Loblolly

Speaking of Larkin (as we usually are), I was delighted to come across the word 'loblolly' in print the other day – the first time I've seen it anywhere but in Larkin's 'Toads' with its 'Lecturers, lispers, losels, loblolly-men, louts...' –

Why should I let the toad work

  Squat on my life?

Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork

  And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils

  With its sickening poison –

Just for paying a few bills!

  That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:

  Lecturers, lispers,

Losels, loblolly-men, louts –

  They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk 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.

Ah, were I courageous enough

  To shout Stuff your pension!

But I know, all too well, that's the stuff

  That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like

  Squats in me, too;

Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,

  And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney

  My way of getting

The fame and the girl and the money

  All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other

  One's spiritual truth;

But I do say it's hard to lose either,

  When you have both.

I came across 'loblolly' again in something my South African cousin wrote about the early history of Durban. He is telling the story of Henry Francis Fynn, who befriended the Zulu king Shaka Zulu and was given the strip of land that became the city of Durban.
Fynn is about to attempt to cure the wife of an uncle of Shaka's:
'Fynn's prior experience of medicine was as a loblolly boy – a surgeon's attendant – at Christ's Hospital, "when I obtained the smallest particle of knowledge of medicine" [as he writes in his diary].'
He was a resourceful fellow, though, and had read the Hippocratic oath. He effected a cure, and thereby got himself quite a reputation as a healer. 'Lots of folks live on their wits...'