by C K Williams
If the decision towards truth can be morally unnerving, it has aesthetic implications as well. Herbert’s poems, for example, have an inherent propulsive pressure in them; they are in a sense underway the moment they begin: the poet knows and we know what their purpose is, what the universe will be they evoke, what emotional and intellectual and symbolic contexts will determine their trajectory and even their volume. Larkin, conversely, begins each poem in a void, both of meaning and of aspiration. If the world he will deal with is familiar to us, it is familiar in a particularly stripped way: what will be selected from the world to be meditated on, the perceptual sensitivity with which that meditation will be equipped, and, most important, what the mood of the poem will be are completely unpredictable; whatever meaning the poem might be moving towards or sometimes away from will only be revealed in the course of events. Whether any poetic meditation ends up being positive or negative, optimistic or pessimistic, will depend entirely on the success or failure of the inspiration of the poet and the skill with which the poem is accomplished. Every poem, then, is a risky undertaking, both to write and to read; one never knows whether the poem will lift us to the inspirational exaltation of, for instance, “Church Going” or “The Whitsun Weddings,” or drive us down again into the grinding skepticism of “Reading,” or the obsessive spiritual negations of “Self’s the Man” or “Home.”
Considered in this way, Larkin’s poetry is terribly difficult, not because we have trouble parsing what the poems say—he is never anything but excruciatingly lucid—but because each work presents us with the possibility of subjecting ourselves to a first person whom we will experience with a vertiginous frankness really unlike any other—since every other poet’s self-revealings, even the so-called confessional poets at their most embarrassingly sincere, have about them a personal aggrandizement that the very writing of the poem assumes and that is generally taken to be morally consoling. The poet says in one way or another: Behold the audacity with which I position myself before you in this poem, a place from which I will speak truths whose purpose, if not whose conditions, is entirely laudable. The poetic undertaking is assumed to be intrinsically noble, but for Larkin this is simply not the case. He presumes no nobility, not even any minimal personal glorification for his effort: if the experience he has chosen to investigate leads him to an abyss of self, a dismal exemplary of characterological flaw, so be it—this is the truth his poetry risks.
4
The only time I ever found myself strongly disagreeing with Czesław Miłosz, a poet and thinker I admire enormously, was about Larkin. Miłosz was speaking at a conference I attended, and he attacked Larkin, saying in so many words that the darkness of Larkin’s vision and his apparent pessimism weren’t redeemed by his talent or lyric accomplishments. He insisted that poetry that embodied so little hope and so much outright despair simply couldn’t be called great because great poetry always has as its ultimate theme just such hope, for the individual, and for humanity.
I felt that Miłosz was wrong, and I’m still certain that he hadn’t then read Larkin’s great poems with sufficient attention. Because despite the cynicism of many of Larkin’s poems, despite an unpretentiousness in some of them that can seem demeaning to him and to humanity, his poetry as a whole is illuminating and inspiring. Even with Larkin’s evident personal dejection—the despondency of his hopes for himself—there is in his best work a redemptive gravity: the refinement and variety of his song, the precision and generosity of his perceptions, do outweigh and by more than a little the more superficial grimness of his view of life.
What we take to be a poet’s view of life does of course at some point have to come into play in our reflections. It’s finally impossible to consider fully any poet’s body of work without considering his or her character, with how it determined the work, and then with how the work may in turn have affected the poet. With some poets, this procedure can seem gratifyingly benign. With Keats, for instance, whose poetry seems to be cultivated in the very earth of our language, our judgment of his person is only a grace note to the poetry. Surely we feel so affectionate towards Keats the man just because the details of who he was are so incidental to the grandeur and purity of his song. With Wordsworth—to continue in the Romantic era—there’s more in the poems that makes you want to know about the conditions of their writing: even though “The Prelude” is autobiographical, it feels proper to go back to Wordsworth’s person to check it against what that person has had to say about itself. It isn’t that we don’t trust Wordsworth but, rather, that we want to know him more fully in order to understand what brought forth his abundant and generous poetic sentiments. With Coleridge, more, much more of this: it seems as though we can really appreciate the body of Coleridge’s work only by understanding the person. The poems point to a person of such variousness and complexity that we can find ourselves reading the poems as much to illuminate our sense of the person who wrote them as for the intrinsic interest of the work. Not that the poems aren’t significant in their own right, but the identity that generates them seems often to be obscured by them.
With Larkin, this is surely the case, with Herbert not at all. We don’t know very much about Herbert’s life, and yet what we do know seems perfectly adequate to the vision and purpose of the poems and the poet. We can believe what we read from those who knew him that he was a sweet and generous soul, utterly devoted to the clerical calling that came to him relatively late in life. But from the poems we can also tell that he was not always entirely a happy man; there is so much dissatisfaction with himself, so much feeling of inadequacy, that we can sense a certain lurking melancholy in him.
With Larkin, though, the dissatisfactions and self-questionings generally glare from much of his writing, and in reading him we constantly seem to have in mind the caverns of his afflicted soul. We know that Larkin was seriously depressed much of his life; he says so himself, most crudely and baldly in a poem, “The Literary World,” one of the many that Larkin knew enough not to publish but that the editor of his Collected Poems didn’t. In it, Larkin replies to a complaint of Kafka’s that he hadn’t been able to write anything for five months:
My dear Kafka,
When you’ve had five years of it, not five months,
Five years of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object right in your belly,
Then you’ll know about depression.
Larkin certainly wasn’t the only depressed poet the world has ever known, to say the least. Even Herbert, as I’ve said, evidences surface shadow, but because of the religious disciplines his poems enact, because of how his dissatisfactions and despair are so firmly embedded in the structures of his spiritual quests, we hesitate even in our diagnostic age to apply any categorizing psychological frame to Herbert the person. Yet in their imagery, their connotative auras, the poems can be nearly as somber as anything in Larkin. In “Mortification,” for example, Herbert writes:
How soon doth man decay!
When clothes are taken from a chest of sweets
To swaddle infants, whose young breath
Scarce knows the way;
Those clouts are little winding sheets,
Which do consign and send them unto death.
When boys go first to bed,
They step into their voluntary graves,
Sleep binds them fast; only their breath
Makes them not dead:
Successive nights, like rolling waves,
Convey them quickly, who are bound for death.
The poem goes on to register six stages of the life of a man, all of which point to death, are limited by death, contained in death. It is a depiction of the inevitability and pervasiveness of our awareness of death as convincing, if not nearly as overtly harrowing, as that of Larkin’s in “The Old Fools,” where he constructs a sort of compressed atheist’s cosmology, raw, clear-eyed, and fearsome—all the more fearsome because of Larkin’s use of the first person plural, which few modern poets use as oft
en or as convincingly.
At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavor
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend
There’ll be anything else.
In Herbert’s poem, the conviction of his spiritual hope keeps his plaint from casting the same pall on our perception of his personality as does Larkin. “Yet Lord, instruct us so to die, / / That all these dyings may be life in death,” Herbert says, and, because of the way he posits his plea, we experience the poem not as the expression of a soul in need but of a consciousness in the speculative mode, the mode requisite for religious undertaking.
Larkin’s despair, in contrast, can be all too convincing. The bitterness of his tone is sometimes sadly distasteful: “Get out as quickly as you can,” he suggests, in “This Be the Poem,” his ultimate statement on parenthood, “And don’t have any kids yourself.” Or, in his grim little poem about the futility of reading, he ends, in a paroxysm of hopelessness and self-scorn: “Get stewed: / / Books are a load of crap.”
The examples are sadly many, including “Self’s the Man,” a scorchingly sarcastic examination of the way ordinary people live, which has an ending that implies that the alternative to such banality is madness, or something close to it.
. . . I’m a better hand
At knowing what I can stand
Without them sending a van—
Or I suppose I can.
Larkin in his slighter poems can seem so small spirited that you want to take him as an imaginative figure of his work, a fiction, rather than as himself, although he gives no indication that he means to be read that way. Those all purpose critical euphemisms, “persona” or “mask”—how I wish they could be applied with any kind of conviction to the voice in “Toads,” for instance, his poem about the insufferability and meaninglessness of work, or of any effort, for any end at all. I’d truly prefer not to believe it’s he himself who allows himself to say:
Lots of folks live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines—
They seem to like it.
Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets—and yet
No one actually starves.
Surely it was this sort of extrapolation from personal pathology into poetry that offended Miłosz. Larkin’s spiritual depression at its worst sounds an edge of contempt, and sometimes expands from contempt for himself to a similar attitude for everyone else. The “we” at the end of “The Old Fools” asks much sympathy from us and includes us perhaps too presumptuously into an attitude like Larkin’s own. He writes about old people:
This is why they give
An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction’s alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.
How one wishes one might retrospectively endow Larkin with the spiritual resiliency that Herbert manifests in “The Flower,” when after all his self-castigation, all his afflictions of the soul, he says,
How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in spring:
To which, besides their own demand
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.
And then his famous sigh of triumphant reaffirmation:
And now in age I bud again
After so many deaths I live and write:
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my only light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.
Would that Larkin, at the end, could have come back to “relish versing,” to have used his senses—for his senses and his intellect never did desert him—to give him recompense for so much resolve, so much diligence. But he didn’t. As we know from his biographer, at the end of his life his mood about himself became sadder and sadder.
5
I don’t intend to say here that our ultimate judgment about a poet can be based on character; perhaps that was the ground of my disagreement with Miłosz. At the same time, it can’t be denied that an artist’s ambitions are defined to a great extent by who he or she is. This doesn’t mean that we have to believe “character is fate”: there are too many external conditions that determine what we call fate, even when it’s defined most personally, though it is hard not to conclude that what defines character is character. Still, although there are in every artist’s biography bruises, spots of triviality, a weakening of moral tissue, we learn to take these as marginal to the work.
But in considering Larkin’s accomplishment, because his resolution of total personal truth determined so much of the tone of his poetry, we do seem to have to take his emotional identity into account in a way we don’t with many poets. With Herbert, for instance, for us, and for he himself, his personality is a detail to which we pay little attention and to which he simply refuses to give credence. His poems struggle for a purity that is beyond self; his identity, his likes and dislikes are incidentals that he is constantly trying to shuck. He seems to want to appear in every moment like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. In its resistance to his spiritual ambitions, Herbert’s self can appear to be nearly as repugnant to him as Larkin’s, but its offensiveness consists essentially in its recalcitrance, its refusal to enact the requisites a belief in redemption entails.
With Larkin, the contrary is true. In his work, and probably in his life, Larkin makes a kind of Pascalian gamble: he wagers that the stripped, unself-exalting person of Philip Larkin can withstand the risks of possible meaningless and the futility that might be involved in his resolute refusal of pretense. Sometimes it’s clear he can’t hold out against such peril at all, and a forbiddingly global dejection captures him, and us in reading him. But sometimes the gamble pays off marvelously. In his most successful poems, like “Church Going,” “An Arundel Tomb,” “The Explosion,” and, most notably for me, “The Whitsun Weddings,” his extravagant objectivity enables a precision of perception and a purity of sentiment unlike any other poet’s. “The Whitsun Weddings” is an unrivaled representation of a particular place at a particular moment of cultural history, of a physical environment and a social structure, and of the way individuals experience all of these elements together, consciously and unconsciously, individually and in collectives. The poem ends in an almost jubilant realization that all human reality can be experienced as connection, as a linking together of rituals of allegiance and community, and that an individual consciousness—the poet’s—can discover an order for all of this.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:
There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Traveling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready t
o be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. 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.
Larkin said that he took the image of the shower of arrows from Lawrence Olivier’s version of Henry V, but the possible militarism of the image is marvelously transfigured into that metaphoric rain, which is suspended in some place of mystery beyond sense and intellect.
In this and in Larkin’s other great poems, the objectivity of the poet speaking, his refusal to make any claims for the lyric self that might go beyond its capacity to perceive, acknowledge, and transfigure into verse, becomes a way of deflecting personal moral judgment and engendering a lyric state that embodies poetic meanings never diluted with idle fancies of transcendence. Yet there’s no question that his inherent longing for a more romantic vision tempered his hard-boiled secular realism so that there is in some of the poems at least a celebration of forms of empathy and compassion that Larkin seemed to deny himself.
What is projected in the poems rather than any systematic social vision or any concrete system of meaning is a vision that is conditioned by mood, but a mood that generates what can at the end be a nearly ecstatic state of consciousness, in which intellect and emotions are wholly devoted to the poetical apparatus and its workings and never to a dramatic enactment of the feelings the poet might have about his stake in whatever is under consideration. Describing Larkin’s method might make it seem less pertinent to the spirit than it is, but surely his poetic attack is as purifying in its way as Herbert’s, and its self-abnegation has a nearly equivalent rigor, its force of inspiration arising in a similar way from a transparency of self. Larkin’s self, like Herbert’s, while never being completely committed to the world, still accounts for the poignant realities of existence and exalts them.
