Larkin again: 'Something people do'

Talking of Larkin, on this day in 1973 he signed off on one of his last long poems, Show Saturday (which was the last poem selected for High Windows, put in, on the poet's insistence, to add more substance). This is Larkin playing it straight with a solidly built, richly descriptive pastoral - no trace here of the Larkin of This Be the Verse or Annus Mirabilis or, say, The Life with a Hole in It. Show Saturday is in the gentler, more wistful, even affectionate mode of The Whitsun Weddings or Here or To the Sea. It was inspired by a visit to the Bellingham Show in Northumberland, and unfolds in long, slightly laboured lines, many of them enjambed, even between stanzas, to disguise the ABACBDCD rhyme scheme. As so often with Larkin, it ends beautifully...

Grey day for the Show, but cars jam the narrow lanes.

Inside, on the field, judging has started: dogs

(Set their legs back, hold out their tails) and ponies (manes

Repeatedly smoothed, to calm heads); over there, sheep

(Cheviot and Blackface); by the hedge, squealing logs

(Chain Saw Competition). Each has its own keen crowd.

In the main arena, more judges meet by the jeep:

The jumping’s on next. Announcements, splutteringly loud,

Clash with the quack of man with pound notes round his hat

And a lit-up board. There’s more than just animals:

Bead-stalls, balloon-men, a Bank; a beer-marquee that

Half-screens a canvas Gents; a tent selling tweed,

And another, jackets. Folks sit about on bales

Like great straw dice. For each scene is linked by spaces

Not given to anything much, where kids scrap, freed,

While their owners stare different ways with incurious faces.

The wrestling starts, late; a wide ring of people; then cars;

Then trees; then pale sky. Two young men in acrobats’ tights

And embroidered trunks hug each other; rock over the grass,

Stiff-legged, in a two-man scrum. One falls: they shake hands.

Two more start, one grey-haired: he wins, though. They’re not so much fights

As long immobile strainings that end in unbalance

With one on his back, unharmed, while the other stands

Smoothing his hair. Bit there are other talents –

The long high tent of growing and making, wired-off

Wood tables past which crowds shuffle, eyeing the scrubbed spaced

Extrusions of earth: blanch leeks like church candles, six pods of

Broad beans (one split open), dark shining-leafed cabbages – rows

Of single supreme versions, followed (on laced

Paper mats) by dairy and kitchen; four brown eggs, four white eggs,

Four plain scones, four dropped scones, pure excellences that enclose

A recession of skills. And, after them, lambing sticks, rugs,

Needlework, knitted caps, baskets, all worthy, all well done,

But less than the honeycombs. Outside, the jumping’s over.

The young ones thunder their ponies in competition

Twice round the ring; the trick races, Musical Stalls,

Sliding off, riding bareback, the ponies dragged to and fro for

Bewildering requirements, not minding. But now, in the background,

Like shifting scenery, horse-boxes move; each crawls

Towards the stock entrance, tilting and swaying, bound

For far-off farms. The pound-note man decamps.

The car park has thinned. They’re loading jumps on a truck.

Back now to private addresses, gates and lamps

In high stone one-street villages, empty at dusk,

And side roads of small towns (sports finals stuck

In front doors, allotments reaching down to the railway);

Back now to autumn, leaving the ended husk

Of summer that brought them here for Show Saturday –

The men with hunters, dog-breeding wool-defined women,

Children all saddle-swank, mugfaced middleaged wives

Glaring at jellies, husbands on leave from the garden

Watchful as weasels, car-tuning curt-haired sons –

Back now, all of them, to their local lives:

To names on vans, and business calendars

Hung up in kitchens; back to loud occasions

In the Corn Exchange, to market days in bars,

To winter coming, as the dismantled Show

Itself dies back into the area of work.

Let it stay hidden there like strength, below

Sale-bills and swindling; something people do,

Not noticing how time’s rolling smithy-smoke

Shadows much greater gestures; something they share

That breaks ancestrally each year into

Regenerate union. Let it always be there.