Philip Larkin - "What will survive of us is love" or "Books are a load of crap"?

I like "Vers De Société."

Lots of people like the Andrew Motion bio.

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
'Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex,
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.'

So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
They certainly don't keep it upstairs.
By now they've a second house and car and wife:
Clearly money has something to do with life

- In fact, they've a lot in common, if you enquire:
You can't put off being young until you retire,
And however you bank your screw, the money you save
Won't in the end buy you more than a shave.

I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
From long French windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

95 poems here:
http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Philip_Larkin#poems

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Argh! Sadness :(

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread
Their greeness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say.
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh,

what i love most about his work is when he begins a poem focused on the dirt and muck and messiness of human existence (which he always manages to convey so concisely: a single "crap" in larkin has the weight of a zillion "fucks" in any half-assed beat writer), then slowly pulls back to focus on an image of mysterious transcendence. this happens most movingly, for me, at the end of "aubade," when the POV abruptly shifts out of the narrator's feverish 4 a.m. thoughts to the cool pre-dawn air outside and "postmen like doctors going from house to house." without in any way diminishing the horror of being suddenly aware of your mortality, larkin suggests that - well, you know, that isn't ALL there is.

Philip Larkin

Caught in the center of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask.
I make a sharp reply,
Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.

We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
-The Whitsun Weddings

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
-Water

The music in the piano stool. That vase.
-Home Is So Sad [thanks Trayce!]

The decades of a different life
That opened past your inch-closed eyes
Belonged to others, lavished, lost;
Nor could I hold you hard enough
To call my years of hunger-strife
Back for your mouth to colonise.

Admitted: and the pain is real.
But when did love not try to change
The world back to itself—no cost,
No past, no people else at all—
Only what meeting made us feel,
So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
--High Windows

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

Autographed Titch Thomas, while
Someone had used a knife
Or something to stab right through
The moustached lips of her smile.
She was too good for this life.
Very soon, a great transverse tear
Left only a hand and some blue.
Now Fight Cancer is there.

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

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

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

They would no guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

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

His old house is in the park just down the road from me. I'm sure this affects my attachment, that I know well so many of the places he wrote about. I'd take him above those guys you listed, Alfred, because in the end his rancidness was more human.

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

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

Just about every great poet is full of shit; it goes with the territory. We judge a great poet by quality, not quantity. I'd rather read Larkin than Swinburne, say.

But then there are the poets who are so modest that their greatness is often overlooked: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Ashbery.

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked back at me, forty years back,
And thought, Thatlls be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

The idea that "perfection" is a quality one would want in poetry seems... problematic.

Why is he so unspecific? He isn't talking about actual leaves unfolding, or an actual couple who could be fucking. It's based more on definitions, perhaps received definitions: Leaves are, at some point, buds, and then they open up and become leaves. Kids today, they fuck each other, and the girls take pills or wear diaphragms. It's as if he's never actually seen a leaf or a young couple, or perhaps he's seen so many that they have all blurred together, and he can't remember any specific one. Or he's actively avoiding that kind of specificity. Almost every idea quoted here has that quality: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad" is perhaps an "edgier" idea (or was at the time, perhaps -- it seems bone obvious now) but still seems like a received idea (and I think what makes that line so memorable is the singsong rhythm and monosyllabic words, not the insight).

And in many ways I find the emotional heft (and even the thought process, the structure of the ideas) to be a sort of received idea. "Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless": you drop an idea like this at a party, and people go "heaaaaavy" and accuse you either of philosophy or poetry. And there is an idea that "earning" that kind of statement is what makes good poetry; poetry is the vehicle which takes you to that kind of "poetic" emotional rush; that is perhaps what the "perfect" poem does. Well, I guess; if a poem is going to be emotionally transportive, I'd rather it took me someplace a little more unexpected, someplace I couldn't put my finger on quite so easily.

But that's my taste. I'm actually more curious about what the Larkin fans think of his use of generalized ideas.

Now, OK. There are some potentially interesting implications that can be teased out of this conceit. Leaves are individual, but seem interchangeable; perhaps people are like that as well. The cycle of leaves seems eternal, but of course trees eventually die. You could go further with this, following the metaphor's reasoning like some pre-scientific thinking trying to use the barest amount of observation coupled with a lot of "reasoning" to arrive at how the universe must be. It's an odd form of argument that poetry is very good at and which appeals at a certain gut level but which doesn't actually... work. Because people aren't leaves, after all, and just because two things are similar in one way doesn't mean they will be similar in all ways.

Anyway, he doesn't go any further with this metaphor, but drops it. I'm not entirely sure what the "castles" mean in the third stanza -- in context it seems like it should be a type of bird, or something -- but the gist of it seems to be that, despite the fact that these aren't actually reborn leaves, but are new leaves, they still inspire us to want to be reborn ourselves. And there is some despair there, I guess, since the leaves aren't actually reborn, and thus our chances of being reborn are slim.

But then again this ignores that nevertheless there are new leaves, and even though it's not literally the same leaves reborn, a new generation of leaves, much like a new generation of people, and that doesn't seem so bad. Oh, and leaves don't seem to be a good metaphor for people, since people aren't a part of something; leaves are like hair, which grows on the person [tree] and eventually falls off. But the tree manages to renew itself through its new coat of leaves, making the very renewal that the poem despairs of seem eminently possible.

But the "seem" in the next-to-last line and the repetition of "afresh" in the final line and other parts of the text (does it really end with a comma?!) make the gloomy interpretation seem to be the one he was going for. "Their greenness is a kind of grief" -- I'd put my money on the sense of the poem being that leaves inspire one towards a renewal that one cannot achieve, that the leaves are not actually achieving.

But if so, I think it stems from a poor engagement with its central metaphor.

If I could answer this sort of question, I'd be a professor rather than a librarian. And in any case, I shouldn't want to. It's a thing you don't want to think about. It happens, or it happened, and if it's something to be grateful for, you're grateful.
I remember saying once, I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: it's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife. Whoever I was talking to said, They'd do that, too, if their agents could fix it.

i also don't think i really understand chris's objection to "the trees"; surely you could also object that shelley doesn't really give a full and accurate description of the nature of the west wind?

Sandy said she had gone to a gynecologist on the Upper East Side whom a friend had recommended. She told the doctor she wasn't married, but she wanted to be able to make love with her boyfriend, and she didn't want to get pregnant. The doctor, a distinguished-looking man in his mid-forties, didn't say anything, but he fitted her for a diaphragm, told her how to use it, and she thanked him and got up to leave. He walked her to the door of his office and uttered a line she would always remember. "Well," he said, "you're off to the races."

Sandy laughed when she told me the story, amused rather than angered by the doctor's presumption of her promiscuity. She and I both took it as an indication of the jealousy of an older man for a beautiful, intelligent, "nice" young woman who could have sex with whom she chose, with a freedom that was not available in his own generation.

And this isn't a student-y kind of Deep Thought?

This, though, was another example I was thinking of using. They are nobles shown in their "proper habits" and demonstrate the "plainness of the pre-Baroque". He really doesn't want the couple to be all that specifically historically placed. He isn't interested in saying anything about the couple, historically (he doesn't name them, certainly, or try to imagine any concrete details about their life) and their plainness adds to the effect. There is, really, nothing to focus on except the pure content of the sculpture: They are holding hands. And, cast in stone, it becomes an idea of a love made permanent and eternal, which is contrasted with what human love actually is (to Larkin), which is no such thing.

So for me, the tomb still doesn't feel specific; it feels like he thought: People say love is eternal, but it isn't, and people say our love will outlast our death, but it doesn't, and is there an example of a love that does outlast death and is eternal, such as an expression of love cast in stone in a tomb? And every detail in the poem points to this idea, and every detail that might make the idea a little less axiomatic is cast away.

I don't think that either this poem or the trees poem is especially "inward looking" or "outward looking". I think they consist of playing with these axiomatic relationships between broad concepts, illustrated with a single conceit (does Larkin ever use more than one conceit per poem?) and wrapping the whole thing up in what might be called "charming gravitas" to obscure how tenuous his connections are, and how limited his thinking is.

He might be especially good at the "charming gravitas", though, and that might be what people like in him. It's a very common "voice" in poetry of all stripes, and I generally can't stand it. But it's so common that either most people like it or they don't realize that poetry doesn't have to have that voice. But, again, that's my taste.

The line Trayce quoted about "the music in the piano stool" seems far more specific (although maybe for Larkin it was a given that homes contained piano stools with music in them?) and meaningful.

But again, you seem to be taking Larkin to task for not being a kind of poet that he isn't. It's personal taste, like you said, but I think his poems are inward-looking in that they're almost all expressions of his own personality, not arid statements of ideas. He affected that "charming gravitas" in his life as well as his work, and to the extent that he did it's his voice.

(Music in the piano stool is cute: it would be very common in pre-war Middle Class homes.)

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

An act of fidelity that wasn't meant proving how our sense that our love will outlast us as almost true: It is hard for me to read this as "a hope or belief that the good we do outlasts us, rather than the evil." The good that outlasts us isn't the good that we do, it is the good that our friends impose upon us when they tell the story of our lives, a good we "hardly meant", illustrated by placing us in a position that we "would not think to lie [in] so long"; the faithfulness that outlasts us is something done in effigy.

And yes, you could identify the specific tomb, or let's say you could, but it's not the specificness of the tomb or the people in it that he's interested in, he's interested in how the definitions of this detail contrast with definitions of love's eternity. I'm not actually suggested he thought of the conceit and then hunted down a tomb to match it, but he might as well have.

That affected voice is always acknowledging that it is affected.

Do any examples come to mind?

But again, you seem to be taking Larkin to task for not being a kind of poet that he isn't.

Well, sure. I might also accuse you of liking Larkin for being the kind of poet that he is. ;-)

But I know very little, and I don't have the words to say things correctly. So sorry, but I like him. That's about all.

http://www.oregonlive.com/books/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/1135797904106880.xml&coll=7

I Remember, I Remember"

Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with number plates
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
'Why, Coventry!' I exclaimed. 'I was born here.'

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign
That this was still the town that had been 'mine'
So long, but found I wasn't even clear
Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates
Were standing, had we annually departed

For all those family hols? . . . A whistle went:
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.
'Was that,' my friend smiled, 'where you "have your roots"?'
No, only where my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to retort, just were I started:

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

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

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

Who didn't call and tell my father There
Before us, had we the gift to see ahead --
'You look as if you wished the place in Hell,'
My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well,
I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.

'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'

what i love most about his work is when he begins a poem focused on the dirt and muck and messiness of human existence (which he always manages to convey so concisely: a single "crap" in larkin has the weight of a zillion "fucks" in any half-assed beat writer), then slowly pulls back to focus on an image of mysterious transcendence. this happens most movingly, for me, at the end of "aubade," when the POV abruptly shifts out of the narrator's feverish 4 a.m. thoughts to the cool pre-dawn air outside and "postmen like doctors going from house to house." without in any way diminishing the horror of being suddenly aware of your mortality, larkin suggests that - well, you know, that isn't ALL there is.

:-) i was hoping there'd be a j.d. post on this thread!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/25/complete-poems-philip-larkin-review

John Banville review of the Complete Poems.

Odd use of the word 'purblind' as a verb, which makes me unsure how to say it.

This bit sounds a bit annoying:

the citation Burnett offers from a fellow critic who, warning against a too literal linking of the poet's life and the poet's poems, "correctly insists that 'An April Sunday Brings the Snow' does not specify the sex of the 'you' addressed, the relationship of the speaker to that person, or indeed details of skin colour and ethnicity".

That sort of modern pedantry of the absent or insane 'set of all sets' inclusiveness, which seems to characterise the vast industry of modern academia when it errs. (Can't be accused of laziness or complacency like much older English criticism, but there's almost a lack of energy gone into thinking about what might and might not be useful.)

But yeah, I'll definitely be spending some time looking at this, even if I don't buy it just yet.

paul muldoon reviews larkin's 'collected' stuff:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/books/review/philip-larkins-complete-poems.html?pagewanted=all

i don't think that larkin intends "nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless" to be a student-y kind of Deep Thought: it's a description of a universe without god or heaven. every generation grows up less and less in thrall to the church and conventional morality; the final result, as larkin sees it, is nihilism.

And this isn't a student-y kind of Deep Thought?

― Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, December 12, 2005 10:10 PM (6 years ago)

six years later, i still find this to be one of the most irritating exchanges i've ever had on ilx.

i went to my copy of collected poems (not the new one) on the shelf to look up "mr bleaney", and i guess my ex-girlfriend bought me this book, which i'd forgotten, but which i was reminded of when i opened it up and a dead pressed flower immediately slipped right past "that music in the piano stool. that vase." and fell to the floor; SOME HEAVY SHIT HAPPENING OVER HERE

the music, i mean. not that music.

like fully half of larkin's last lines make me wince. compliment.

funny what you find in books. i was lying on my couch earlier and i picked up a copy of mary gaitskill's 'bad behavior,' which i bought used a few nights ago. i held it over my head and opened it up and a very small piece of cardboard the previous owner'd been using as a bookmark fell out and struck my face like an inch away from my eye, with the pointy edge. i was this close to having the lamest 'and that's how i lost my eye' story ever.

i bought a copy of the love of the last tycoon that turned out to have a photograph in it of a guy in a college sweatshirt on a boat with his arm around an intensely smiling blonde and it was lol because it might as well have been fitzgerald.

what will survive of us is books

Suspended lion face
Spilling at the centre
Of an unfurnished sky
How still you stand,
And how unaided
Single stalkless flower
You pour unrecompensed.

The eye sees you
Simplified by distance
Into an origin,
Your petalled head of flames
Continuously exploding.
Heat is the echo of your
Gold.

Coined there among
Lonely horizontals
You exist openly.
Our needs hourly
Climb and return like angels.
Unclosing like a hand,
You give for ever.

Managed to get a pristine copy of Selected Poems for a few quid, keep returning to this one.

i'm with nv:

aubade

the cul de sac of cul de sacs

this is the hull i will die in

my life v much mirrors Phil's except without the talent

I am sure you have a finer appreciation of jazz :)

:D well it doesn't stop at 1940

It began in 1963.

PL's grasp of early jazz is good not bad

(also he's right abt coltrane lol)

Like almost any good critic he's way better on what he likes than what he doesn't. And his Bechet poem is good.

What will survive of us is Love Supreme

As I recall of All What Jazz (it's a long time since I read it) he's only really interested in the stuff he loved when he was young, and nothing else. Even when he's given some crate-digging reissue stuff from that era to review his attitude is basically "It can't be any good, otherwise I would've know about it at the time".

like fully half of larkin's last lines make me wince. compliment.

"Well, / We shall find out."

Like almost any good critic he's way better on what he likes than what he doesn't. And his Bechet poem is good.

Palmer, Richard. “ALL WHAT JAZZ: LARKIN'S MOST EXPENSIVE MISTAKE.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), vol. 9, no. 2, 2003

Interesting analysis on Larkin and the whole All What Jazz furore that I haven't really seen circulated - obviously Palmer being an acquaintance and the fact he was publishing a book on Larkin's Jazz reviews should be accounted for - but there are some good points made suggesting Larkin had more respect for post-1940 jazz then he gets credit for and the introduction might have been somewhat tongue in cheek.

Anyway I'm waiting for a copy of AWJ to arrive and looking forward to re-evaluating his reviews in light of the above.