The Poetry of Philip Larkin

John Press
Philip Larkin, like Tennyson, has the power to make poetry out of material that might seem to
be unpromising and intractable. Most of us live in urban or suburban landscapes among the
constructions and the detritus of an industrial society. Larkin distills poetry from the
appurtenances of this societyan Odeon cinema, advertisement hoardings [British billboards], scrap
heaps of disused cars, hospital waiting rooms, cut-price storeswhich he presents without
falsification or sentimentality. And, again like Tennyson, he delineates with considerable force and
delicacy the pattern of contemporary sensibility, tracing the way in which we respond to our
environment, plotting the ebb and flow of the emotional flux within us, embodying in his poetry
attitudes of heart and mind that seem peculiarly characteristic of our time: doubt, insecurity,
boredom, aimlessness, and malaise. (p. 131)
Larkin is, like Tennyson, an artist of the first rank, who employs language with a rare
freshness, precision, and resonance, and whose verse records with lyrical purity his experience of
loneliness and anguish. He is both the unofficial laureate of post-war Britian and the poet who
voices most articulately and poignantly the spiritual desolation of a world in which men have shed
the last rags of religious faith that once lent meaning and hope to human lives. (p. 132)
The 1966 edition of The North Ship is a reprint of the 1945 edition, plus one poem, numbered
XXXII, of which Larkin writes: As a coda I have added a poem, written a year or so later, which,
though not noticeably better than the rest, shows the Celtic fever abated and the patient sleeping
soundly. The first stanza of this poem leads us at once into a world far removed from the artificial,
literary stage set of The North Ship:
Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair,
I looked down at the empty hotel yard
Once meant for coaches. Cobblestones were wet,
But sent no light back to the loaded sky,
Sunk as it was with mist down to the roofs.
Drainpipes and fire-escape climbed up
Past rooms still burning their electric light:
I thought: Featureless morning, featureless night.
Already in this stanza we can observe many of the hallmarks of Larkin's mature poetry: the
ability to evoke not only the specific appearances of things but the atmosphere that surrounds
them; the power of discovering poetry in objects or in situations that most people would regard as
dull or unremarkable; a rare skill in making slight, unobtrusive departures from the dominant
metrical patternthe last line deviates from the expected beat of the iambic pentameter and, despite
its irregularity, paradoxically conveys the impression of weariness and monotony: I thought:
Featureless morning, featureless night.

It is instructive to compare this poem with Poem XX from The North Ship, which begins, I
see a girl dragged by the wrists / Across a dazzling field of snow, and speedily moves on to the
contemplation of the poet as a sack of meal upon two sticks, and of two old ragged men, before
concluding with an image of a snow-white unicorn. The girl exists merely as a prologue to a
brilliant evocation of Yeatsian cadences and personae.
The theme of poem XXXII is also Yeatsian in its speculation about the poet's being forced to
choose between the Muse and the mortal girl, but although there is no description of her physical
or emotional characteristics, we are convinced that, like the young lady in the photograph album,
this is a real girl in a real place. It is not easy to determine to what extent the poem reflects
Larkin's newly-born admiration for Hardy. The diction and the tone are quite unlike Hardy, and
indeed Larkin seldom imitates or verbally echoes him. Yet he is present in the poem, even though
we cannot locate him precisely, for as Larkin himself remarked, Hardy taught me to feel rather
than to write. From 1946 onward Larkin has remained faithful to the belief that poetry can be
made out of any situation or incident, however odd or trivial, that genuinely stirs the poet.
Conversely, he must write only about those matters that move or excite him and not about subjects
that he feels ought to form the themes of his poetry. This belief Larkin owes in part to his study of
Hardy. (pp. 13435)
The awareness of suffering and the brooding spirit of compassion that inform so much of
Hardy's poetry are widely diffused throughout The Less Deceived. I believe also that there is a
close kinship between the emotional pattern of this collection and the complex attitude of mind
delineated by Hardy in the Apology, dated February 1922, with which he prefaced Late Lyrics and
Earlier. Poems such as Deceptions and Myxomatosis embody Hardy's desire that pain to all upon
[the globe], tongued or dumb, shall be kept down to a minimum by loving-kindness. And the best
introduction to Church Going, the most celebrated poem in The Less Deceived, is Hardy's
Apology, with its conviction that Poetry and religion touch each other, or rather modulate into
each other; are, indeed, often but different names for the same thing. Although Larkin has
remarked of Church Going that its tone and argument are entirely secular, the power of this poem
is largely generated by the tension between the ironical mistrust of orthodox Christianity
expressed by the poet and his intuitive reverence for the church as a place where our intimations of
mystery and destiny are enshrined. ... Hardy, despite his atheism, regarded himself as a churchy
man, and in the Apology acknowledges the potentialities of the Anglican Church. ... Although
Larkin is, like Hardy, an unbeliever, he suggests in Church Going that this accoutred frowsty barn
of a church will continue to be worthy of respect. ... (p. 138)
If The Less Deceived can be called Tennysonian because of the notes of lyrical intensity,
loneliness, and longing that resound so plangently in its pages, The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
reveals the other side of the Tennysonian medal on which the lineaments of contemporary England
are depicted. Larkin evokes for us, in poem after poem, the postwar English landscape, rural,
urban, and suburban; and his verse takes on the central, representative character that marks the
poems of Tennyson in the years after 1850 and of Auden in the late 1920s and throughout the
1930s. (p. 139)

Whereas T. S. Eliot regards the modern world with horror and catalogues, with a mixture of
disdain and disgust, golf-balls, abortifacient pills, women's underwear, false teeth, cigarette ends,
and other testimony of summer nights, Larkin is moved to a wry tenderness. ... Even the enormous
hoardings that most of us find so distasteful awaken in Larkin a rueful compassion, since he sees
them as the media whereby the urban masses are led to contemplate ideal Forms in the Platonic
sense, (although they are deluding Forms). The title of the poem, Essential Beauty, in Whitsun
Weddings is not entirely ironical: the figures on the hoardings transport simple people into a pure,
otherworldly realm, and in an age when the Christian pantheon has lost its power to comfort and
uphold, they may bring a kind of consolation to those on their deathbed. ... (pp. 13940)
The volume's title poem, The Whitsun Weddings, evokes a series of impressionist pictures
that capture the appearance and the atmosphere of our heavily urbanized landscape. Larkin
manages to combine a curt exactness with a Tennysonian delicacy and amplitude. ... Larkin's eye
is acute and unsentimental: his portrayal of the wedding guests clustered on the railway station
platforms is so accurate that it verges on cruelty. ... Yet these rather coarse, ridiculous figures are
aware that marriage, like birth and death, has a sacred quality. ... And as the train approaches
London the poet feels that in some mysterious way the Waste Land of the metropolis is fertilized
not by a dying god or a mythical redeemer, but by the newly married couples sitting in the railway
carriages. (pp. 14041)
High Windows contains more overt comment on the state of England than any of Larkin's
previous volumes. Twenty years earlier he had remarked that the impulse to preserve lies at the
bottom of all art, and such an impulse colors his entire political and social philosophy, which is
profoundly conservative and pessimistic. Larkin's feeling for tradition and continuity is very
strong: one of the most beautiful poems from The Whitsun Weddings, MCMXIV, is an elegy for
those who rushed to volunteer at the outbreak of the First World War, and for a vanished England;
another poem from that volume, Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses, flays a
literary intellectual who despises the London crowds on Armistice Day. (p. 141)
Homage to a Government, written in 1969 and included, like Going, Going, in High
Windows, has angered some readers by its reactionary sentiments. Just as MCMXIV is a lament
for lost innocence, Homage to a Government is a lament for a sense of responsibility submerged
beneath a tide of materialism. ... It is a mark of Larkin's superb technical skill that in Homage to a
Government he can make a virtue of monotony and give tonelessness a strong flavor. (p. 142)
The poems on public themes in High Windows are counter-balanced by poems that evoke a
world transcending the contingencies and imperfection of daily existence. Larkin has always been
aware of such a world, which corresponds to the needs of human loneliness and longing, and
whose nature can be hinted at by the medium of images drawn from the inexhaustible realm of
naturesun, moon, water, sky, clouds, distance. (p. 143)
[Although Larkin] has repeatedly deplored the post-Symbolist revolution inaugurated by
Eliot and Ezra Pound, [there is] a quality that has been present in his poetry from the very start, a
quality that manifests itself in High Windows with an intensity of feeling and of utterance fiercer
than Larkin has ever previously attained. The language takes on at times a concentration and

density so intricate and compressed that they incur the charge of obscurity, a vice strongly
reprehended by Larkin in twentieth-century poetry:
By night, snow swerves
(O loose moth world)
Through the stare travelling
Leather-black waters.
This kind of concentrated lyrical purity coexists in certain poems with vulgarisms and
obscenities that have become more frequent and more coarse with every successive volume. There
are precedents for this in modern English verse. Eliot's Sweeney Among the Nightingales
foreshadows the strategy, though not the vocabulary, of Larkin's more outspoken poems; and Yeats
shocked some of his older admirers with his Crazy Jane sequence and with Last Poems (Larkin
still owes more to the rhetoric of his first master than he may care to admit). The collocation of
musical intensity and poignant longing with the employment of four-letter words more commonly
found in taprooms and barracks than in poems occurs in several places in High Windows. The title
poem opens with a brutal reflection on youthful sexuality, but ends in a meditation that transcends
the impulses of sweating carnality. ... The title of another poem, Sad Steps, lulls us into a mood of
high romance where Sir Philip Sidney looks questioningly at the heavens: With how sad steps, O
Moon, thou climb'st the skies! We are in for a shock:
Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.
Then, after a precise delineation of the cloudy sky through which the moon dashes, the poem
modulates into a series of invocations that might be the climax of a Symbolist poem, were it not
for the irony underlying the apostrophes. The moon shifts again, the rhetoric is dispersed, and the
poem ends with a bare statement that, like so many of Larkin's closing lines, strikes home with
unerring accuracy and gravity:
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.
I began this essay by suggesting that Larkin is, like Tennyson, at once the public laureate of
contemporary England and the solitary poet of human isolation, fear, and longing. One poem in

High Windows, Then Trees, is more reminiscent of Tennyson than anything else that Larkin has
written. This is partly because it employs the metrical and stanzaic form of In Memoriam, but
mainly because it recalls and re-creates the older poet's extraordinary responsiveness to the
emotional significance no less than to the sensuous properties of the English landscape. (pp.
14345)
We find in Larkin as in Tennyson an awareness of the way in which the utter perfection and
abundance of the natural world accentuate our sense of its mortality as well as of our own. The
whole poem is so perfectly ordered that it is unrewarding to point out individual felicities, but it is
worth drawing attention to the consummate artistry and deep awareness of complex emotions
displayed in the last line. The word afresh normally evokes images of greenness and of hope. So it
does here; but Larkin somehow contrives to suggest that sadness and transience are mingled with
joy and affirmation. The effect is akin to that achieved at times by Mozart and Schubert at their
most tender and poignant:
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. (pp. 14546)
(Source: John Press, The Poetry of Philip Larkin, in The Southern Review, Vol. XIII, No. 1,
Winter, 1977.)