ESC: English Studies in Canada

L O N E L I N E S S C L A R I F I E S : A S T U D Y O F T H E L O N G E R P O E M S O F P H I L I P L A R K I N MARY FORD Carleton University I n the Christmas 1977 issue of TLS there appeared a painfully pessimistic poem by British poet Philip Larkin. In contrast to the mood of joy which traditionally pervades this celebration of the birth of Jesus, the theme of Larkin’s poem was death, not the regenerative death-in-Christ, but the darkly feared death of “total emptiness forever.” “Aubade” is the poet’s most melan­ choly pronouncement on human expectations. It is also the latest in a series of longer poems, beginning with “Church Going” (1955), in which he expresses himself on some important aspects of British life, including such highly personal areas as religion, marriage, aging, and death. To accommodate his ideas he uses a longer form (usually five to eight stanzas with six-beat lines), which is more intricate, more consciously planned, and more serious in tone than many of his shorter verses. How Larkin makes use of this form in a unique and personal way will be the subject of this paper. To illustrate his development of this technique, the following poems will be considered: “Church Going,” published in The Less Deceived (1955), “The Whitsun Weddings,” published in The Whitsun Weddings (1964), “The Old Fools” and “The Building,” both in High Windows (1973), and finally, “Aubade,” TLS, December 1977. The longer poems follow the same general pattern, beginning with a detailed description of a physical setting, followed by an intellectual, then often emotional, involvement on the part of the speaker, and concluding with a statement of realization or affirmation. The use of this form adds an important dimension to Larkin’s work. Louis Martz has linked this form with a long tradition of British medita­ tive poetry beginning with John Donne. The procedure for the meditative poem is similar to the religious meditative process of the seventeenth century as outlined by the Jesuit, Edward Dawson, in 1614. It involves, essentially, a cerebral drama in which the participant sees himself on an inner stage. The participant is alone. Out of his solitude comes reflection and revelation. Says Martz of the meditative poet, he “constructs a stage on which an insatiable actor presents to the mind the action of an inward search.”1 This poetic English Studies in Canada, vi, 3, Fall 1980 process for such modem poets as Hardy, Stevens, and Larkin becomes a secularized version of the seventeenth-century religious meditative experi­ ence. For Philip Larkin, “loneliness clarifies” because it makes the meditative process possible. It also links him with a great spiritual and poetic tradition of the past. Briefly infatuated with the musical language of Yeats early in his career, Larkin, by the mid-50s, was soon under the more earthy spell of Thomas Hardy. In 1896, the speaker in Hardy’s famous “Wessex Heights” gained comfort from his surroundings, and, alone and aloof on a familiar promon­ tory, surveyed his past life, anguished over his failed relationships and loss of faith, and drew some comfort from the solid English earth, where “mind chains do not clank.”2 Using the freedom gained from the vantage point of isolation, Larkin, like Hardy before him, seems imbued with what Hardy in “Wessex Heights” called “a long vision.” In the style of his mentor, he attempts to work out socio-philosophical problems in terms of an enlightened humanism. He has resolved, it would seem, to surrender to reality and accept less than the ideal. His themes, too, are of life’s large events: love, loss, aging, human relationships, faith, and death. Hardy, whose influence on Larkin was, in Larkin’s own words, “undramatic, complete and permanent,” 3 con­ fessed to “a forlorn hope, a mere dream, that of an alliance between religion . . . and complete rationality . . . by means of the interfusing effect of poetry.”4 The importance of religion for agnostic Larkin is questionable, but in the large area of...