Continuing to live — that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries —
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.
A habit formed to get necessaries —
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.
This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise —
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it’s chess.
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it’s chess.
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,
On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.
Then, on April 24th, 1968, Larkin gifted us Sad Steps, one of the more resigned masterpieces of his maturity, combining a wonderfully vivid evocation of an everyday experience (especially to those of a certain age) with bleakly amused reflections on moon imagery and the passing of time and youth. It's a shock to realise that he was only 45 when he wrote it...
Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,
The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)
High and preposterous and separate—
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
One has to assume that the production of his art gave Larkin some kind of consolation as, unrelentingly, nothing else did. Sad cove. He seems to have had problems with the existential. One has also to assume that the pleasures of the art (which I can see) outweigh the bleakness of the sentiments. Close run thing for me. Don't the truly great artistic sensibilities (Shakespeare, Mozart, Sterne etc), encompass more than misery and mourning in the face of the human condition?
ReplyDeleteAbolutely Guy, but there's a whole lot more to Larkin than misery - you could number him among the Stoic Comedians.
ReplyDeleteInteresting Nige. Point me in the right direction. I've read most of the major collections but few belly laughs. What humour I've encountered seems bitter rather than joyful.
ReplyDeleteA wit? Yes. Hugely elegant? Certainly. Would you grant him the title 'stoic'? If he'd been through Bergen-Belsen maybe, but all he 'suffered' was 50s and 60s Britain. Too precious? Too fastidious? Holding life with a pair of sugar tongs? In his own words:
ReplyDelete-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 now so near.
All work and no wassail.
Fait l'existence pas facile.
Makes me think of Sartre and bad faith which always spoils the alloy.