I've always liked "soppy-stern" so that gets my vote
― thomasintrouble, Thursday, 16 November 2017 19:21 (six years ago) link
i have always liked "it deepens like a coastal shelf" which is just such a fantastic, unexpected image, a shaft of metaphorical light amid all this blunt talk
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, 16 November 2017 20:01 (six years ago) link
one of the best
― the late great, Thursday, 16 November 2017 20:09 (six years ago) link
I used "High Windows" on the first day of my lit classes for years – it never failed to impress the students.
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 16 November 2017 20:10 (six years ago) link
The 2nd line, for the really wicked ambiguity
― Harthill Services (Neil Willett), Thursday, 16 November 2017 20:29 (six years ago) link
Which I never noticed until Martin Amis wrote about it somewhere. And, suddenly - OMG!!! Mega Larkin LOLZ!!!
― Harthill Services (Neil Willett), Thursday, 16 November 2017 20:33 (six years ago) link
internal rhyme too xpost
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 16 November 2017 20:55 (six years ago) link
My mum and dad were deeply fucked up but this poem didn't seal any universal truths for me just because it's sublimely stated.
Truth ! Beauty and Keats was beautifully full of shite, the poem is either well or badly written etc etc
― fake pato is kind of racist, dude (darraghmac), Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:07 (six years ago) link
They may not mean to, but they do.
― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:12 (six years ago) link
Wait, what's the "wicked ambiguity" of the second line? "They may not mean to, but they do (fuck you up)" v. "they may not mean to, but they do (mean to)" ?
I always enjoy the shift with "man hands on misery to man" — I assume it's a change in metre that does it, but I know nothing about scansion. But "soppy-stern" has my vote.
― Øystein, Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:18 (six years ago) link
i like the ambiguity of ‘they may not mean to’ paired with the definitiveness of ‘but they do’
― estela, Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:22 (six years ago) link
otm
― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:22 (six years ago) link
"May" automatically implies "or may not", but I don't see that ambiguity as especially wicked. It merely asserts that volition is not required for the transaction to occur.
― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:25 (six years ago) link
I read it as it not mattering whether they mean to or not, but it certainly cannot be presumed that they don't
― fake pato is kind of racist, dude (darraghmac), Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:29 (six years ago) link
If the "fuck you up" can mean that your mum and dad - literally - "fuck you into existence"
Then the 2nd line suggests that "your" very conception is a mistake, let alone what's happened since
Insult to injury, really
― Harthill Services (Neil Willett), Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:32 (six years ago) link
Reading "fuck you up" as a sort of equivalent to "dream you up", or "whip you up" like whipping up a meal, seems like a huge reach, in that the common colloquial meaning is so universally understood, while that alternative reading is something I have never encountered before in any form, written or spoken.
― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:38 (six years ago) link
I feel that much of the love for this poem is of the "OMG TRUTH BOMB" type - as in, its transgressive sentiment precludes actual criticism. For what it's worth I believe we fuck ourselves up and permit our parents a role in that to varying extents."Deepens like a coastal shelf" is not terribly evocative for me - meaning, it gradually deepens and then there's an abrupt drop?
― attention vampire (MatthewK), Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:39 (six years ago) link
Unless that is part of the design then the 2nd line isn't really doing very much apart from being unusually - for this poem - considerate of parental good intentions
― Harthill Services (Neil Willett), Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:49 (six years ago) link
I think it's a valid but unlikely reading but that your dismissal of the second line as considerate under the alternative circumstance is not correct, certainly not necessarily correct at any rate
― fake pato is kind of racist, dude (darraghmac), Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:51 (six years ago) link
Don't personally see any ambiguity in the second line. Whether the mean to or not, they *will* fuck you up. Plain as day. (and otm)
― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:51 (six years ago) link
"They may not mean to, but they do" reads, idiomatically, as "they do, albeit without meaning to", and then, more literally, archly, cruelly, "they do, though it's possible that they didn't mean to".
― .oO (silby), Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:55 (six years ago) link
Which is exactly the same as what I said :)
― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 16 November 2017 22:57 (six years ago) link
I know I just wanted to say it too :)
― .oO (silby), Thursday, 16 November 2017 23:01 (six years ago) link
"coastal shelf"
this is a long way short of his best tho
― the intentional phallusy (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 16 November 2017 23:02 (six years ago) link
tbh I only know about ten poems total, plz do feel free to mention others
― .oO (silby), Thursday, 16 November 2017 23:07 (six years ago) link
From Larkin or for cynics to enjoy
― fake pato is kind of racist, dude (darraghmac), Thursday, 16 November 2017 23:17 (six years ago) link
"aubade" is a masterpiece
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, 16 November 2017 23:18 (six years ago) link
Silby <3
― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 16 November 2017 23:34 (six years ago) link
J.D. on the money, that poem destroys me, it's my internal monologue
― the intentional phallusy (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 16 November 2017 23:37 (six years ago) link
same
― estela, Thursday, 16 November 2017 23:40 (six years ago) link
just this last weekend i re-read MCMXIV; the bit that jumps out at me is "And the countryside not caring". i welled up at that.
do people ITT think he was the best of his generation? over-rated? what's your hot Larkin take?
― piscesx, Thursday, 16 November 2017 23:42 (six years ago) link
Yep. "Unresting death" destroys me. Two words that became a whole concept for me.
xp
― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 16 November 2017 23:42 (six years ago) link
Wow at aubade
― fake pato is kind of racist, dude (darraghmac), Thursday, 16 November 2017 23:43 (six years ago) link
Deepens like a coastal shelf" is not terribly evocative for me - meaning, it gradually deepens and then there's an abrupt drop?
― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Thursday, 16 November 2017 23:48 (six years ago) link
Was thinking abt this poem today & nearly quoted it in the Masculinity thread - a weird coincidence
Aubade is my fave too. I also really like ... is it called And The Wave Sings Because It Is Moving? And of course the one about the toad “work”. His Collected is worth shelling out for. Haven’t read him in many years, but huge memorized shards of his work stick in my head. If pressed, I probably know more lines of Larkin by heart than of any other poet.
Larkin generally v good and v accessible - a “pop” poet in a way, tho (of course) not undeserving of serious consideration because of that. I think you can say his best work lacks the depth & richness of (insert “rock” poet here) without meaning it as a knock on him.
In the end his unrelenting pessimism - and his misogyny (fortunately expressed less in his poems than his letters) - makes him a tough gruel for me to stomach too much of at once.
― bumbling my way toward the light or wahtever (hardcore dilettante), Friday, 17 November 2017 00:22 (six years ago) link
Oh yeah, the mower too! We should be careful of each other; we should be kind / while there is still time.
― bumbling my way toward the light or wahtever (hardcore dilettante), Friday, 17 November 2017 00:24 (six years ago) link
IT'S A POEM ALL THE LINES COUNT THE SAME
― she carries a torch. two torches, actually (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Friday, 17 November 2017 00:51 (six years ago) link
says Mr Never-Polled-A-Poet
― the intentional phallusy (Noodle Vague), Friday, 17 November 2017 00:59 (six years ago) link
Aubade and Water are my favorite Larkin.
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 17 November 2017 01:00 (six years ago) link
Larkin could've been a novelist of exquisite refinement. I loved A Girl in Winter a couple years ago.
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 17 November 2017 01:02 (six years ago) link
our beloved Harold Bloom considers Robert Lowell and Larkin the most overrated 20th century English poets. I've struggled with Lowell for years, going so far as to read the new psychoanalytic bio and spending a summer with his poetry, but Larkin is like Frost in his accessibility.
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 17 November 2017 01:03 (six years ago) link
― she carries a torch. two torches, actually (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Thursday, November 16, 2017 4:51 PM (seventeen minutes ago)
I don't think the poem being a thing negates the possibility that the lines of the poems are themselves things. Both the poem and the lines of the poem, severally, are interesting. And polling the lines of a poem both amuses me and serves as a framing device for considering the poem in its made-up-of-lines aspect.
― .oO (silby), Friday, 17 November 2017 01:12 (six years ago) link
Many poems rely on a rhythmic shift that also signals an emotional shift. The key line in Thomas Hardy's "The Voice" is, "Thus I; faltering forward..."
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 17 November 2017 01:14 (six years ago) link
coastal shelf
― Clay, Friday, 17 November 2017 02:06 (six years ago) link
What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake usTime and time over.They are to be happy in. Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that questionBrings the priest and the doctorIn their long coatsRunning over the fields.
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 17 November 2017 02:35 (six years ago) link
deepens like a coastal shelf
― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Friday, 17 November 2017 02:45 (six years ago) link
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, November 16, 2017 1:10 PM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
god "high windows" is my fucking jam
― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Friday, 17 November 2017 02:46 (six years ago) link
the BBC made a Larkin documentary, in the early 90s I think it was, and they used some footage of a couple of friends of mine playing Frisbee in the park that Larkin's room overlooked to represent the "couple of kids" I guess. It worked pretty neatly
― the intentional phallusy (Noodle Vague), Friday, 17 November 2017 02:54 (six years ago) link
and he was a technician. the accessibility of his verse is deliberate and hard-won. his politics and personali
― the intentional phallusy (Noodle Vague), Friday, 17 November 2017 02:57 (six years ago) link
ty are obviously horrible in a ton of ways but "what will survive of us is love" is bett
― the intentional phallusy (Noodle Vague), Friday, 17 November 2017 02:58 (six years ago) link
HUMAN BEINGS look at your hands your beautiful useful hands you’re not an ape you’re not a parrot you’re not a slow loris or a smart missile you’re human not british not american not israeli not palestinian you’re human not catholic not protestant not muslim not hindu you’re human we all start human we end up human human first human last we’re human or we’re nothing nothing but bombs and poison gas nothing but guns and torturers nothing but slaves of Greed and War if we’re not human look at your body with its amazing systems of nerve-wires and blood canals think about your mind which can think about itself and the whole universe look at your face which can freeze into horror or melt into love look at all that life all that beauty you’re human they are human we are human let’s try to be human dance!
not british not american not israeli not palestinian you’re human
not catholic not protestant not muslim not hindu you’re human
we all start human we end up human human first human last we’re human or we’re nothing
nothing but bombs and poison gas nothing but guns and torturers nothing but slaves of Greed and War if we’re not human
look at your body with its amazing systems of nerve-wires and blood canals think about your mind which can think about itself and the whole universe look at your face which can freeze into horror or melt into love look at all that life all that beauty you’re human they are human we are human let’s try to be human
dance!
― imago, Friday, 17 November 2017 14:42 (six years ago) link
grooped i implore thee, my footling turlingdromes
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 17 November 2017 14:43 (six years ago) link
the last line and by extension entire poem spoken by cowboy movie heel as he fires his pistol into the dirt at some poor young lad's feet
― imago, Friday, 17 November 2017 14:43 (six years ago) link
lost me at "not an ape"
― thomasintrouble, Friday, 17 November 2017 14:52 (six years ago) link
and the idea that such a speciesist poem would be used for a first contact
― thomasintrouble, Friday, 17 November 2017 14:54 (six years ago) link
I cannot settle which is worse,The Anti-Novel or Adrian Fucking Mitchell
― the intentional phallusy (Noodle Vague), Friday, 17 November 2017 14:56 (six years ago) link
Pshaw! Millions of people like posters of cats with modestly amusing captions, such as "Hang In There!", too. Someone must supply them with ever new and transparently cheesy gewgaws and Adrian Mitchell is just the person to do it, proudly, sincerely and without shame. Let us leave them to themselves, fondly holding hands, their mouths stained pink by cotton candy.
― A is for (Aimless), Friday, 17 November 2017 19:20 (six years ago) link
Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.
― System, Thursday, 14 December 2017 00:01 (six years ago) link
Great thread everyone
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, 14 December 2017 00:57 (six years ago) link
In a National Poetry Day poll in 2005 his poem "Human Beings" was voted the one most people would like to see launched into space.
Out of a cannon into the sun?
― Stoop Crone (Trayce), Thursday, 14 December 2017 01:01 (six years ago) link
Hoos what’d you vote for
― .oO (silby), Thursday, 14 December 2017 01:04 (six years ago) link
Uhh I think the second line because it leaves space for people to mean well despite forces at play that can ultimately be more powerful than they are
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, 14 December 2017 01:23 (six years ago) link
^vmic
― Bingo Little’s Breakout (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 14 December 2017 01:25 (six years ago) link
Which is a good thing
Haha truly
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, 14 December 2017 01:58 (six years ago) link
feeling “Man hands on misery to man” at the moment. otherwise “coastal shelf” - that way it conveys a dread sense, which surrounds the heart, of an accumulation of irretrievable cold and darkness over time - rather than progress or even not-progress, the perpetuation of the human race being an act that ploughs is further into sadness as a collective being of isolated individuals, that retains and adds to our fucked upness (our solitude, our anger, our failures of tolerance and kindness etc). this is the picture of someone awake with fear at night, assessing their own mortality and childlessness, rather than a truth, i think. or rather it sums up that feeling truly than necessarily expressing a “true” sentiment (otherwise no “Sidney Bechet” - “oh play that thing!” - or “First Sight” - “Earth’s immeasurable surprise” - that “immeasurable” a counterweight to the endless “deepening” here)
― Fizzles, Thursday, 14 December 2017 08:42 (six years ago) link
I
Look it's a very good thread and poetry and interpretation etc
But coastal shelf as a line stands out for me as the one put in
Because it rhymed with what he wanted the last line to be
― remember the lmao (darraghmac), Thursday, 14 December 2017 10:26 (six years ago) link
i read george herbert’s poem Miserie recently and turned back to it after that post, to see whether there was any useful gloss for Larkin’s use. Not really, tho it is really good:Man is but grassHe knows it, fill the glasseandOh foolish man! where are thine eyes?How hast thou lost them in a crowd of cares?Thou pull’st the rug, and wilt not rise,No not to purchase the whole pack of starres (pull’st the rug = drag the quilt over yourself in the morning)it was in the poem above tho - Decay - that i found a sort of parallel to This Be The Verse:I see the world grows old, when as the heatOf thy great love once spread, as in an urnDoth closet up it self, and still retreat,Cold sinne still forcing it...i’ll break off there for the moment. this is, as with larkin’s coastal shelf, progressive, irrevocable loss, coldness and decay. it progresses through history, in herbert’s case away from the starting fire of God’s love, in Larkin’s through an accumulation of corruption (from an implied point of innocence, then). what larkin cannot have is millenarian redemption - to continue the herbert verse:Cold sinne still forcing it, till it return,And calling Justice, all things burn.the apocalyptic fire renews the heat forever. for larkin there is no such moment. what larkin calls “misery” herbert wd call sin. and it occurs to me in a way that is now obvious and will have been pointed out before that much of what larkin wrote is a reaching into godlessness from with a religious framework, of poetry, of language and of society and an inherited state of mind. there is no wheel or couplet or fire to redeem his coastal shelf. that inherited state of mind, from which you can’t escape, which traps you in its religion even when you do not believe, is how your parents and your parents’ generation fuck you up.
― Fizzles, Thursday, 14 December 2017 10:30 (six years ago) link
xpost
― Fizzles, Thursday, 14 December 2017 10:31 (six years ago) link
yeah but sometimes the process that drives you to choose the word doesn't mean it's not the right word
Xp
― The Dearth of Stollen (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 14 December 2017 10:32 (six years ago) link
i think that happy conjunction of meaning, fit and sound is why it’s good! deepens like a coastal shelf works as a stand-alone image for me ymmv / de gustibus
― Fizzles, Thursday, 14 December 2017 10:32 (six years ago) link
wot NV said. the constraints of poetry produce these moments.
― Fizzles, Thursday, 14 December 2017 10:33 (six years ago) link
Ya it's acknowledged as a personal thing
― remember the lmao (darraghmac), Thursday, 14 December 2017 11:05 (six years ago) link
Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.
― System, Friday, 15 December 2017 00:01 (six years ago) link
Strong showing for the last verse, 4 of the top 5.
Also I have much love for some parents, but lol at the other line in the top five being "but not me, right, guys?"
― Andrew Farrell, Friday, 15 December 2017 08:34 (six years ago) link
Think the votes for "They may not mean to, but they do." was based on double-meaning, as discussed upthread
― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Friday, 15 December 2017 11:30 (six years ago) link
Yeah it's very much a line that can be read as apology or condemnation or just a shrug all of which came up itt
― remember the lmao (darraghmac), Friday, 15 December 2017 12:02 (six years ago) link
The Verse This Be
It deepens like a coastal shelf.And don’t have any kids yourself.Man hands on misery to man.They may not mean to, but they do.
Get out as early as you can,They fuck you up, your mum and dad.Who half the time were soppy-sternBy fools in old-style hats and coats,
But they were fucked up in their turnAnd add some extra, just for you.They fill you with the faults they hadAnd half at one another’s throats.
― infinity (∞), Friday, 15 December 2017 17:40 (six years ago) link
hahah sick
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, 15 December 2017 17:54 (six years ago) link
Excellent
― remember the lmao (darraghmac), Friday, 15 December 2017 17:58 (six years ago) link
ha wrote itself rly
― infinity (∞), Friday, 15 December 2017 18:01 (six years ago) link
A good idea need only be done half-well
― remember the lmao (darraghmac), Friday, 15 December 2017 18:15 (six years ago) link
nice
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 15 December 2017 18:20 (six years ago) link
Kudos
― ♫ very clever with maracas.jpg ♫ (Le Bateau Ivre), Friday, 15 December 2017 19:53 (six years ago) link
We should poll more poems and do the same.
― Burru Men Meet Burryman ina Wicker Man (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 16 December 2017 03:18 (six years ago) link