Larkin in Venice

Yesterday Patrick Kurp posted a poem, 'Larkin's Typewriter' – a 5-4-5 sonnet evoking Larkin's sad loss of his poetic afflatus – by a poet I had never heard of before, Robin Saikia. Taking a look online, I discovered that Saikia has written at least one other Larkin-themed poem, 'Philip Larkin's Death in Venice',  in which the old curmudgeon ruthlessly skewers every romantic cliché about La Serenissima...

If I should die, think only this of me:  
I'd not say labyrinth, save ironically.  
Nor shimmering lagoon, nor lapis sky,  
Nor call some damp old church a jewel (why?).  

I never let the moon caress the spires,  
Or let canals reflect my heart’s desires.  
No gondolier was stoic, wry, or kind,  
No shadows whispered secrets to my mind.  

I saw no lovers lost in time’s embrace,  
No masks concealing sorrow’s tragic face.  
And never, even once, in life or dream,  
Did Byron’s ghost drift past upon the stream.  

Instead, I stood here, damp, confused, and cold,  
Inspecting water damage, growing mould,  
As cruise ships spewed out flocks of squawking Brits,  
And pigeons shat their Jackson Pollock shits.  

So if you must romanticise my end,  
At least don’t make me out some fool who penned  
The stuff that turns this sinking pile of stone  
Into a fleeting sigh, or softened moan.

This is one of a collection of Venetian poems by Saikia (who also wrote Drink and Think Venice: The Story of Venice in 26 Bars and Cafés). Here is another, in which he addresses John Ruskin himself – 'Venetian Light'...

I take the views to task for looking wrong,
Too bright, too sharp, too easily admired.
They stir me into long complaints
Of how Venetian light seems tired
Of telling the same old truth.

And all this balanced marble leaves me cold:
Palladian fronts, too pleased with being grand,
Look like the sort of buildings that uphold
Whatever graft found readily to hand,
Their symmetry a smirk at common need,
Their columns as performative as kings.
I see in them the tidiness of greed,
The waterline where beauty stops and power begins.
Look, for example, at that awful dome
Which claims the clouds as mere reflective drift;
Not so much a hallowed shelter
As vaulted evidence of civic grift.

Still worse, the precious murmur of canals,
Or chalk-dust overbrush of Guardi skies,
Washes back something truly grim,
A lesson in grief I happily once forgot,
That only the over-thoughtful truly learn:
Beauty is no luxury, but a brief reprieve
From something dark,
And only God knows what.

Despite all this, my water-scriptured bride 
Takes me in hand
In ways I never planned.

That slow unbuttoning of light and shade,
Those trembling walls, the peeling off of gold,
All these unfreeze me, tease out a reminder
Of how time illuminates a gentler truth:
That nothing built by man is ever free,
Nor should be, from a sense of loss,
Or a leaning back to youth.

I listen, then, as if her stone could speak
In arching syllables,
All Gothic tracery a whispered thought
That all our half-articulate desires
And private longings can and should be wrought,
Made public fact, by love or art;
That in these crooked lanes and lines
A Gothic spirit lives,
Not as a theory, but a daily act
Of breathing memory,
Giving a sense that all we seek
Is findable, if slightly out of sight,
Smudged, uncertain, blurred,
But there, in the Venetian light. 

There are more of Saikia's Venetian poems to be found here, and they are well worth exploring.