Saturday, 25 January 2025

'And that will be England gone'

 In 1972 the UK government participated in the UN Stockholm Conference on the Environment, submitting a number of papers, one of them titled How Do You Want to Live? Deciding that they wanted to commission a preface to set the tone of the report, they commissioned that notorious cock-eyed optimist Philip Larkin, and – surprise, surprise – they were not entirely satisfied with the result, publishing a bowdlerised version, under the plain title 'Prologue'. Larkin happily pocketed the fee, then reworked the poem, restored the cuts, changed the title to 'Going, Going' (completed on this day in 1972) and published it in High Windows. It's not one of his best poems, but, like so many of Larkin's, it ends beautifully, and contains some resonant phrases: 'I thought it would last my time', 'Things are tougher than we are', 'It seems, just now, to be happening so very fast', 'And that will be England gone', 'Most things are never meant', 'I just think it will happen, soon'...

Going, Going

I thought it would last my time –

The sense that, beyond the town,

There would always be fields and farms,

Where the village louts could climb

Such trees as were not cut down;

I knew there’d be false alarms

 

In the papers about old streets

And split level shopping, but some

Have always been left so far;

And when the old part retreats

As the bleak high-risers come

We can always escape in the car.

 

Things are tougher than we are, just

As earth will always respond

However we mess it about;

Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:

The tides will be clean beyond.

– But what do I feel now? Doubt?

 

Or age, simply? The crowd

Is young in the M1 cafe;

Their kids are screaming for more –

More houses, more parking allowed,

More caravan sites, more pay.

On the Business Page, a score

 

Of spectacled grins approve

Some takeover bid that entails

Five per cent profit (and ten

Per cent more in the estuaries): move

Your works to the unspoilt dales

(Grey area grants)! And when

 

You try to get near the sea

In summer ...

It seems, just now,

To be happening so very fast;

Despite all the land left free

For the first time I feel somehow

That it isn’t going to last,

 

That before I snuff it, the whole

Boiling will be bricked in

Except for the tourist parts –

First slum of Europe: a role

It won’t be hard to win,

With a cast of crooks and tarts.

 

And that will be England gone,

The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

There’ll be books; it will linger on

In galleries; but all that remains

For us will be concrete and tyres.

 

Most things are never meant.

This won’t be, most likely; but greeds

And garbage are too thick-strewn

To be swept up now, or invent

Excuses that make them all needs.

I just think it will happen, soon.


Reading the poem today, it seems prophetic only in the sense that Larkin's England was indeed, as he sensed, going, going – but in all manner of ways, with changes that went far beyond the urban spread that is Larkin's preoccupation. If he had cast his net more widely, the results might well have been even more pessimistic, so perhaps it's just as well he didn't. His reflex pessimism was often, I think, quite shallow, half jocular, and frequently wrong. I recall that when he had his mother's ashes interred in St Michael's churchyard in Lichfield in 1977, the Rector told him that it was the last burial in the old churchyard, which also contained several earlier Larkin family graves. The churchyard would now, Larkin averred in a letter to Barbara Pym, be 'handed over to the Council to be landscaped into a vandals' playground or some such nonsense. I expect I shan't see all the old Larkin graves again ... as they will all be levelled and the stones taken away.' He was quite wrong, of course: the old churchyard of St Michael's is now a combination of well maintained historic burial ground and well managed nature reserve, and the old Larkin graves are still there, quite easily found. The one that eludes me, oddly, is that of Larkin's parents, which, having found it once (and photographed it), I have never been able to find again. 

3 comments:

  1. Wow. I never knew that's how this poem began. Why do you think it's not among his best? I remember learning it off by heart & in the process finding fault with it - but when I talked about my complaints with my brother he persuaded me the poem was fine; the problem was that i was judging it against the quite different - perhaps more mystical Yeatsian? - poem I wished Larkin had written but which he had never intended to write. Thus I was being fairly unreasonable
    ZMKC

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    1. I just feel it would have been better at a shorter length, more concentrated. In fact the cuts made by the government, taking out that stuff about the Business Pages and Grey Area Grants, might actually have improved the poem! That doesn't often happen. I'd rate the lines from 'And that will be England gone' to the end as vintage Larkin.

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  2. Although it does conjure what he wants it to conjure, "split level shopping" isn't his greatest phrase, nor is "the whole boiling" - but I wouldn't want to part with the "spectacled grins" ZMKC

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