Philip Larkin (16 page)

You have no limbs

Crying for stillness, you have no mind

Trembling with seraphims,

You have no death to come. (XIII)

The phrasing shows a refined ear for the music of vowels and consonants: ‘Trembling with seraphims’.
²⁰
Even more exquisite is the jewel-like miniature, ‘This is the first thing’ (XXVI):

This is the first thing

I have understood:

Time is the echo of an axe

Within a wood.

This lyric, in plain indicative mood, elusive in literal meaning but immediately emotionally comprehensible, would be perfectly in place in one of Ezra Pound’s anthologies of imagist poetry.

One major strand of the volume is an aestheticist celebration of beauty for its own sake in a tone of secular worship or awe. In ‘Like the train’s beat’ (XII), the poet glimpses transcendent beauty in the eyelashes and ‘sharp vivacity of bone’ of a Polish airgirl in a corner seat, lit through the window of the swaying train by the ‘swinging and narrowing sun’:

all humanity of interest

Before her angled beauty falls [. . .]

Her beauty has an abstract precision, as loveless and deathless as the running water and wind in ‘I put my mouth’. Her fluttering foreign words are as ‘meaningless’ as the ‘whorling’ notes issuing from a bird’s throat. A similar pure lyric impulse informs ‘Is it for now or for always’ (XXVIII), a
carpe diem
poem, playing with words to conjure exalted euphoria from an assertion of transience:

Shine out, my sudden angel,

Break fear with breast and brow,

I take you now and for always,

For always is always now.

The ecstatic rhetoric cannot conceal the irony familiar from ancient and Renaissance examples of the genre. The only permanence the poet can offer his beloved is the livelong minute: we are always here; always is always now. Life is never more than a moment long.

To achieve a unifying tone of pure lyricism, Larkin entirely excluded the humour and irony of his Brunette persona from the volume. He also banished the postures of his earlier Audenesques in favour of a more direct address to the reader. Larkin dedicated the first poem in the volume ‘To Bruce Montgomery’, but though his friend was generous about it (‘I
like
the North Ship’), he still preferred the Brunette works: ‘I adore WGO [
Willow Gables at Oxford
]. There’s a sort of brisk heartlessness about it, and it is extraordinarily funny.’
²¹
Partly perhaps because of Montgomery’s lack of enthusiasm, but also because of the long delay before publication, Larkin always felt disappointed with
The North Ship
. His dissatisfaction resurfaced when the collection was reprinted in 1966 in the wake of the success of
The Whitsun Weddings
. In the Introduction to the reissue he derided his youthful pretension: ‘Then, as now, I could never contemplate it without a twinge, faint or powerful, of shame compounded with disappointment. Some of this was caused by the contents but not all: I felt in some ways cheated. I can’t exactly say how. It was a pity they had ever mentioned February.’
²²

In 1966 Larkin reflected that the volume contained ‘not one abandoned self but several’, and added self-deprecatingly that ‘The search for a style was merely one aspect of a general immaturity.’
²³
An alert reader will catch the widest range of verbal echoes: Keats, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Ernest Dowson, A. E. Housman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the French symbolists, T. E. Hulme, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas. But, though some of the poems in the volume are second-hand and weakly characterized, it does not deserve his later scorn. It is remarkable how often a poem in
The North Ship
appears upon examination to be an early, less forceful version of a later mature poem. The symbolist ‘One man walking a deserted platform’ (XXII) was later recast in his later ‘Movement’ demotic style, as ‘Poetry of Departures’; ‘Morning has spread again’ (XXV) anticipates ‘No Road’. ‘Like the train’s beat’ (XII), with its image of the ‘meaningless’ beauty of the Polish airgirl, looks forward to the poet’s ‘useless’ encounter with beauty in ‘Latest Face’.

In 1966 Larkin was apologetic about his ‘infatuation’ with the particularly potent music of Yeats, ‘pervasive as garlic’, pleading in excuse that it has ‘ruined many a better talent’.
²⁴
Later in life he became fixed in condemnation, referring to ‘that shit Yeats, farting out his histrionic rubbish’.
²⁵
There may be a personal, biographical explanation for this puzzlingly disproportionate antipathy. The most headily Yeatsian works in
The North Ship
are Larkin’s first real love poems. ‘Morning has spread again’ (XXV) could easily be read, for instance, as an immature attempt to dictate the script of his relationship with Ruth Bowman. The poet dreams that the love affair has run its course to the end; the lovers have ‘worn down love good-humouredly’, and are left:

Talking in fits and starts

As friends, as they will be

Who have let passion die within their hearts.

The couple in Yeats’s ‘Ephemera’ sighed similarly that ‘Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.’
²⁶
This is very satisfying and poetic. But, following this valediction, the speaker expresses puzzlement that ‘love can have already set / In dreams, when we’ve not met / More times than I can number on one hand.’ The cosy ventriloquism of Yeats is broken by the poet’s dismay that he is rehearsing the end of the relationship when he should by rights be rejoicing at its beginning.

Similarly it is easy to read ‘Love, we must part now’ (XXIV) as a Yeatsian spell, designed to avert the threat of Ruth’s growing emotional dependence by anticipating the end of the relationship in
fin de siècle
world-weariness:

Love, we must part now: do not let it be

Calamitous and bitter. In the past

There has been too much moonlight and self-pity [. . .]

There is a whiff of the nineties decadents Dowson and Symons here. And the young poet was only too aware that such gorgeous rhetorical gestures were irrelevant to his real situation. His and Ruth’s parting, nearly six years later, was indeed to be ‘calamitous and bitter’. But he could not realistically expect her to share his enjoyment of his gaudy rhetoric of tall ships ‘wet with light’, ‘waving apart’ as the sun boldly paces the sky. The poem’s tone, indeed, is so high-falutin that one might suspect the young poet of mocking himself, in Montgomery mode, inserting invisible inverted commas of irony: ‘There is regret. Always, there is regret. / But it is better that our lives unloose [. . .]’ It seems that following the bitter reproaches and self-reproaches of his long engagement to Ruth he felt painfully embarrassed by the manipulative bad faith of these poems. The quarrel was perhaps less with Yeats’s rhetoric itself than with his own use of it in the emotional mistreatment of Ruth.

Implicit in the imagery of
The North Ship
is an ominous gender theme. At times we see a Larkin concerned to empathize with women in a straightforward human way. The speaker of ‘Ugly Sister’ (XIX), disregarded, climbs the thirty steps to her high room.

Since I was not bewitched in adolescence

And brought to love,

I will attend to the trees and their gracious silence,

To winds that move.

This lonely, ugly girl offers a protest against simplificatory gender archetypes which do not allow ugly sisters to be objects of empathy. But she is not quite a real girl in a real place. The theme is expressed in the terms of the ‘myth-kitty’; she finds her consolation in a symbolic attic, communing with the elements. Overwhelmingly in the volume, women remain archetypal and idealized. They are muses, ‘sudden angels’, sweet severed images, floating wing-stiff in the sun; or, like the Polish airgirl, they are embodiments of Beauty. They may even be, as in ‘The North Ship’,
femmes fatales
.

In the most complex poem in the volume, ‘I see a girl dragged by the wrists’ (XX), the girl is on the one hand the male poet’s unattainable muse; on the other she shows, in Brunette vein, his intense desire to ‘be that girl!’ The mixing of the two motives makes for a powerful but muddled effect. The poem opens with a stark antithesis between the girl rejoicing in the flux of life and the male poet alienated and self-doubting. With affected world-weariness he regrets his inability to identify himself with this girl as she is dragged laughing across the snow in courtship horseplay:

Nothing so wild, nothing so glad as she

Rears up in me,

And would not, though I watched an hour yet.

He will never, as he had once hoped, ‘be / As she is’. Remarkably, the man who is dragging the girl by the wrists is of no concern to the poet. He feels no rivalry, no envy of this man’s masterful control over the girl. Instead he strains to identify himself with
her
delighted passivity. His vain hope had been to achieve her breathless submission to life. On this level the poem propounds, if with an unusual gender twist, the familiar
fin de siècle
theme of the alienated poet’s exclusion from the everyday world which his poetry serves and celebrates.

However, his resignation to his lot has, it seems, caused the ‘first brick’ of a new imaginative building to be laid, and he finds himself suddenly excited ‘to fever-pitch again’ by the sight of ‘two old ragged men’ clearing the drifts ‘with shovels and a spade’:

The beauty dries my throat.

Now they express

All that’s content to wear a worn-out coat,

All actions done in patient hopelessness [. . .]

The beauty he had seen in the young girl reappears in the epiphany of these two shabby old men. They ‘sweep the girl clean from my heart’. Here it seems is a different version of the muse, realer and less conventionally beautiful than the girl. The structure of the poem imitates that of Yeats’s early Platonic meditation ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’. Yeats sought ‘Eternal beauty wandering on her way’ in the symbolic rose itself, but then found that he must come down to earth and turn his attention also to the ‘rose-breath’: to the reflection of eternal beauty in the mortal world of ‘common things that crave’.
²⁷
Larkin retreads Yeats’s tortuous poetic steps, turning from the transcendent beauty of the girl to the less obvious beauty of the commonplace old men. The speaker claims, ‘I’m content to see / What poor mortar and bricks / I have to build with.’

But at this point the young poet begins to slip and slide between alternative inspirations and the momentum falters. He abruptly reverts to his hopeless desire to be the girl, and the old men change from alternative muses into metaphorical artists:

Damn all explanatory rhymes!

To be that girl! – but that’s impossible;

For me the task’s to learn the many times

When I must stoop, and throw a shovelful [. . .]

The poem ends by leaping to a quite different evocation of the beauty he seeks, in the form neither of the girl nor of the two old men, but of a preposterous Yeatsian ‘snow-white unicorn’, which in reward for his service may ‘Descend at last to me, / And put into my hand its golden horn.’ Are there invisible inverted commas of irony here? Unicorns traditionally entrust themselves to virgins; is he perhaps making derisive reference to his own virginal state? The word ‘horn’, which in letters to male friends Larkin uses frequently in its vulgar meaning, also hints at an obscene joke. The poet conjures an image of a girlish muse while holding a horn in his hand as he stoops to throw a shovelful.