Six Poets (21 page)

High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms

With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows

How much … How little … Yawning, I suppose

I fell asleep, waking at the fumes

And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,

And ate an awful pie, and walked along

The platform to its end to see the ranged

Joining and parting lines reflect a strong

Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,

No house or land still seemed quite natural.

Only a numbness registered the shock

Of finding out how much had gone of life,

How widely from the others. Dockery, now:

Only nineteen, he must have taken stock

Of what he wanted, and been capable

Of … No, that's not the difference: rather, how

Convinced he was he should be added to!

Why did he think adding meant increase?

To me it was dilution. Where do these

Innate assumptions come from? Not from what

We think truest, or most want to do:

Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They're more a style

Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,

Suddenly they harden into all we've got

And how we got it; looked back on, they rear

Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying

For Dockery a son, for me nothing,

Nothing with all a son's harsh patronage.

Life is first boredom, then fear.

Whether or not we use it, it goes,

And leaves what something hidden from us chose,

And age, and then the only end of age.

I don't, alas, know much about the technicalities of poetry. Like most people, I recognise a thumping metre and an obvious rhyme and not much more. But poetry isn't just prose that's been through the shredder, and it's only after reading Larkin's poems a few times that one senses how well they're constructed, the rhymes lurking just under the surface so that what seems casual and even discursive is actually carefully structured. Larkin's remark about MacNeice – ‘He always brings the kite down safely' – applies equally well to Larkin himself.

Larkin generally feels, or affects to feel, shut out, though the language he uses in order to say so signals that he still wants to be recognised as a member of the human race, and a pretty straightforward one at that. He has one poem which begins:

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he's fucking her and she's

Taking the pill or wearing a diaphragm,

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives –

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly …

Well. Not quite. Yes, one wants to say, but … Of course, Larkin wrote that in 1967, a few months before this:

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(Which was rather late for me) –

Between the end of the
Chatterley
ban

And the Beatles' first LP.

Up till then there'd only been

A sort of bargaining,

A wrangle for a ring,

A shame that started at sixteen

And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:

Everyone felt the same,

And every life became

A brilliant breaking of the bank,

A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than

In nineteen sixty-three

(Though just too late for me) –

Between the end of the
Chatterley
ban

And the Beatles' first LP.

Larkin didn't want to be thought nice, and sometimes wasn't. A friend of mine – the writer Neville Smith – was a student at Hull and found himself at a bus stop with Larkin. It was pouring with rain and Larkin had an umbrella. Neville edged closer and closer to the poet until finally Larkin said, ‘Don't think you're coming under my umbrella.'

‘Don't think you're coming under my umbrella' could serve as a description of a number of his poems. The temptation of all art is to console, but Larkin's poems seldom attempt to.

This next poem would, I suppose, nowadays be called a ‘green' poem, though properly construed, all poems are green. It was written in 1971, when its sentiments were rather less modish than they are today.

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 café;

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 so 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.

That poem was written for the Department of the Environment. What Larkin didn't foresee was that one of the things that was going was the ability of government departments to spend money on poems.

Now a poem called ‘1914', though the title is written in Roman numerals, as if it were carved on a war memorial.

Those long uneven lines

Standing as patiently

As if they were stretched outside

The Oval or Villa Park,

The crowns of hats, the sun

On moustached archaic faces

Grinning as if it were all

An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached

Established names on the sunblinds,

The farthings and sovereigns,

And dark-clothed children at play

Called after kings and queens,

The tin advertisements

For cocoa and twist, and the pubs

Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring:

The place-names all hazed over

With flowering grasses, and fields

Shadowing Domesday lines

Under wheat's restless silence;

The differently-dressed servants

With tiny rooms in huge houses,

The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word – the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again.