Six Poets (22 page)

If poetry is the highest form of writing, it's because it does so much with so little. That poem, only thirty-two lines, says as much as a play or a film.

In 1954, Larkin wrote a poem about work, in which he pictured it as a toad: ‘Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?' This poem, written nearly ten years later, takes a mellower view, with Larkin now rather easier on himself.

Walking around in the park

Should feel better than work:

The lake, the sunshine,

The grass to lie on,

Blurred playground noises

Beyond black-stockinged nurses –

Not a bad place to be.

Yet it doesn't suit me,

Being one of the men

You meet of an afternoon:

Palsied old step-takers,

Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters,

Waxed-fleshed out-patients

Still vague from accidents,

And characters in long coats

Deep in the litter-baskets –

All dodging the toad work

By being stupid or weak.

Think of being them!

Hearing the hours chime,

Watching the bread delivered,

The sun by clouds covered,

The children going home;

Think of being them,

Turning over their failures

By some bed of lobelias,

Nowhere to go but indoors,

No friends but empty chairs –

No, give me my in-tray,

My loaf-haired secretary,

My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir:

What else can I answer,

When the lights come on at four

At the end of another year?

Give me your arm, old toad;

Help me down Cemetery Road.

Larkin relished dullness. ‘Deprivation is for me', he said famously, ‘what daffodils are for Wordsworth.' But he also said that however negative some of his poems might seem, one should never forget that writing a poem was never negative; to write a poem is a very positive thing to do.

This poem was inspired by a tomb in Chichester Cathedral, and it's among Larkin's best known and most hopeful.

Side by side, their faces blurred,

The earl and countess lie in stone,

Their proper habits vaguely shown

As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,

And that faint hint of the absurd –

The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque

Hardly involves the eye, until

It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still

Clasped empty in the other; and

One sees, with a sharp tender shock,

His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.

Such faithfulness in effigy

Was just a detail friends would see:

A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace

Thrown off in helping to prolong

The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in

Their supine stationary voyage

The air would change to soundless damage,

Turn the old tenantry away;

How soon succeeding eyes begin

To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths

Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light

Each summer thronged the glass. A bright

Litter of birdcalls strewed the same

Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths

The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.

Now, helpless in the hollow of

An unarmorial age, a trough

Of smoke in slow suspended skeins

Above their scrap of history,

Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into

Untruth. The stone fidelity

They hardly meant has come to be

Their final blazon, and to prove

Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.

Larkin's last long poem ‘Aubade' was printed in the
Times Literary Supplement
in 1977. I remember it being something of an event: you asked friends if they'd seen it. It was what it must have been like in the nineteenth century when poetry was news.

By this time, though, Larkin was writing less and less. He hadn't abandoned poetry, he said; poetry had abandoned him. In
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
, Wilde says that he who lives more lives than one, more deaths than one must die, and not being able to write was a kind of death, though one which Larkin bore stoically and with his usual grim humour, comparing it to going bald – nothing he could do about it. But he did regret it very much, and it made the last years of his life all the bleaker.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what's really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

And interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

– The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says
No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel
, not seeing

That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can't escape,

Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

When Larkin died, there was a great and unexpected out-pouring of public affection and appreciation, some of which, though, he must have been aware of during his lifetime. He had always tried to dodge the public, letting his second nature – the grim pessimism of so many of his poems – do duty for the whole man. ‘I have a great shrinking from publicity,' he wrote to the novelist Barbara Pym. ‘Think of me as A. E. Housman without the talent or the scholarship. Or the curious private life.'

Still, when one is dead, one's life is no longer one's own, and though his diaries were burned, biographical and critical studies now loom, and what we feel now about Larkin then is perhaps another reason why he regarded death with such a marked lack of enthusiasm. If anything, after his death there was too much glad endorsement of the bleaker side of his verse, a lot of jumping on his bandwagon (if a hearse can be a bandwagon), so I'd like to finish on a more optimistic note. I ended the Hardy section with a poem – ‘Proud Songsters' – that was almost cheerful, and with Larkin's admiration for and debt to Hardy, it's appropriate to end this one with a poem very like it in spirit.