poem already in the first line: “Sexual intercourse

began/ In nineteen sixty-three” (CP 146). But there is one more subtle subversion of the

illusion in the last stanza of the poem when Larkin writes: “So life was never better than/ In

nineteen sixty-three” - he does not write ‘Since nineteen sixty-three’ suggesting that the

illusion did not last more than one year. Even though the sexual freedom remained, people

100

realized that it did not bring the happiness it promised “In nineteen sixty-three” and it also

suggests the irony in the fact that although he was supposed to, the speaker himself did not

feel that his life was wonderful in 1963 which also casts doubt on the wonderful picture of the

illusion. So even this poem, which on first reading seems like a self-pitying rhymed lament of

a person too old to enjoy all the sex which is at last available, has to say much about the

nature of illusion.

“High Windows” subverts illusion in a different way. The contrast in diction already

in the first stanza hints that everything is not as it should be with the “paradise”. The strong

language and the unromantic details of sexual life (“he’s fucking her and she’s/ Taking pills

or wearing a diaphragm” [CP 129]) makes the idea of “paradise” slightly dubious (and still

more so for the girl for whom the whole Eden means “taking pills”). If anything is shocking

in the first stanza, it is the word “paradise” rather than “fucking”, as it is thoroughly

incongruous in such a context - this already points at something dodgy about the illusion.

However, it is not only “paradise” - it is a “paradise// Everyone old has dreamed of all their

lives” (CP 129). It is the older generation’s ideal which has become now the younger

generation’s illusion. The speaker nevertheless still believes that social change has determined

the happiness of all the young people: “And everyone young going down the long slide// To

happiness, endlessly” (CP 129).

But this metaphor makes the illusion ambiguous still further. On the one hand, it is an

image of a wonderfully effortless and smooth path through one’s life where one does not have

to climb anywhere. On the other hand it could be interpreted quite differently: “the long slide”

(CP 129) downwards could be seen as an enclosed passageway from which one cannot

escape, in which one deteriorates and which is certainly in the opposite direction from

paradise. The aim of this journey is to gain “happiness”, but happiness never comes; the

journey is “endless[ ]”; in other words it is the illusion of happiness which makes us join the

101

“long slide”, but the illusion will never come true. The speaker envies the young their journey

to “happiness” and at the same time is doubtful about it. He further realizes that such views as

he has of the younger generation do not necessarily need to be true, as those illusions that

older generations had about the promises that he was given by society for his own life - i.e.

the freedom from religion - did not make his life any happier. He supposes that as he now

looks at the “couple of kids”, someone “looked at [him], forty years back/ And thought,

That’ll be the life”, that older people also envied him his being like “free bloody birds” (CP

129) but that he was not enviable and he was not free.

He thus realizes that to invest society with the power to give our lives happiness is an

illusion - that it is futile to believe in any change for the future which resonates with many of

the previous poems. Larkin himself commented about this poem that “it shows humanity as a

series of oppressions, and one wants to be somewhere where there’s neither oppressed nor

oppressor, just freedom” (qtd. in Cooper 170). In the last stanza of the poem, which is very

complex in its symbolist diction, it is as if the speaker finds some kind of freedom only in the

world which is not driven by desires and therefore not drowned in illusions: it is a calm,

people-less, time-less and history-less “sun-comprehending” world which is “nowhere, and is

endless” (CP 129). A stanza like this would deserve much more attention, but suffice it to say

here that it expresses the “thought” of escaping from the tension created by expectations,

illusions and reality, from both the “bonds” and “slides”.

In many of the poems discussed above, illusions of the future bringing happiness

usually dissolve with time and are replaced with bleak reality. Such could be the summary of

many of Larkin’s poems. So when readers encounter the poem “First Sight”, not only that

they see it shine like a jewel with its optimism, but it seems like a very good joke on Larkin’s

part. The change which so often constitutes the frame of many of the poems: from youth to

age, from hope to resignation and disillusionment, is unexpectedly turned upside down. As

102

has been shown, the good or the youth is rather than the result of achieved happiness more

often the result of hope and illusion.

But here, in “First Sight”, the change is from cold of the winter to the longer and

warmer days of spring, from the worse to the better, and moreover, and this is what turns it

into a little joke, the change takes place through reality. It bypasses all hopes and illusions. It

just happens without any effort on the subject’s part. So the poet, who is known for recording

“the dull days as dull” (CP 43) suddenly “leap[s] from the sun” (CP 71) and catches us

unawares with “Earth’s immeasurable surprise” (CP 107). Larkin managed to find in reality

something that could be a declaration of hope: “They could not grasp it if they knew,/ What

so soon will wake and grow/ Utterly unlike the snow” (CP 107). The reality will exceed by far

what the lambs could imagine or what they could hold as ideal. This poem and the hope and

faith it confers is so powerful exactly because it does not need any hope or faith to do it

(unless we had to hope for the sun coming up every morning); it just states how it is: there is

no metaphor, symbol or simile that would be supposed to convey hope, as is the case in for

example “The Trees” which needs the parallel between the life of the tree and the life of

people in order to be hopeful. “First Sight” is a good example of the poems which Barbara

Everett calls “wilfully modest” and “peculiarly potent” (Everett, “Poets in Their Time” 243).

The relationship between illusion and love is present also in slightly different terms in

“An Arundel Tomb”. This poem is, because of its last line, certainly Larkin’s most well-

known poem about love, so the fact that it has to say very much about illusion is perhaps

symptomatic. The dimension of illusion in the poem is underlined by the fact that it discusses

a work of art - a statue on a medieval tomb of an earl and a countess who, contrary to the

viewers’ expectation, hold hands – and its representation of reality. The underlying question

in the poem is whether the couple’s love was real or if it only seems so now from the illusion

of the art. They may have really loved each other and lived in “faithfulness”, or perhaps the

103

“faithfulness” is only “in effigy” (CP 116) and was not in reality; this idea is repeated towards

the end of the poem where “The stone fidelity” is subverted on next line by “They hardly

meant” (CP 117). This is further developed in Larkin’s favourite pun on the verb ‘lie’, which

is significantly used twice in the poem: they “lie in stone” (CP 116) and “They would not

think to lie so long” (CP 116).

The latter example cleverly expresses two possible meanings: first, they could not

imagine that they would survive in their death into such a distant, utterly different “unarmorial

age” (CP 117) - they could not imagine they would outlive the limits of their imagination and

comprehension; but the second meaning suggests that they would not think that such a petty

and vain lie – their love for each other- could last for so long. The visitors to the tomb, “the

endless altered people”, see them lying “side by side” (CP 116), but that does not necessarily

prove their love for each other (the two people in “Talking in Bed” also lie side by side and

their love is far from unproblematic): here the lovers “rigidly [...] persisted” (CP 116) as if it

was nothing pleasant to them, to be there together; moreover the love may have been also

only one-sided, it is “his hand withdrawn, holding her hand” (CP 116), not them both holding

hands.

They are becoming more and more a symbol and less and less the representation of

reality, “their faces [are] blurred” (CP 116), their “identity” is “wash[ed]” (CP 117). They are

buried in “Bone-riddled ground” (CP 116) which suggests we cannot understand the lives

(and loves) of the dead - they are riddles for us. All this is contrary to what was probably their

original intention; their aim was to preserve their fame so the holding hand was only a means

of rendering their tomb more memorable, “helping to prolong/ The Latin names around the

base” (CP 116). The love may have not been important and its illusion may have been created

by their order, by the “sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace” (CP 116), or by the will of the

eyes of the observers.

104

Larkin in the poem gives much attention to sight and seeing: he often does not state

how things are, but how people see them, which opens possibilities for interpretation and for

illusion: it all “involves the eye”, “One sees, with a sharp and tender shock”, “How soon

succeeding eyes begin/ To look, not read” (CP 116). The fact that love, the idea or the illusion

of it, is a very powerful concept is clear from this poem, too. It is after all only love that

makes the visitors interested - they would not otherwise “read” or care about “Such plainness

of the prebaroque” (CP 116). It is the idea of love that makes them “look” and gives them the

“sharp tender shock” (CP 116). Their “scrap of history” has evaporated and their (dubitable)

faithfulness and love “has come to be/ Their final blazon” to which only “an attitude remains”

(CP 117).

The “blazon” and the “attitude” originate in the space between the viewers’ mind and

the work of art - the tombstone; in other words what has remained of them has little to do with

reality so the fact that it may “prove” something “true” or even “almost true” may be a

wished-for illusion or our instinct, or the combination of both - our “almost-instinct” (CP

117). The assertion of the last line, however strong and powerful due to its final position

separated by a colon: “What will survive of us is love”, is thus undermined not only by the

“almost[s]” but by the fact that all the proofs are only an illusion. An ironic or on the contrary

a symptomatic postscript to this poem is the fact that the “Stone fidelity” was indeed an

artist’s “sweet” idea, as it turned out that the holding hands were only a much later Romantic

addition (FR 58).

“Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” also asks if it is possible to preserve a

moment from the past in art, and shows that where feelings take charge, looking will grow

erratic, to paraphrase Larkin’s line from “Deceptions”. Here a man goes through an album of

photographs of a young lady and after three stanzas which describe in detail what he sees in

the pictures and how he reacts to them, he starts to contemplate the photography as such: “But

105

o, photography! As no art is,/ Faithful and disappointing” (CP 43). This exclamation comes

right after he has been disturbed by the presence of other men in the pictures and therefore in

the life of the young woman. Photography is “Faithful and disappointing” as it destroys the

illusion we would like to have with cruel empirical evidence. Also the adjective “faithful”

being here juxtaposed to “disappointing” and having therefore negative meaning suggests that

the speaker (and the watcher here) cannot come to terms with the fact that he missed the past

of the woman, that he was not there with her, and he does not want to be reminded of it. The

speaker supposes that photography, unlike art (statues on tombstones, for example) is

objective and not influenced by an artist’s imagination. Photography “overwhelmingly

persuades/ That this is a real girl in a real place, // In every sense empirically true” (CP 43).

The speaker, however, does not realize that, although the photographs may be

empirically true, his sight and therefore his perception of them is not objective, so that when

he says still addressing the photography: “what grace/ Your candour thus confers upon her

face” (CP 43), it might not be the photography’s “candour” but rather his ‘eye of the

beholder’ that sees it; that when feelings take charge, empirical reality acquires new colours.

As can be seen from this extensive discussion of illusion in love and in general,

Larkin’s attitude to illusion is far from simply condemnatory. He views and questions illusion

from many angles seeing both the good and bad sides of it and the impossibility of evading it.

He tries in his poems to see truth through illusion, but he also tries to see “truthfully through

Truth” (Everett, “Larkin and Dockery” 149); nevertheless he knows that illusion is an

obligatory parameter in our lives, that it cannot ever be abolished altogether.

Ideals are very close to illusions, they sometimes overlap and many of the illusions

discussed above have been illusions of the (future) availability of ideals. Ideals are always

somehow present in our lives. Very often they are bitingly present by their absence. Larkin’s

poems are never about ideals in the sense of depicting an ideal woman or an ideal love

106

relationship. They are about ideals in the sense that they question and analyze ideals’ place in

people’s lives and they investigate the source of these ideals and the impact of holding them

on our lives. The discrepancy between the imagined ideal and reality is one of the elements by

which Larkin’s poems are most haunted. This is true of the poems “concerned with relations

between the sexes [which] could be characterised as satires or elegies on the gulf between the

mythic ideals of our sexual dreams and the empirical reality out of which they are

constructed”, as Booth said (Booth, “PL: Writer” 107).

The sense of what might be and is not or what might have been and was not pervades

most of Larkin’s poems, which can be detected already from his excessive use of words with

the prefix un- which suggest the negation of the expected ideal: “unraised, unwalked,

unspent” (Watt, viii). Ideals concerning love may be the ideals of a relationship, an ideal of

the person to be loved or the ideal of the person loving. They may be the results of stereotypes

imposed on us by the society or they may have intrinsic origin in our instincts or “almost-

instincts” (CP 117). As he does with illusion, Larkin assesses how much ideals affect reality

and what our reactions to them are.

The source of ideals is diverse. There seem to be ideals that we are born with, that are

somehow intrinsically present in us; it is very interesting to realize that some ideals seem to

be rooted in us without the contribution of our experience. We can feel an ideal’s absence

without ever having felt its presence, so it really seems that “In everyone there sleeps/ A sense

of life lived according to love” (CP 86). The ideal of being loved is so powerfully imbedded

in us that it causes all ailments, as “Faith Healing” suggests.

But there seem to be also ideals imposed on us by society and its expectations.

However, society can sometimes also act as an enemy to our inmost ideals. “Wires” explores

in an almost allegorical way the process of losing ideals in adjusting to reality and to social

norms. The “young steers” (CP 57) are always driven by some inner force to look for an ideal

107

which is unlike the reality they are surrounded by: “scenting purer water/ Not here but

anywhere” (CP 57). We look for ideals “beyond the wires”, “anywhere”, it does not matter

where, but not here within the limits of society with its norms and approved everydayness

allows. The “anywhere” is important here, as very often Larkin makes sure that the ideals do

not have to be specific and concrete, they are usually just notions of something that is not in

reality, something “unfocused” (CP 113) and yet unbearably powerful.

But the journey towards ideals proves to be dangerous, as every adventurous quest in a

fairy tale or a romance is. However, here in the world of reality, the search for the ideal “leads

them [and us] to blunder up against the wires” (CP 57). It is fatal not in the sense that we

would get killed, but in that the ideals in us do; we learn that we “must not stray” from what

reality has to offer as it teaches us with its “muscle-shredding violence” (CP 57). Similarly to

some of the poems, here the holding of ideals is also connected with age, it is only the young

who “stray”. The change is instant and irrevocable: “Young steers become old cattle from that

day” (CP 57). The speaker’s perspective is very interesting here; it both condemns the

youthful naivety as “blunder” but cannot help feeling sorry and disappointed that it works that

way - that we must lose our ideals as can be seen from the choice of the word “old” where it

could be “adult”, “experienced” or even “wise”; “old” does not sound positive - as if the

speaker lamented the inevitable loss of ideals, as if the speaker could still feel the ideals’

presence but only knew better not to pursue them. Such an attitude towards ideals, a mixture

of longing and scorn, can be found in many more poems.

One of them is “Breadfruit” which also deals with an opposition of youth and old age

in relation to ideals. “Boys” as well as “old men” “dream of native girls who bring breadfruit”

(CP 179); both groups therefore hold ideals but in a different disguise. For “boys” the ideals

still act as hope, for “old men” they are only a kind of nostalgia. And again, as the ideals were

“anywhere” and unspecific in “Wires”, here the ideals are not concrete either – the men dream

108

of “breadfruit” but they do not know “what[ ] they are”. It is not important what exactly it is

they desire for, it is something bringing them great pleasure and power, especially sexual

(“Sixteen sexual positions on the sand”) , “whatever” that is (CP 179).

And as in “Wires”, it is during their pilgrimage to the realm of ideals that they get

trapped, the vision of the ideals proves fatal to them, they are driven to act in a promising way

(“This makes them join (the boys) the tennis club,/ Jive at the Mecca, use deodorants” [CP

179]) which is in the overall perspective rather laughable. It suggests the desperate

ridiculousness of human attempts to reach the absolute of ideal happiness, love and self-

esteem by such petty moves as using “deodorants”. To see these ideals before oneself means

to have “uncorrected visions” (CP 179)and it leads to unwelcome consequences, which here is

not “electric fences” (CP 57) but marriage, portrayed here as usual, in very dull and dreary

terms together with “illness” and “age”: “A mortgaged semi- with a silver birch;/ Nippers; the

widowed mum; having to scheme with/ Money” (CP 179). The ideals survive this attack but

only as nostalgic reverie “without a chance of consequence” (CP 44) as Larkin writes

elsewhere. Nevertheless to dream like this is not condemned here but rather seen as a slight

compensation for the period of “maturity” when the men had no time to dream during the

undesirable practical reality of their marriage and work. The sadness of the poem lies also in

the fact that the dreams of the “boys” and the “men” are identical suggesting that nothing

significant really changed in a lifetime, or rather that they have not got anything that they had

longed for.

The idea that having an ideal and trying to reach it can be the cause of unhappiness in

our lives is further developed in a more personal poem, “Wild Oats”. In the poem the persona

speaking shares with his predecessors the desire for something else than he has got, here

specifically it is someone else. There are two women in the poem, one of them is “A bosomy

English rose” (CP 112), an ideal girl for him, who is desirable but unavailable and even cruel

109

to him (“she was trying [...] not to laugh”). The other one is “her friend in specs” (CP 112)

whose very identity is derived from the ideal, but the contrast is terrible: this girl is

undesirable and her only quality is her availability. She is the one he “could talk to” and who

became part of his everyday reality as it was her whom he “took out” (CP 112). The other girl

remained, however, an ideal for him, he “doubt[ed]/ If ever one had [a face] like hers” (CP

112), despite or more likely because he did not get the chance to know her - he probably met

her only “twice” and is not even sure about that.

The reality of his relationship with the other girl is not portrayed in very nice terms:

there is no mention of any positive emotion between them. Readers get only the list of things

they did with precise down-to-earth (therefore unidealistic) details of amount and costs

(“Wrote over four-hundred letters”, “Gave a ten-guinea ring” [CP 112]). The only emotion

expressed in relation to her are the bad feelings connected with their separation and even these

are still rather held back and detached; so when he says: “Well, useful to get that learnt” (CP

112) one cannot be sure if it is spoken out of hurt feelings or indifference. Even after many

years and much experience, he cannot bring himself to discard the ideal of the other woman:

“In my wallet are still two snaps/ Of bosomy rose with fur gloves on” (CP 112).

The last line of the poem is crucial: “Unlucky charms, perhaps” (CP 112). “[C]harms”

in the sense of the girl’s beauty are also charms in the sense of magical spell which had the

power over his happiness: the fact that her beauty constituted an ideal for him destroyed the

possibility of being happy in his other relationship, in reality. As in “Wires” and “Breadfruit”

ideals are here lethal weapons destroying the appreciation of humbler reality.

The title of the poem is also extremely effective and further develops the idea of the

harming impact of ideals: “Wild Oats” suggest the saying in which a man sowing his wild

oats “has a period of his life when he does a lot of exciting things and has a lot of sexual

relationships” (“Sow your wild oats”). It could feel straightforwardly ironic, since the speaker

110

was far from excited and further still from promiscuous with “seven years” (CP 112) in one

relationship, but it is subtler than mere irony. It could be argued that his infidelity was rooted

in his love for the ideal. He was not faithful as he had a desire for someone else or rather for

an ideal someone else. In this sense it is too “wild” to have an ideal.

The discussion of the ideal is further complicated by the final “perhaps” (CP 112).

Perhaps, it was not purely the existence of the charming ideal as such that caused his

unhappiness. Perhaps it was the discrepancy between the constant conscience of the ideal and

the complete lack of belief in the possibility of reaching it. In this the persona is different

from the steers and the boys who dream of breadfruit: he is certain he could never reach the

ideal and he does not do anything in order to do it. He never asked the “bosomy” girl for a

date, and he “believe[d]” (CP 112) she was laughing at him. This kind of default surrender is

quite characteristic for Larkin’s personae many of whom are defeatist. It is often the case that

they are aware of an ideal, but decide not to fight for it as it would be futile or wrong anyway

usually accompanying the decision with a chain of intricate rationalization, as in “Money”,

partly in “The Dance”, “Reasons for Attendance” or “Poetry of Departures”. The combination

of the knowledge of an ideal and of one’s own inadequacy contributes often to the overall

feeling of failure in the poems.

So that is why in several poems it is suggested that it would be much better not to

know the ideal at all, that the combination of one’s ideals and inadequacies is unbearable.

Spring and summer remind us of ideals, of joy and love, and that is why they are unwelcome

for the speakers in “Spring” and “Mother, Summer, I” respectively. So in the latter poem, the

speaker is relieved “when the leaves are gone” as the time of autumn is more “appropriate”

for his life. It is much better not to know the “summer days” which are ideal “Emblems of

perfect happiness/ [He] can’t confront” (CP1988 68). “Spring” is set in the season

traditionally attributed to love, so that is why the solitary speaker for whom spring “has least

111

use” (CP 66), finds it so hard to witness the spring’s approach. People like him “see her best”,

but (or because) only as an ideal, as remote and yet focused “visions mountain-clear” (CP 66).

It is the knowledge of the ideals that makes “their needs immodest” and the knowledge of the

terrible contrast between the ideal and the reality: spring’s being “most gratuitous [...] earth’s

most multiple, excited daughter” and their being “An indigestible sterility” (CP 66). The

contrast and the impossibility of reaching the ideal by walking on the “paths grown craven

and circuitous” (CP 66) is what paralyses the speaker.

Neither of the speakers has any hope that things could change, so that is why they

adopt such a resigned position (and it could be argued they know better than their hopeful

colleagues from the poems discussed in connection with illusion). Sometimes, the personae

add a fatalistic dimension to their idea of failure. They like to indulge in their failures in love

and like to think they are unlucky compared to others as it is their fate. In “Letter to a Friend

about Girls” the speaker contrasts a friend’s world where everything ideal happens, or at least

he thinks that happens, with his world where it is not possible to get anywhere near the ideal.

In the former world “to want/ Is straightaway to be wanted [...] And beauty is accepted slang

for yes”; in the latter world the women “work, and age, and put off men/ By being

unattractive, or too shy,/ Or having morals” (CP1988 122). The stance from which the

persona speaks is that of a resigned loser who has decided not to fight against his predicament

as apparently it is his fate. Such resigned fatalism casts shadows over many of Larkin’s poems

and it often helps to rationalize the failure, however dubiously: “I’m happier now I’ve got

things clear, although/ It’s strange we never meet each other’s sort:/ There should be equal

chances, I’d’ve thought” (CP1988 123). The idea that it is not possible to influence one’s own

life and choose its course is central to Larkin’s poetry which will be shown later.

A poem which makes the same point as “Spring” and “Mother, Summer, I” but in

much more explicit terms is “Born Yesterday”, in which the speaker wishes the newly born

112

baby not to be the object of or a subject with ideals but to have no ideals and constitute no

ideals for others, as that will grant her happiness. The speaker is here cleverer than the others

who still wish her all the ideal things: “being beautiful” or “running off a spring/ Of

innocence and love” because he is very doubtful that it “should [...] prove possible” (CP 54).

It is better to be “ordinary”, i.e. not to seem ideal to anyone, and have no “uncustomary” wish

which “unworkable itself,/ Stops all the rest from working” (CP 54). All such desires are

beyond our control and make a mess of our lives bringing little good in the end. That is why it

is best to be “dull”, i.e. not to be able to imagine anything extraordinary and ideal, as that will

most likely guarantee happiness in her life as Larkin suggests in the virtuoso ending of the

poem: “In fact, may you be dull -/ If that is what a skilled,/ Vigilant, flexible,/ Unemphasised,

enthralled/ Catching of happiness is called” (CP 54). All these adjectives describing activity

(“vigilant”, “flexible”) advocate here for dullness and passivity suggesting that such an

approach is the most efficient way of reaching happiness. Dullness helps us to escape desire

and ambition to gain ideals and is therefore commendable. As Larkin said in an interview: “I

think it is very much easier to imagine happiness than to experience it. Which is a pity

because what you imagine makes you dissatisfied with what you experience” (RW 55). It is

therefore better not to imagine happiness. It is better to be dull.

However, some ideals do not grow from inside us but are thrust upon us by society as

can be seen in a few of Larkin’s poems. The most obvious examples are “Sunny Prestatyn”

and “Essential Beauty” which present ideals in their “essential” form – as advertisements.

“Essential Beauty” is based on the juxtaposition of perfect ideals on billboard hoardings and

the bleak reality which is made even bleaker by contrast with advertisements. So “above the

gutter” there “shine/ Perpetually these sharply-pictured groves/ Of how life should be”,

perfect and “pure” (CP 113). As has been shown in the example of the already-mentioned

poems, there seems to be some kind of intrinsic drive for the ideal imbedded in us. However

113

the advertisements remind us of them and, still worse, they make it seem that they are

possible to reach easily as everything important and unimportant can be bought: “Well-

balanced families [...] owe their smiles, their cars,/ Even their youth, to that small cube each

hand/ Stretches towards” (CP 113). Although they are “beyond this world”, they are

inescapable and “dominate” our lives in which our “live imperfect eyes” are drawn to them;

but the eyes cannot see them, they just “stare” at them (CP 113). As in other poems, they are

not graspable and concrete - they are “unfocused”. The fact we “missed them” turns our lives

into tragedy and that is the reason for “the boy puking his heart out in the Gents” (CP 113).

Ideals kill us in the end as they kill the “dying smokers” who were made to seek the ideal by

lighting a “match” (CP 113). Again, as in “Wires”, the quest for the ideal proves fatal and it is

the cruelty of society that it reminds us of them all the time.

In “Sunny Prestatyn” people protest against this cruelty, here the real and the ideal

fight. People do not want to be reminded of the ideal, they want to overpower it and destroy

it. Here is only one poster showing a sexually attractive woman, “the most convenient

shorthand for happiness” (FR 89) who is promising to take us into paradise with “palms” (CP

106), sex and love; never mind it is only in Prestatyn. But these promises will never come

true; those who walk past it go to their homes very unlike the paradise.

So those who decide to scrawl obscenities on the poster and tear it do so more in order

to defy the ideal that makes them realize how far their lives are from it, than merely to indulge

in manifestation of their sexual power over the woman. Of course, the violent way they treat

the poster is a kind of symbolic rape. They rid the woman of her beauty and she gets

“snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed” (CP 106). Moreover they exaggerate those parts which they

probably found the most provocative to show that it is they who have power over her and not

her body over them, so she is given “Huge tits and a fissured crotch” and is raped in a most

nasty way: “the space/ Between her legs held scrawls/ That set fairly astride/ A tuberous cock

114

and balls” (CP 106). However, much more important than the issue of a woman being

overpowered by men is here the fact that it is an ideal being refused by people and destroyed

by reality whose inadequacies are here exaggerated for example in the terrible portrayal of the

rape. I would agree here with Booth that “it is this glimpse of unsullied happiness, rather than

her sexuality, which perhaps constitutes her most unbearable provocation to the vandals”

(Booth, “PL: Writer” 123). The key evidence for this conviction is in the line “She was too

good for this life” (CP 106) which can mean both that it was actually better for her to

disappear from this world but more importantly that she was too wonderful an ideal that could

not be faced in this life. Unlike in “Essential Beauty”, in this poem, reality indeed wins over

the ideal. When the poster of the girl is covered over, it is with a poster with “Fight Cancer”

(CP 106) on it, i.e. with something contrary to ideals – the reality of death.

Beside these two poems, there is one more poem in The Whitsun Weddings which

makes use of the world of marketing and shopping and of the society’s influence on us and on

our notion of the ideal through these, “The Large Cool Store”. This poem blends the world of

reality and ideal in a peculiar and puzzling way. In the discussion of ideals so far there have

been poems which spoke about ideals as something that is naturally present in us, there have

been poems which discussed the society’s use and reinforcement of these ideals within us, but

this poem is different – it almost fears that the ideals, or the higher things in our lives, our

loves and “ecstasies” (CP 101), are not in effect much different from the everyday reality, but

rather that they are merely results of norms and expectations like anything else.

Where in the two previous poems, reality and ideal were contrasted as something

utterly irreconcilable, here they strangely meet, in a department store. “The large cool store”

sells both “cheap clothes” for “the weekday world of those// Who leave at dawn low terraced

houses/ Timed for factory, yard and site” and the “machine-embroidered” and more colourful

“Modes For Night” (CP 101). The realization that the public weekday world of factories and

115

the private night world of love are here next to each other seems puzzling, and puzzling in at

least two ways.

First, it is strange that women believe it is possible to reach the ideal of beauty, and

through that the ideal of love, by choosing one of the “Lemon, sapphire, moss-green” (CP

101) articles, that something so important and crucial as love could be thought to be gained by

spending a few pounds. Second, how peculiar it is that the ideals of beauty and love are

imposed on us by the same reality as the “cheap” everydayness of work, that love is nothing

individual but rather something prefabricated, unified and “Set out in simple sizes plainly”

(CP 101). As if here the ideal of love and the ability to love and be loved did not spring at all

from within the individual women, but was “matched by something in” (CP 101) the world of

the clothing industry. Love would then be nothing inner and natural, but rather “separate and

unearthly”, and that would apply not only to women’s love but also to men’s “young unreal

wishes” (CP 101) for love. The weirdest thing is to collaborate in sharing these “synthetic,

new,/ And natureless” ideals literally woven from reality.

As has been shown, the role of ideals in our loves and lives is very important and

complex and is viewed and questioned from many angles. But obviously ideals would not

affect us the least if there was not desire to create the long and longing passage between

ourselves and the ideals. It is therefore important to discuss the theme of desire in Larkin’s

poetry in more depth now.

Desire seems to be the prime mover in Larkin’s universe. Desire is what drives us to

do the things we do; “wind’s blowing” (CP 45) in “Wedding-Wind” is moved also by desire,

both refreshing and destructive. The fact that a majority of the most beautiful transcendent

moments in the poems are completely static, as in “High Windows” or “Solar”, already hints

at the undesirability of desire. The problem with desire seems to be not only that it does not

leave us in peace but that it cannot be satiated. It is very interesting that in none of Larkin’s

116

poems there comes a moment of happiness as a result of fulfilling one’s desire. Perhaps the

most happy moment in Larkin’s poetry, the happiness felt by the person in “Coming”, comes

as a complete surprise, uncomprehended, unpremeditated and unyearned-for (to use Larkin’s

favourite prefix), separate from desire, and is likened to the feeling of a child who “can

understand nothing [...] And starts to be happy” (CP 47). The only other poem in which

something desired nearly comes true, “The Dance”, was abandoned exactly at the moment

when the speaker after the many hours of unhappy awkwardness and feeling of insufficiency

starts to be happy dancing with the desired woman; this may be quite symptomatic.

Desire usually drags us where it wants. In most poems we are desire’s slaves rather

than masters and the worst seems to be that we are not always aware of it. Desire is therefore

the arch-deceiver as it creates the illusion of fulfilment for which we yearn. In “Deceptions” it

is “where/ Desire takes charge, [that] readings will grow erratic” (CP 67), in other words

desire is the reason for us being deceived causing our “stumbling up the breathless stair/ To

burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic” (CP 67). Larkin explained this in prose: “action comes

from desire, and we all know that desire comes from wanting something we haven’t got,

which may not make us any happier when we have it” (qtd. in Swarbrick 43).

In “Dry-Point”, a poem which has been discussed in detail in chapter 2, the speaker is

not deceived in the sense that he is very well aware of the fact that desire is “imprisoning”

(Swarbrick 54), but he does not know how to escape it. The poem speaks specifically about

sexual desire which is indeed one of the strongest desires and which is typical of all desires in

the vicious cycle of long longing and negligible moment of fulfilment. So what the speaker is

left with is the “dream” of escaping it all, somewhere beyond the end of desire, in the static

“sunscrubbed room” (CP 49).

In what was originally a twin companion for this poem, “Oils”, Larkin expresses in

very different formal terms a similar idea that our lives in this world are constituted by desires

117

and “No one can migrate across [the] boundaries” (CP 171) of such a world. “Oils” is

however much more positive about desire: desire is not the reason for the “shame that started

at sixteen” (CP 146), rather it is something almost mythical or Edenic, it is set among “Sun.

Tree. Beginning. [...] God in the thicket” (CP 171). Sex is here described as a natural miracle

with a biologist’s meticulous detail: “Entire alternative in man and woman/ Opening at a

touch like a water-flower”. Even the possibility of procreation is here viewed in positive

terms: “the future erupts like struck oil”, unlike in most other poems. But even this poem

complains directly to the desire about it being inescapable: “No one can exist without a habit

for you./ No one can tear your thread out of himself./ No one can tie you down or set you

free” and no one can therefore set himself free, only “the dead” (CP 171).

“Wants” is dedicated to the expression of the desire to escape all the desires. One

escape is through being “alone”, i.e. out of all relationships with people and wants created by

“invitation-cards” or “printed directions of sex” – “Beyond all this the wish to be alone” (CP

52). “All this” can be the desires and the entanglements we get into through ‘wanting’

something. Desires are awakened in us by motives from outside, which could be seen also in

“Wedding-Wind” where the woman’s life ceases to be static and enveloped in itself at her

wedding, when “All is the wind”. Although the bride is worried that with the introduction of

desire into her life, she will never have any more peace (“Shall I be let to sleep/ Now this

perpetual morning shares my bed?”), she still considers the wind to be the “wind/ Of joy” (CP

45). But in “Wants” the speaker wants to reach the wind-less state; in expressing the wish for

harmony and calmness, he wishes for solitude.

The second stanza goes still further, it wants to forget everything as the safest escape

from ‘wanting’ and desires: “Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs” (CP 52). To escape all

ambitions and conventional and expected manifestations of sexual desire: “the tabled fertility

rites” (here love is nothing special, but a predictable institutionalized convention). Despite

118

“the costly aversion of the eyes of death” (CP 52), despite the fact that we want to ignore

death, we long for the perfect “oblivion” it brings. One can escape desire only by escaping

oneself, this conviction also lies under “Absences” where the speaker also yearns for “Such

attics cleared of me” (CP 70). “Forget What Did” ends with a similar longing, as the writer of

the diary cannot cope anymore with all the things that have happened to him through

interaction with other people and pines for oblivion and “empty pages” (CP 128); or at least

for utter suppression of the self which would be replaced by occurrences which have nothing

to do with the human world: “Should they ever be filled/ Let it be with observed// Celestial

recurrences,/ The day the flowers come,/ And when the birds go” (CP 128). As Larkin stated

in an interview: “One longs for infinity and absence, the beauty of somewhere you are not”

(FR 59).

The passage that one makes from oneself to others can be dangerous because

interacting with a new world does not bring only new desires, but also involves new choices

on our part. When such a passage is completed in “Arrivals, Departures” it only creates

“horny dilemmas” which cry to us: “Come and choose wrong” (CP 74). As a consequence of

the possibility and/or necessity of choice, “We are nudged from comfort” (CP 74), we are

tugged by it without even understanding our actions. One of the reasons why desire,

especially sexual desire, is puzzling and unwelcome lies also in the fact that it directs our

actions without any consultation with the self. When in “Ignorance” it is stated that “our flesh/

Surrounds us with its own decisions” (CP 110), it is partly the desire of our flesh that decides

for us - it deprives us of choice.

The role and possibility of active choice is another crucial theme in Larkin’s poetry

about love. It asks if we have any choice concerning our lives and loves at all or whether the

way we live is only a result of chance or fate or imposition from outside. As has been shown

in “Letter to a Friend about Girls”, some people have success and some people fail, whatever

119

they do. This kind of fatalism which determines the inborn success or failure of our actions is

very important for understanding many of Larkin’s poems.

“As Bad as a Mile” presents this in a nutshell: the fact that the person fails to hit the

“basket” with “the shied core” had been already determined before the speaker could

influence it in any way: “Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,/ The apple unbitten in

the palm” (CP 103). The sense that we cannot influence our actions whatever we do is an

important dimension in Larkin’s discussion of choice. And it is not only an abstract fate that

determines what happens - it is also our character or our habit that we somehow learn from

the society.

These ideas are probably most successfully developed in “Dockery and Son”. The

persona visits a place of his university studies after many years and by a chance comparison

between him and his peers, especially Dockery, he realizes suddenly “how much had gone of

life” (CP 108) - that perhaps other people have managed to get much more from their lives

than he has. He ponders what determines the difference between Dockery who had a son “At

nineteen, twenty” (CP 108) and himself who still has “no son, no wife,/ No house” (CP 108);

if it is just fate which is assigned to us - if we are to follow the “Joining and parting lines” of

the railway reflected in the light of the “strong/ Unhindered moon” (CP 108), or if it is our

doing - our rising up to the occasion or wasting it.

Unlike the speaker who feels he has achieved very little, Dockery was able to act, was

not afraid of the consequences of his choices - he “must have taken stock/ Of what he wanted,

and been capable/ Of...” (CP 108-109). The speaker cannot come to terms with the idea that

he has wasted so many possibilities in his life and feels inferior to Dockery because of this

contrast. For a moment he makes the effort to dispute his own self-doubts by an awkward

rationalization claiming that it was his well-founded conviction that to have children is

“dilution” whereas Dockery foolishly believed that by having children he can “be added to”

120

(CP 109). But he abandons quickly this competitive comparison in order to ponder “Where do

these/ Innate assumptions come from” (CP 109), whether they are really assumptions here or

only a posteriori excuses.

Such assumptions can shape our lives and we do not even know their origin, our lives

are decided for us “Not from what/ We think truest, or most want to do”; those are “tight-

shut” (CP 109) and inaccessible to us. What decides for us seems to be a chance combination

of circumstances and the habits we randomly acquire, our assumptions and choices are “more

a style/ Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,/ Suddenly they harden into all we’ve

got// And how we get it” (CP 109). In this way little unnoticed details of our lives become the

life itself, “thick and close”, for some people these details “embody a son”, for some

“nothing” (CP 109) except for the knowledge of the son’s absence. Life and everything in it,

including children, marriage, love, is built by such details similar to grains of “sand”, by

“what something hidden from us chose” (CP 109). Our lives are a kind of coincidental side-

effects, “life is something which happens to us” (Punter 58). This is expressed also in

“Afternoons”: “Something is pushing [us]/To the side of [our] own lives” (CP 115) without us

having any active role in it. The only thing that is sure is that our life “goes”, and it does not

really matter “whether or not we use it” (CP 109), whether or not we make choices. And this

applies to love as well: “Measuring love and money/ [are only] Ways of slow dying” (CP 82)

as Larkin states in “Nothing To Be Said”.

But obviously, this is not Larkin’s only approach to choice. In other poems, he

expresses the conviction that the actual possibility and ability to choose is what makes us

alive. That is why Larkin is so horrified by “the power/ Of choosing gone” (CP 131) in “The

Old Fools” or by the fact that “age claims/ The end of choice, the last of hope” (CP 136) in

“The Building”, since it signifies the nearness of death.

121

But when the possibility of our choosing and acting upon the decisions of our free will

is asserted, the problem of the difficulty of choice comes up - because to choose also implies

to renounce the possibility of choosing differently in the future, especially when the choice is

supposed to bind us to something definite. Settling for something definite is a concept which

haunts many of Larkin’s poems and which often leads the personae into passive inertia. To

make a choice, to decide for one place to settle down or one woman to marry “seems to prove/

You want no choice in where/ To build, or whom to love” (CP 46), as one can read in “Places,

Loved Ones”. It is interesting that often in Larkin, the act of choosing is often accompanied

by discarding both the ability to change things and responsibility; so here also “it’s not your

fault/ Should the town turn dreary,/ The girl a dolt” (CP 46). If one chooses, one must

surrender to what has been chosen.

However, if one wants to avoid such passivity by not choosing, one cannot ever be

happy with what one has: “you’re/ Bound, none the less, to act/ As if what you settled for/

Mashed you, in fact” (CP 46) which is not exactly desirable either, but to believe one could

“trace/ Uncalled-for to this day/ Your person, your place” (CP 46) would only admit to

wanting the passivity of one final choice. So in the end, one is caught in the complete

stalemate of passivity, as one must neither be happy about the current situation nor hope for

the best choice. So Swarbrick’s claim that this poem “seems to rebuke resignation by saying

that resignation is just another of our defensive postures” (Swarbrick 63) seems not to see

round the corner, as the poem rebukes resignation only to replace it by a resignation of a

different kind.

“No Road” is a much more personal and therefore more poignant poem focusing on

one specific decision - the decision to leave a lover. Here the two lovers exercise their own

free will, they are not pushed by anything, but “agree[ ] to let the road between us/ Fall to

disuse” (CP 56). Their choice was easily made, perhaps too easily, and it still could be taken

122

back, “Walking that way tonight would not seem strange”. But with time the decision is

sealed and that is the speaker’s “liberty” (CP 56). “Not to prevent” the consequences of their

choice is the speaker’s “will’s fulfilment”, so everything seems that is in agreement with his

choice. However, the choice and the responsibility for the decision to make such a choice is

what decimates: “Willing it, my ailment” (CP 56). It is as if the power to make such decisions

could hurt us or as if the “silence of minorities” (CP 173) in us, which did not win the vote,

caused the ailment, as our self is never unified - this further complicates the choice.

The complicated attitude to choice is very important as it influences Larkin’s approach

to marriage. What seems to be terrifying about marriage is exactly the definitiveness of

choice. This is most straightforwardly, almost crudely, visible from an originally unpublished

poem “To My Wife” which states explicitly: “Choice of you shuts up that peacock-fan/ The

future was. [...] Simply to choose stopped all the ways up but one [...] No future now. I and

you now, alone” (CP1988 54). What echoes the idea of self-pitying surrender from “Places,

Loved Ones” gained here still much tougher expression: “Now you become my boredom and

my failure [...] A heavier-than-air hypostasis” (CP1988 54). The fear of such a marriage may

be the reason for most Larkin personae never to marry, but as will be seen later, the decision

to remain single does not bring them much happiness either, which follows well from the

discussion of choice.

Nowhere else is Larkin so scathing about marriage. However, in many poems

marriage remains something oppressive which deprives married men (mostly) and women

(rarely) of freedom. Wife and children in such cases demand something from their husbands

who therefore cannot do what they would like to and must submit to their wishes. So in

“Posterity” Jake Balokowsky’s research, his getting “stuck with this old fart” is the doing of

his wife’s family which did not let him “to teach school in Tel Aviv” and which “Insisted [he]

123

got tenure” (CP 139) in order to earn more money. Or there is Arnold in “Self’s the Man”

who is pestered by his wife in many ways ever since he decided to marry her:

And the money he gets for wasting his life on work

She takes as her perk

To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier

And the electric fire

And when he finishes supper

Planning to have a read as the evening paper

It’s Put a screw in the wall –

He has no time at all (CP 95).

And leaving the sound of his wife’s unpleasant commanding voice in readers’ ears, the

poem goes on in the litany of the wrongs committed on the poor husband; there is no hint that

the wife or the “kiddies” could bring any happiness to him. Not once are children viewed in

positive light. Arnold is seen as partly stupid for ruining his life in that way, but he is also

pitied as a saint who sacrificed everything on the altar of his manipulative spouse.

Perhaps if Larkin described marriage only in the three just mentioned poems, feminist

voices would be justified in joining the choir of these wives’ voices; but he is never so one-

sided and so generalizing, not even in his private letters, contrary to the conviction of some

critics. He is very sensitive to the women’s position in marriage, too. “Afternoons” focuses on

women who like their husbands Arnolds and Jakes have little choice in living their life. Their

lives seem quite monotonous taking their children to the playground or sorting out “An

estateful of washing”; their life passes in empty units of “the hollows of afternoons” (CP 115).

124

Everything in their life is swallowed-up by meaningless time, the afternoons disintegrate with

the children’s sand pies in the sandpit. The mothers are “setting free their children”, but no

one sets them free and they are trapped in their role of mothers, “their children [...] Expect to

be taken home” (CP 115). They change in the marriage, they lose their beauty and get less

sensitive and more resigned (“Their beauty has thickened”) and they lose the prospect of any

future: “Before them” there is only “the wind [...] ruining their courting places” (CP 115).

Their husbands do not seem to give them much support, let alone love. They are separate

“Behind them, at intervals” caring about their careers “in skilled trades” (CP 115). The love

between them, if there ever was any, is now not true anymore, the “albums, lettered/ Our

Wedding [are] lying” (CP 115). The poem ends in the already mentioned denial of power over

one’s own life and of choice. It is possible to see that Larkin was far from sexist or misogynist

- these poems contrasting the male and female perspective on marriage could feature in a

gender-studies textbook.

“This Be the Verse” adopts a non-gendered perspective and with the use of the least

undermined sarcasm in the whole of Larkin’s oeuvre, denounces the institution of marriage

and having children. It might be, however, the sadness of the mothers or of the Arnolds rather

than his indulgence in bitter provocation that made him be so uncompromising in the poem. If

any Larkin poem is love-less, it is this one. Marriage is certainly no fun and parents do not

show any love for each other, they are “fools [...] Who half the time were soppy-stern/ And

half at one another’s throats” (CP 142). The sex between them is crude and the results, too:

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to, but they do” (CP 142).

If “fuck up” is understood in its primary sense, then the phrase “They may not mean

to” might suggest that the speaker praises the couple for not wanting the child, as having

children is a crime by which human suffering is prolonged. We are all part of this evil chain

125

of “misery” from which we should “get out as early as [we] can” and not add new segments

by having “kids” (CP 142).

However, Larkin can see marriage and having children in positive light, too. Even if

only as something desired and not bad as was partly suggested by “Dockery and Son”. Having

missed marriage is lamented in a retrospective poem “The View”: “Where has it gone, the

lifetime?/ Search me. What’s left is drear./ Unchilded and unwifed, I’m/ Able to view that

clear:/ So final and so near” (CP1988 195). The poem “The Whitsun Weddings” is a poem

about weddings, i.e. about the outset of marriages and at the same time in Larkin’s words

“the transcription of a very happy afternoon” in which “there is nothing to suggest that [the

newly-weds’] lives won’t be happy” (RW 57).

Here Larkin denies what he states in “Church Going”, i.e. that marriage “is found/

Only in separation” (CP 59) since the church’s role has gone from our lives, by suggesting

that the weddings bind the community together. They are something that can be shared on his

train-journey, something which makes the observer feel part of a greater whole (the “I” of the

speaker becomes in the course of the poem “we”). At first the weddings are described in

ridiculous social-comedy details: “grinning and pomaded, girls/ In parodies of fashion” (CP

92), or “fathers have never known/ Success so huge and wholly farcical” (CP 93); everything

is stereotypical and nothing original, all the wedding parties are alike, but the observer

comments it more with sympathy and esteem than with scorn.

As for the woman in “Wedding-Wind”, the change brought on the girls by marriage is

something both terrible and yet noble and transcendental, it is “a religious wounding” (CP

93), it is turning their lives finally into something solemn and wonderful with “all the power/

That being changed can give” (CP 94); it is no more a kind of childish trifling, but something

serious “like a happy funeral” (CP 93). In contrast to the poems discussed already, here

marriage can bring freedom – when the couple leaves the parties, they are “free at last” (CP

126

93). The world acquires new meaning for them, “They watched the landscape, sitting side by

side” (CP 94). The weddings are not unique (“A dozen marriages got under way” [CP 93])

and could be viewed as the result of social stereotypes and habits thrust on our lives, but here

they are viewed as both special for the couple of whom “none/ Thought of the others they

would never meet” (CP 94) and, more importantly, it connects all the couples in some kind of

holy union with the others as ”their lives would all contain this hour” (CP 94). The last two

lines, “A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain”

(CP 94) could be read as an image crowning the laudatio of the weddings. The “arrow-

shower” is reminiscent of the love arrows of love gods, a massive attack of love which

becomes “rain”, which becomes life-giving and fertile. This interpretation, almost verging on

kitsch, this “fairy-tale ending” (Swarbrick 107) as Swarbrick calls it, is not the only one, but

only to concede that it is possible already betrays Larkin’s ability to view marriage as

something (at least) good.

The “power/ That being changed can give” (CP 94) is hailed also in “Wedding-Wind”

where the wedding night means for the woman “The happiness I had” (CP 45). Her life is

utterly changed by her experience and she has to learn how the new joy “Can [...] be borne”

(CP 45). She has to come to terms with the world suddenly changed by wind at which she

must “stare” (CP 45). Despite the fact that the poem views marriage favourably, it

foreshadows a problem which is central to Larkin’s discussion of relationships - the change

of our identity as the result of entering a relationship. Here, the woman is so changed by the

experience of the wedding and of the wedding-night that her identity becomes

indistinguishable from her husband’s. She becomes his wife and when she is left alone while

he goes out to attend to a “door [...] banging”, she does not recognize herself: she is no

integral personality anymore, she is left “Stupid in candlelight [...] Seeing my face in the

twisted candlestick,/ Yet seeing nothing” (CP 45).

127

Another poem which speaks about identity lost through marrying is “Maiden Name”.

The maiden name is “disused” and irrevocably lost: “Its five light sounds no longer mean

your name” (CP 53) and with the name as password lost, the meaning, the person was lost,

too, as she “cannot be/ Semantically the same” (CP 53). Here the speaker is caustic about her

marrying, in the speaker’s eyes she was “so thankfully confused/ By law with someone else”

(CP 53); in other words she made a blunder which was still more serious by the fact that she

did it deliberately and even gratefully. Marriage is here likened to “depreciating luggage” (CP

53) which is “laden” upon her.

The change of identity is underlined in the poem by the change of pronoun; suddenly

the speaker ceases to speak about “you” and swaps it for “her”. The name is now “untruthful”:

it is “lying just where you left it” (CP 53) as valueless evidence. However, the speaker

changes his mind here and comes to the conclusion that although the girl changed her identity,

the feeling she produced in others has not lost its identity and still exists: “It means what we

feel about you then”, the feeling is still alive and “faithful[ ]” - “unfingermarked” (CP 53). As

the dead “Kitty, or Katy” whose “name meant once/ All love, all beauty” survives in the

“singing” in “Dublinesque” (CP 140), the woman in “Maiden Name” survives in the affection

of others, which gives Larkin’s famous line “What will survive of us is love” (CP 117) a new

meaning.

The same exaggerating diction which Larkin used in “To My Wife” about marriage

and choice, is employed in another short, originally unpublished poem, “Counting” to talk

about the denial of one’ identity in a relationship: “Thinking in terms of one/ Is easily done

[...] But counting up to two/ Is harder to do;/ For one must be denied/ Before it’s tried”

(CP1988 108). The loss of identity in a relationship and also the fact that we not only lose

ours but change the identity of our partner is another of the concepts haunting Larkin’s verse.

In “He Hears that his Beloved has become Engaged”, a poem published only after Larkin’s

128

death, the speaker directly accuses the just-engaged man of “fancying you improve her.

Where’s the sense/ In saying love, but meaning interference?/ You’ll only change her”

(CP1988 66).

It is this fear of changed identity and forced choices with the combination of the

conviction that “virtue is social” (CP 147) and with the “sense of life lived according to love”

(CP 86) that makes Larkin connect distinctly his thoughts about love relationship with the

question of selfishness and selflessness. So it does not seem too striking when the only poem

called “Love” is a disputation exactly about selfishness and selflessness. The first stanza

speaks from the point of view of somebody who abhors the idea of changing somebody’s

identity and life in a love relationship and who finds it repugnant to make someone do things

just for our “own sake”:

The difficult part of love

Is being selfish enough,

Is having the blind persistence

To upset an existence

Just for your own sake

What cheek it must take (CP 180).

However, such selfless concern for the other person changes abruptly in the second

stanza into a declaration of the difficulty of being “unselfish” as it makes us lose or dilute our

identity and do things we do not want to do:

How can you be satisfied,

Putting someone else first

129

So that you come off worst?

My life is for me (CP 180).

What does not come into play here is the idea of mutual benefit in love; not even in the

first stanza can the speaker imagine any other position in a relationship than a selfish one and

that is why he is so troubled. To love someone and to be loved by someone means “having the

blind persistence” (CP 180), i.e. the ability to see the other’s perspective and to reach any kind

of mutual understanding is out of the question. In the second stanza, the speaker does not see

the reason for favouring someone else to one’s own self; when he says “My life is for me”

(CP 180) it is not only a declaration of the crudest selfishness but also of a kind of duty to

fulfil one’s own life. This stanza has a very cleverly ambiguous last line: “As well ignore

gravity” both suggesting that “My life is for me” is an indisputable natural law and denying it

as “gravity” is exactly the force that does not leave things separate, but attracted to each other

- a kind of mechanics form of love. So it says in one sentence that it is both necessary and

impossible not to get involved in love. The whole poem parallels this line in not being able to

solve the problem of selfishness and unselfishness and settles for the fact that, whether we are

“vicious or virtuous”, “Love suits most of us” (CP 180).

Another variation on the same theme can be found in “Self’s the Man”, a poem which

has been already discussed in connection with marriage, but whose main focus is also

selfishness and unselfishness in relationships. At first, the speaker’s point of view is clear:

“Oh, no one can deny/ That Arnold is less selfish than I” (CP 95) because Arnold decided to

“put someone else first” (CP 95), namely his wife, whereas the speaker decided to follow the

idea “My life is for me” (CP 180) and remain single. So that is why he says: “To compare his

life and mine/ Makes me feel a swine” (CP 95). Just to digress a little, this viciousness of

being alone is discussed also in “Best Society” where the speaker “[v]iciously” chooses

130

“Uncontradicting solitude” only in which he can create and preserve his identity, where

“cautiously/ Unfolds, emerges, what I am” (CP1988 57).

Nevertheless, in “Self’s the Man” the clear-cut distinction between the virtue of

relationship and vice of solitude is subverted several times. First of all, the speaker questions

whether to fall into the pitfall of marriage is really so selfless as it seems to be; Arnold has

married “a woman to stop her getting away” which is not exactly self-sacrificing, he just had

her presence guaranteed on the legal “exchange of love” (CP 104), as it is expressed in

“Ambulances”, and “was out for his own ends [...] Playing his own game” (CP 95). The

speaker comes therefore to the idea that they are both selfish, each in his own way, one in a

relationship, one in solitude: “So he and I are the same” (CP 95). And the chain of

rationalizing his own position tips over for a moment to the conclusion that although they are

both equally selfish, the speaker is cleverer and better “At knowing what I can stand” (CP 95).

However, even this is subverted not only by the whole poem – if he was not bothered by it, he

would not start comparing himself with Arnold in the first place - but also by the last line “Or

I suppose I can” (CP 95) which challenges his complacency about being able to arrange his

life to his own satisfaction.

Another poem which at its end “pulls the rug from under the speaker’s feet”

(Swarbrick 55) is “Reasons for Attendance”. In this poem the speaker contrasts his own

solitary life with the life of the dancers who are “shifting intently, face to flushed face” (CP

48) in couples. The speaker tries to persuade himself that he is for sure better off than the

dancers because “to think the lion’s share/ Of happiness is found by couples- [is] sheer/

Inaccuracy, as far as [he’s] concerned” (CP 48). He regards sex as unimportant and believes

that the fact that he is “individual” will preserve his identity and enable him to know more

important things in life than sex, such as art. However, his argumentation supporting the

virtue of being alone is finally undermined in the last stanza:

131

...and so

With happiness. Therefore I stay outside,

Believing this; and they maul to and fro,

Believing that; and both are satisfied,

If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied (CP 48).

However, the problem is more general; whether one “maul[s] to and fro” (CP 48) on

the dance floor or in marriage or whether one stays alone and “always get[s] [one’s] own

way” (CP 187), it does not mean that one is really free to do as one pleases. It can be seen

from “The Life with a Hole in it” that we are unfree whether we are in a relationship or not:

whether we are “the [single] shit in the shuttered chateau” or the married “spectacled

schoolteaching sod [with] Six kids”, life is for us “Three-handed struggle between/ Your

wants, the world’s for you, and (worse)/ The unbeatable slow machine/ That brings what

you’ll get” (CP 187).

However, “what you’ll get” is sometimes hard to bear as is the case in “Vers de

Société”, a poem which also discusses the matter of selfishness and unselfishness in

relationships, but which is in the end about something different – about loneliness. Company

in a “crowd of craps” (CP 147) seemed quite undesirable, but in older age the speaker

suddenly realizes “how hard it is to be alone” (CP 148). The readers witness for a part of the

poem the speaker’s attempt to find a false excuse for going into company: “All solitude is

selfish” and “the big wish/ Is to have people nice to you, which means/ Doing it back

somehow/ Virtue is social” (CP 147). But then the speaker realizes that such arguments are

“Too subtle [...and] Too decent” and that the true reason why he should “care to join” them is

132

that he cannot face the actuality of solitude which “brings/ Not peace, but other things” (CP

148).

Loneliness is indeed a pervasive motive in Larkin’s poetry and has crept in many

poems about love, too. As has been shown in chapter 3, loneliness was the prominent topic of

Larkin’s first collection, The North Ship, and also Larkin’s last major poem, “Aubade”, fears

loneliness as one of the worst things that is brought by death: death is so terrible also because

there is “Nothing to love or link with” (CP 190). Loneliness is present in one way or another

in most of Larkin’s poems, most of which have been discussed already.

There are, however, a few poems which have not been discussed so far, some of them

present loneliness at its most acute. There are two poems in which loneliness is painful

because the speakers know exactly how they would like to abolish it but also know it is not

possible. Again, to know what we lack is much worse than to lack something we do not know.

In “The Dance” (precisely, in its first part) and “Love Again” it is a particular woman who

makes the lack awfully agonizing.

In the former poem the speaker goes to a dancing party in order to meet the woman he

loves - “simply to be where you are”. But facing her presence, he realizes his pathetic

inadequacy which prevents him from reaching to her over the chasm of loneliness. Such a

feeling of predetermined personal failure is well known by now in Larkin’s poems and it is

perhaps one of the causes of loneliness, too. He is aware that other men can move in

relationships with much more dexterity than he can: “It’s pathetic how/ So much most people

half my age have learned” (CP1988 156) and he couples his feeling of loneliness with

jealousy.

Jealousy is the key motive in “Love Again” where the speaker is alone in the most

emblematic situation of loneliness – “wanking at ten past three” (CP1988 215). He feels

extremely uncomfortable at the thought that the woman he loves is with someone else. The

133

acuteness of his feelings is stressed by the strong language: “Someone else feeling her breasts

and cunt” (CP1988 215). Nevertheless he realizes that it is not only the sex he misses - he

agonizes over the fact that love which “spreads through other lives like a tree/ And sways

them on in a sort of sense [...] never worked for [him]” (CP1988 215). As if his loneliness was

a kind of Cain’s mark on his forehead printed by “Something to do with violence/ A long way

back, and wrong rewards” which cannot be removed as it has to do with “arrogant eternity”

(CP1988 215).

Such insecurity and fear of failure in love can be felt also as mild undertow in an

earlier and much more positive poem, “Broadcast”. Here the speaker is also alone thinking

about his beloved who, this time, is not in somebody else’s bed but rather at a concert which

the speaker listens to on the radio. The poem presents the feeling of togetherness between the

two lovers despite the distance and a feeling of insecurity. The love which he feels for her is

almost perfect: he focuses completely on her (“I think of your face among all those faces,/

Beautiful and devout” [CP 85]), he loves everything about her, even her “slightly-outmoded

shoes” (CP 85) and the fact that she has not noticed her glove lying on the floor. But still, he

cannot help a feeling of insecurity given the actual distance between them: he is alone at

home where “it goes quickly dark”, the space between him and his beloved seems cold and

mildly threatening: “withering// Leaves on half-emptied trees” (CP 85). Such a cold gap

between them and the fact that he cannot protect her from “rabid storms of chording” and

“Cascades of monumental slithering” make him uneasy and “overpower [his] mind” (CP 85).

When he tries “to pick out/ Your hands, tiny in all that air, applauding” (CP 85), he is

wonderfully loving, but also “desperate” and afraid about the fragility of their relationship.

There are also poems which question the possibility of assessing loneliness and its

effect on the happiness or unhappiness of our lives. “Talking in Bed”, a poem which is

unusual because its implied speaker is not alone, shows that loneliness in the number of two is

134

very possible. It shows two lovers in bed who should be so close, who should be “an emblem

of two people being honest” at a “unique distance from isolation” (CP 100) and who are the

more distant and separate. They cannot find any understanding for each other, “more and

more time passes silently”; they rather look for understanding “outside”, to the “wind”,

“clouds” and “sky” (CP 100), very far from the person lying next to them. But the outside

world gives no heed to them as if it supposed that they do not need anyone else when they

have each other. But that is not true, they are “lying together” (CP 100) in this sense, seeming

happy because together. But the truth is that it is difficult for them to find love for each other -

words which would be “at once true and kind” (CP 100). And still worse, having conceded

love it is still difficult to find even esteem or sympathy for each other – words “not untrue and

not unkind” (CP 100). As can be seen, loneliness is not so easy to be diagnosed.

The fact that it is not possible to assess people’s happiness easily is discussed from an

inverse standpoint in “Mr Bleaney”. The speaker in this poem views Mr Bleaney’s room and

supposes that, like him, Mr Bleaney was also unhappy in his loneliness. The speaker

“know[s] his habits – what time he came down,/ His preference for sauce to gravy”, but he

cannot know if Mr Bleaney was not quite happy despite his living in “one hired box” (CP 81).

Perhaps Mr Bleaney did not “grin[ ]” and “shiver[ ]”, but smiled and enjoyed chatting with

his landlady - we “don’t know” (CP 81).

The presence of loneliness in Larkin’s work is one of the factors that make the poems

seem predominantly sad. It is true that loneliness of one kind or another wails through the

poems making the readers chilly; and it is true that Larkin’s last collection, High Windows, is

larded with it to an extent unprecedented in the two older collections of Larkin’s mature

verse, as if the inescapability of loneliness was Larkin’s final statement. Nevertheless, what

really constitutes the final statement in the final collection, is what Punter calls “a summary of

all the virtues of community, marriage, life together” (Punter 40) in “The Explosion”. This

135

last poem speaks about an explosion (paradoxically with a great calmness) in which many

men die. However, such a disaster is mitigated by the fact that it is borne by people together,

here the women show great love for their husbands seeing them so beautiful and worthy,

almost as angels: “Wives saw men of the explosion// Larger than in life they managed - / Gold

as on a coin, or walking/ Somehow from the sun towards them,// One showing the eggs

unbroken” (CP 154). Life is here born and borne in relationships and it is through love that it

survives, which is also echoed in “Show Saturday”, another poem which appears towards the

end of the collection, where Larkin calls for “Regenerate union [to] always be there” (CP

151). He thus ends all his volumes by such a “vision of immortality” (FR 61).

And one statement is still even more final, as it appears in the last poem to have been

published during Larkin’s lifetime (except for two commissioned poems and a political poem

“Party Politics”). It denies loneliness and the endeavour to preserve one’s identity in one of

the rarer moments of Larkin’s telling us what to do. In “The Mower” what Larkin pleads for

is very far from “Get out as early as you can”; he advocates kindness and love which,

although they cannot defy death here, can make our lives much better: “we should be careful//

Of each other, we should be kind// While there is still time.”

136

5. CONCLUSION

This thesis has tried to show that most of Philip Larkin’s poems have something to say

about love. However, whether it allows us to call Larkin a love poet or not is difficult to say.

Perhaps Larkin did not write enough about love to be called a love poet; or perhaps he wrote

too much. He did not write enough in the sense that there are no long (or short) lists of poems

about a beloved person or about being in love. And he wrote too much in the sense that love is

so important in the poetry that it cannot be isolated only in a few love poems. Larkin did not

treat love as a special category of occurrences which could be separated from everything else

that belongs to people’s lives (and deaths). Therefore one could not speak of Larkin as of a

love poet as well as one could not speak of Larkin as a nature poet or as a poet of deprivation.

Larkin diligently escapes all such simplifying categories by his rich and complex body of

work. The only thing one could say without any further specification is that Larkin is a poet,

and the greater poet for escaping all the limiting categories. We certainly can be glad that

“poetry chose [him]” (RW 62).

Nevertheless, whether we call Larkin a love poet or not, it is necessary to

acknowledge that he did have much to say about love. The aim of this thesis was to examine

all of Larkin’s writing and to discuss the most important themes that touch upon the topic of

love in it and the way they fit among more general views and methods in Larkin’s writing.

Due to this broad and general task, it was not always possible to pay as much attention to

every poem as it would deserve. Hopefully, however, such cross-examination of different

themes in the poetry has made it possible to show Larkin’s diverse and colourful palette of

tones, dictions, convictions and feelings. And hopefully it has managed to show that although

Larkin sounds most of the time like an updated version of Ecclesiastes, he has also managed

to find a way out from the idea that “all [is] meaningless, a chasing after wind” (New

137

International Version of the Bible, Ecc. 1.14). But unlike his biblical predecessor, he did not

find the way out in God, but in the feeling of sympathy for his fellow humans and their

sorrows and predicaments. Sympathy and compassion gurgle and sing as a soft undertow

throughout Larkin’s poetry. In this sense, if not in any other, Larkin was indeed a love poet.

138

6. SHRNUTÍ V ČESKÉM JAZYCE/ CZECH SUMMARY

1. Úvod

1.1 Uspořádání diplomové práce

Účelem této krátké části je seznámit čtenáře s uspořádáním diplomové práce, s tím, do jakých

kapitol je práce rozdělena a co lze v jednotlivých kapitolách nalézt.

1.2 Poznámka o analyzovaných textech

Zde je zmíněna metoda výběru a použití primární literatury v diplomové práci. Je stanoveno,

že detailní pozornost bude věnována poezii publikované za Larkinova života a že ostatní

Larkinovy texty, tj. původně nepublikované básně a všechna próza, budou používány jen pro

ilustraci.

1.3 Obecný úvod

Tato kapitola si klade za cíl uvést problematiku Larkinovy milostné poezie. Larkin není

všeobecně přijímán jakožto básník milostné poezie, ve stručných encyklopedických či

učebnicových textech se o tomto aspektu básníkova díla nedočteme. To ovšem neznamená, že

by se Larkin láskou ve svých verších nezabýval. Je sice pravda, že básně na první pohled

milostné nejsou, nicméně po bližším prozkoumání zjistíme, že téma lásky v nich zaujímá

velmi důležité místo a že jen mizivá část Larkinových básní se láskou nezabývá. Co ovšem

přispívá k tomu, že si čtenáři nevšimnou milostného rozměru veršů, je fakt, že Larkin o lásce

mluví nekonvenčním způsobem. Proto v jeho díle nelze nalézt básně, které by jednoduše

oslavovaly milovanou bytost, nebo které by hořekovaly nad ztracenou láskou. Takové

jednorozměrné básně, které by vypovídaly o osobním citu subjektu, Larkin nepsal. To ovšem

neznamená, že by jeho básně nebyly nabité city. Pocity, city a láska jsou v básních velmi

139

důležité, Larkin je však nedefinuje, nýbrž je neustále prozkoumává. Všechny své závěry dále

podstupuje vlastnímu kritickému pohledu. Díky této metodě podrobného přezkoumávání, je

Larkin schopen dívat se na svět kolem sebe a na lásku v něm z mnoha úhlů a nikdy se

neuchýlit k nějakému konečnému a určitému přesvědčení, což jeho poezii výrazně obohacuje.

Pokud si budeme všímat tématu lásky v Larkinově díle, nejen že se dozvíme mnohé o lásce,

ale také se dozvíme mnohé o dalších tématech tvořících páteř celého Larkinova díla, jako

například téma ideálů a iluzí.

1.4 Kritický přístup k Larkinově milostné poezii

Tato kapitola si klade za cíl seznámit čtenáře s existujícími proudy kritického hodnocení

Larkinovy poezie. Larkin podnítil velice bohatou a různorodou diskusi mezi literárními

kritiky. Byl spojován s různými básnickými směry, což je způsobeno tím, že ve svém díle

spojuje různé básnické přístupy. Do sedmdesátých let 20. století se o jeho poezii mluvilo

především jako o poezii realistické, která se svou konkrétností a svými tématy, která čerpala

z každodenního světa, vymezovala proti symbolismu a modernismu. Později ovšem mnoho

kritiků, mezi nimiž byli například Seamus Heaney nebo Barbara Everett, postřehlo, že

Larkinovy básně mohou a musí být spojovány s tradicí symbolismu. Feministická kritika a

kritika vycházející z Freuda a psychoanalýzy podrobily Larkinovo dílo také podrobnému

zkoumání. Historizující a post-koloniální pohled na básně je také rozvinut. Kritická diskuse

Larkinova díla se velmi silně rozvířila poté, co byly vydány v osmdesátých a devadesátých

letech tři publikace: Larkinovy sebrané básně (Collected Poems), které poprvé obsahovaly i

původně nevydané texty, Larkinův životopis od A. Motiona (Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life) a

výběr Larkinových dopisů (Selected Letters). Tyto tři knihy vrhly na Larkina nové světlo;

mnohé čtenáře a kritiky pobouřil Larkinův soukromý život a jeho názory. Populární i kritický

pohled na Larkinovo dílo byl značně revidován, jeho básně pro mnohé ztratily svou hodnotu.

140

Kritici buď obviňovali Larkina nebo se proti těmto obviněním vymezovali. Co se týče

teoretických východisek, tato diplomová práce nenásleduje pevně žádný z uvedených

kritických přístupů. Snaží se metodou podrobné analýzy textu objevit, co v Larkinově díle

znamená láska a jakou roli v něm hraje. Kritické proudy jí slouží spíše jako inspirace.

2. Philip Larkin a tradice milostné poezie

Tato kapitola se snaží stručně načrtnout místo Larkinova díla v tradici anglické poezie se

zvláštním zřetelem k poezii milostné. Zaprvé představuje kritický pohled samotného Larkina

na tradici a její souvislost s poezií obecně a s poezií jeho vlastní. Larkin důležitost tradice ve

svém díle odmítal, čímž se vymezoval zejména vůči modernismu. Zadruhé se tato kapitola

snaží srovnat Larkinovu poezii s poezií tradice z formálních hledisek. Larkinova poezie byla

kvůli tomu, že často používá rýmy a pravidelné metrum, běžně označována za tradiční. Přísně

definované tradiční formy ovšem používá jen minimálně. Třetí pohled na Larkinovo místo

v tradici bude zkoumat, do jaké míry lze hovořit o tom, že se Larkin inspiroval v díle svých

předchůdců tematicky a obsahově. Larkin nekopíruje žádného ze svých předchůdců, jejich

dědictví ve svém díle do určité míry používá, nicméně vždy velmi originálně - s dědictvím

tradice si spíše hraje, než aby se ho snažil napodobit. Larkin byl velmi proti tomu, aby

ocenění a pochopení poezie ze strany čtenáře záviselo na jeho vzdělání, tvrdil, že každé

literární dílo musí především být úplné samo o sobě, což pro jeho poezii platí.

3. Vývoj milostné poezie Philipa Larkina

Tato kapitola představuje jak formální, tak obsahové změny v Larkinově poezii během jeho

tvůrčího života. Je rozdělena do několika částí podle období. První část analyzuje básníkovu

nejranější poezii, druhá část představuje Larkinovu první sbírku, The North Ship, třetí se

141

zabývá Larkinovými dvěma romány, Jill a A Girl in Winter, a konečně čtvrtá část představuje

tři sbírky, které Larkina proslavily a o kterých lze tvrdit, že jsou pro Larkina typické, tj. The

Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings a High Windows. Kapitola ukazuje mimo jiné, že

tématem lásky se Larkin zabýval od prvních pokusů psát a že mu vydrželo celý život.

3.1 Larkinova raná poezie

Existuje velké množství básní, které Larkin napsal ještě před svojí první sbírkou, The North

Ship. Tyto básně nejsou příliš originální, formálně i obsahově často kopírují básně jiných

autorů, a většinou nepůsobí příliš přesvědčivě. Básně jsou téměř bez výjimky ponuré a

formálně se nepodobají Larkinově pozdější poezii. Nicméně je velmi zajímavé, že už tyto

nepříliš úspěšné básnické pokusy předznamenávají určitá témata a myšlenky, které tvoří jádro

Larkinovy vrcholné poezie. Existují ovšem i témata, kterými se mladý Larkin vůbec

nezabýval a které se pro něj staly důležitými až později, jako například téma manželství.

3.2 The North Ship

V této sbírce Larkin ještě stále nenalezl svůj vlastní básnický styl, básně v ní jsou silně

ovlivněny poetikou W.B. Yeatse. Sbírka působí těžkopádně, zejména kvůli velkému počtu

mnohdy obskurních symbolů. Většina básní působí podobným dojmem a nepřekračuje hranici

konvenční poezie o citech. Většina básní tematizuje samotu a osamělost. Mnoho prvků

v básních této sbírky předznamenává to, co Larkin později dokázal mistrovsky použít,

například symboliku světla. Jen občas v této sbírce lze zaznamenat Larkinovy realistické

tendence, které budou formovat jeho první zralou sbírku, The Less Deceived. Mnoho témat, o

kterých Larkin bude psát později, je přítomno už zde.

142

3.3 Jill a A Girl in Winter

Jill a A Girl in Winter jsou Larkinovy jediné romány. Byly vydány v období mezi jeho první

sbírkou básní a mezi obdobím, kdy se odklonil od románové tvorby a kdy našel svůj zřetelný

básnický styl ve svých třech nejdůležitějších sbírkách. Oba romány tematicky úzce souvisejí

s Larkinovými básněmi o lásce. Představují dva mladé hrdiny, kteří dospívají a kteří

poznávají, jakou roli hraje či nehraje v jejich životech láska. Pro oba románové hrdiny, Johna

Kempa a Katherine Lind, dospívání znamená ztrátu snů a iluzí. Oba poznají, jak krutá dokáže

být realita, která je nakonec naučí rezignovanosti. Larkin v těchto románech dokázal překonat

tu vlastnost, která určovala kvalitu jeho raných básní a první sbírky, tj. určitý emocionální

egocentrismus. Konečně začal psát tak, že se čtenáři mohou identifikovat s city a myšlenkami

prezentovanými v textu. Tato změna je velmi důležitá a umožnila mimo jiné proměnu

Larkinových básní v následujících sbírkách.

3.4 The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings a High Windows

The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings a High Windows jsou Larkinovy tři nejdůležitější

sbírky. Rozdíly uvnitř těchto sbírek nejsou zdaleka tak markantní jako rozdíly mezi těmito

sbírkami jako celku a tím, co jim předcházelo. Básně přestávají používat symboly v takové

míře; témata, slovní zásobu i dikci si hledají v současném světě obyčejných lidí. Jsou

mnohem různorodější než předchozí básně. Nejsou už zdaleka jen osobní výpovědí o citech,

naopak většinou nahlížejí na lásku s odstupem, z perspektivy někoho, koho se věc přímo

netýká. Všechny tři sbírky se zabývají láskou, i když každá v jiné míře. Největší počet

takových básní se vyskytuje v první z těchto sbírek, nejmenší v poslední z nich, což ovšem

neznamená, že Larkin nepsal v závěrečné fázi svého tvůrčího života milostné básně, jen je

nepublikoval.

143

4. Milostná poezie Philipa Larkina

Toto je hlavní kapitola této diplomové práce, která detailně analyzuje Larkinovu milostnou

poezii. Je strukturována podle různých témat, která předurčují Larkinovy básně o lásce.

Nejprve se text zabývá tím, do jaké míry je láska iluze, zda vůbec může být něco jiného a zda

jsou iluze pouze škodlivé či zda mohou být pro lidi blahodárné. Protiklad iluze a reality úzce

souvisí s protikladem skutečnosti a ideálů, které jsou druhým velkým tématem této kapitoly.

Iluze jsou přesvědčení o stávající situaci, která jsou založena na nepravdivých faktech nebo

nepravdivé víře, ideály jsou to, po čem toužíme a čeho chceme dosáhnout. Proto s ideály je

spjata touha, jež je dalším tématem této kapitoly. Touha, především touha sexuální, ovlivňuje

naše životy víc, než by často bylo záhodno. Larkin se snaží objevit její zdroje a především se

v mnohých básních snaží touze uniknout. Touha je nežádoucí, nenechává nás v klidu a ve

spokojenosti, nicméně je zároveň nutným znakem života. Touze lze uniknout pouze ve smrti.

Touha je něco, co nám diktuje, co máme dělat. Proto je téma volby či pasivního přijetí údělu

v lásce dalším důležitým tématem. Larkin se ptá, zda se necháme jen vláčet

nekontrolovatelnou touhou, iluzemi, ideály, očekáváním společnosti nebo prostou náhodou,

nebo zda máme v lásce svobodnou vůli. Pokud ji máme, vyvstává však další otázka - totiž do

jaké míry svoboda rozhodování napomáhá tomu, abychom byli šťastní. Obecněji lze říct, že

otázka, zda existuje vztah mezi láskou a dosažením štěstí, je jednou z hlavních otázek, které

na čtenáře naléhají mezi řádky Larkinových básní. Pokud vůbec lze štěstí v lásce dosáhnout,

pravděpodobnost úspěchu klesá s věkem a s blížící se smrtí. Vztah smrti a lásky, otázka, kdo

z těchto dvou je silnější, je také předmětem několika Larkinových básní. Všechna tato témata

nahlížejí na lásku z jakési filosofické perspektivy. V básních se ovšem vyskytují i témata

spíše psychologická či sociologická, která se soustřeďují na konkrétnější podobu

mezilidských vztahů a na jejich vliv na osobnost a život jedince. Larkin je posedlý otázkou,

zda je morálnější žít sám nebo ve vztahu, neboť obě situace mají svá úskalí. Proto láska je

144

často u Larkina spojována s otázkou sobectví či altruismu. Vztahy, například manželství a

rodičovství, jsou chápany často jako něco, co ohrožuje identitu a integritu jedince, ale na

druhou stranu také jako něco, co drží společnost pohromadě a co je blahodárné. Samota a

osamělost, téma, které bylo tak důležité v Larkinově rané poezii, provází Larkinovo dílo po

celou dobu a tudíž je důležité i zde. Všechna tato témata jsou samozřejmě úzce provázána a

tvoří tak celkovou a osobitou tvář Larkinovy milostné poezie.

5. Závěr

Závěr se ve stručnosti snaží odpovědět na základní otázku celé diplomové práce, tedy zda lze

hovořit o poezii Philipa Larkina jako o poezii milostné. Dochází k závěru, že ano, neboť celé

Larkinovo dílo je prodchnuto přemýšlením o lásce.

145

7. WORKS CITED

PRIMARY SOURCES

Larkin, Philip. A Girl in Winter. London: Faber & Faber, 1975.

Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. London: The Marvell Press and Faber & Faber, 1988.

Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. London: The Marvell Press and Faber & Faber, 2003.

Larkin, Philip. Early Poems and Juvenilia. Ed. A.T. Tolley. London: Faber & Faber, 2005.

Larkin, Philip. Further Requirements – Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews

1952 – 1985. Ed. A. Thwaite. London: Faber & Faber, 2001.

Larkin, Philip. Jill. London: Faber & Faber, 2005.

Larkin, Philip. Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955 – 1982. London: Faber & Faber,

1983.

Larkin, Philip. Selected Letters: 1940 – 1985. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. London: Faber & Faber,

1993.

Larkin, Philip. Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions. Ed. James Booth. London:

Faber & Faber, 2002.

New International Version of the Bible. International Bible Society, 1984. 28 Dec. 2007.

<http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ecc.%201:14&version=31>.

Shakespeare, William. “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark”. The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

Oxford: Blackwell, 1934. 670 – 714.

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 129”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H.

Abrams. New York: Norton, 1993. 820.

Sidney, Philip. “Sonnet 31 from Astrofel and Stella”. The Norton Anthology of English

Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: Norton, 1993. 464.

146

SECONDARY SOURCES

Augustine, John H. “Tentative Initiation in the Poetry”. Philip Larkin: The Man and his

Work, Ed. D. Salwak. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1989. 112 -117.

Bennett, Alan. “Alas! Deceived”. Philip Larkin: New Casebooks. Ed. S. Regan. Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1997. 226 – 249.

Bennet, Alan. "Instead of a Present". Larkin at Sixty, Ed. Anthony Thwaite. London: Faber &

Faber, 1982. 65-74.

Booth, James. “Philip Larkin: Lyricism, Englishness and Postcoloniality”. Philip Larkin: New

Casebooks. Ed. S. Regan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. 187 – 210.

Booth, James. Philip Larkin: Writer. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.

Booth, James. “Resistance and Affinity”. Philip Larkin and the Poetics of Resistance. Eds.

Andrew McKeown & Charles Holdefer. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. 189 – 209.

Booth, James. “The Turf Cutter and the Nine-to-Five Man: Heaney, Larkin, and ‘The

Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work’”. Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 43, No. 4.

(Winter, 1997): 369 – 393.

Brownjohn, Alan. “Novels into Poems”. Larkin at Sixty. Ed. A. Thwaite, London: Faber &

Faber, 1982. 109 – 119.

Brownjohn, Alan. Philip Larkin. Harlow: Longman, 1979.

Clark, Steve. “‘Get Out As Early As You Can’: Larkin’s Sexual Politics”. Philip Larkin: New

Casebooks. Ed. S. Regan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. 94 – 134.

Cooper, Stephen. Philip Larkin – Subversive Writer. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004.

Cooper, Stephen. “Resisting Tradition: The Decentred Perspectives of Larkin, Auden and

MacNiece”. Philip Larkin and the Poetics of Resistance. Eds. Andrew McKeown &

Charles Holdefer. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. 123 – 148.

147

Curtis, Anthony. “Larkin’s Oxford”. Philip Larkin: The Man and his Work, Ed. D. Salwak.

Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1989. 7 – 17.

Drabble, Margaret and Jenny Stringer, eds. The Oxford Concise Companion to English

Literature. Oxford: OUP, 1996.

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. The Sacred Wood. London: Methuen, 1960.

47-59.

Everett, Barbara. “Art and Larkin”. Philip Larkin: The Man and his Work, Ed. D. Salwak.

Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1989. 129 – 139.

Everett, Barbara. “Larkin and Dockery: The Limits of the Social”. Philip Larkin 1922 – 1985:

A Tribute, Ed. G. Hartley. London: The Marvell Press, 1988. 140 – 152.

Everett, Barbara. Poets in Their Time: Essays on English Poetry from Donne to Larkin.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Eyck, David. “Alien Territory: Resistance and the Poet’s Social Function in the work of

Philip Larkin. Philip Larkin and the Poetics of Resistance. Eds. Andrew McKeown &

Charles Holdefer. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. 149 – 163.

Grafe, Adrian. “Larkin’s Impulse to Preserve”. Philip Larkin and the Poetics of Resistance.

Eds. Andrew McKeown & Charles Holdefer. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. 165 – 178.

Groves, Peter. "What Music Lies in the Cold Print": Larkin's Experimental Metric", Style

35.4 (Winter 2001):703-723. 28 Dec 2007.

<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_4_35/ai_97114245/pg_16>.

Hartley, George. “Nothing To Be Said”. Larkin at Sixty. Ed. by A. Thwaite, London: Faber &

Faber, 1982. 87 – 97.

Heaney, Seamus. “The Main of Light”. Philip Larkin: New Casebooks. Ed. S. Regan.

Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. 23 – 31.

148

Holderness, Graham. “Reading ‘Deceptions’ – A Dramatic Conversation”. Philip Larkin:

New Casebooks. Ed. S. Regan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. 83 – 93.

James, Clive. “On his Wit”. Larkin at Sixty. Ed. A. Thwaite, London: Faber & Faber, 1982.

98 – 108.

Kennedy, X. J. “Larkin’s Voice”. Philip Larkin: The Man and his Work, Ed. D. Salwak.

Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1989. 162 – 164.

“Larkin is nation’s top poet”. BBC News 24. 15 Oct. 2003. 27 Dec. 2007

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3193692.stm>.

"Larkin, Philip." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 28 Dec.

2007 <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9047211>.

Lerner, Laurence. Philip Larkin. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1997.

Lodge, David. “Philip Larkin: The Metonymic Muse”. Philip Larkin: The Man and his Work,

Ed. D. Salwak. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1989. 118 – 128.

Longley, Edna. “Poete Maudit Manqué”. Philip Larkin 1922 – 1985: A Tribute. Ed. G.

Hartley. London: The Marvell Press, 1988. 220 - 230.

Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture. Harlow: Longman, 1998.

“Love Poetry II”. The Connection. WBUR, Boston. 2 Dec. 2002. 27 Dec. 2007

<http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2003/12/20031202_b_main.asp>.

Martin, Bruce K. “Larkin’s Humanity Viewed from Abroad”. Philip Larkin: The Man and his

Work, Ed. D. Salwak. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1989. 140 – 149.

Martin, Bruce K. Philip Larkin. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

McKeown, Andrew. “Resisting the Likes of Money”. Philip Larkin and the Poetics of

Resistance. Eds. Andrew McKeown & Charles Holdefer. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006.

179 - 188.

Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. London: Faber & Faber, 1993.

149

Motion, Andrew. “Philip Larkin and Symbolism”. Philip Larkin: New Casebooks. Ed. S.

Regan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. 32 – 54.

Paulin, Tom. “Into the Heart of Englishness”. Philip Larkin: New Casebooks. Ed. S. Regan.

Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. 160 – 177.

Pritchard, William H. “Larkin’s presence”. Philip Larkin: The Man and his Work, Ed. D.

Salwak. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1989. 71-89.

Punter, David. Philip Larkin: Selected Poems. York Notes. Harlow: Longman, 1991.

Regan, Stephen. “Introduction”. Philip Larkin: New Casebooks. Ed. S. Regan. Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1997. 1- 22.

Ricks, Christopher. “Like Something Almost Being Said”. Larkin at Sixty. Ed. A. Thwaite,

London: Faber & Faber, 1982. 120 – 130.

Rossen, Janice. “Difficulties with Girls”. Philip Larkin: New Casebooks. Ed. S. Regan.

Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. 135 – 159.

Rossen, Janice. Philip Larkin: His Life’s Work. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.

Semblat, Martine. “Classical Prosody in Philip Larkin’s Poetry”. Philip Larkin and the Poetics

of Resistance, Eds. A. McKeown & C. Holdefer. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. 93 – 106.

Smith, Stan. “Margin of Tolerance: Responses to Post-War Decline”. Philip Larkin: New

Casebooks. Ed. by S. Regan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. 178 -186.

“Sow your wild oats”. Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms Online. 28 Dec. 2007.

<http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=wild*3+0&dict=I>.

Swarbrick, Andrew. Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin. Basingstoke: MacMillan,

1995.

Thwaite, Anthony. “Introduction”. Larkin at Sixty. Ed. by A. Thwaite, London: Faber &

Faber, 1982. 11 – 15.

150

Thwaite, Anthony. “Introduction”. Collected Poems. Philip Larkin. London: The Marvell

Press and Faber & Faber, 1988. xv – xxiii.

Watt, R.J.C., Ed. A Concordance to the Poetry of Philip Larkin. Hildesheime: Olms-

Weidmann, 1995.

Whalen, Terry. Philip Larkin & English Poetry. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986.