Looking back, I find in the poems not one abandoned self but many—the ex-schoolboy, for whom Auden was the only alternative to ‘old-fashioned’ poetry; the undergraduate… and the immediately post-Oxford self, isolated in Shropshire with a complete Yeats stolen from the local girls’ school. This search for a style was one aspect of a general immaturity. (qtd. in Swarbrick 18)
Following suit with a historicizing twist, Stephen Regan, in an early discussion of the Collected Poems, finds in them the bland attributes of most British wartime poetry: “mellifluous, mystifying, and resolutely apolitical” (67). The terms are precise, for it is the shockingly terse (“This be the verse”), lucid (“Aubade”) and politically poignant (“High Windows”) that defines the mature Larkin; the opposite of these must be accounted for in the early poetry to posit his reactionary development. Likewise, the title of A.T. Tolley’s sensitive reading of Larkin’s poetic development, My Proper Ground, explicitly charts a trajectory that makes Larkin’s early poems, like his childhood, seem forgettable, unimportant, improper. To problematize the reading offered by Larkin and others means countering the reactionary model of poetic development, one that seems warranted by the poet’s wryest voice in his most mature work, “Sad Steps,” for example. “Sad Steps,” of course, takes its title from sonnet 31 of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella sequence. Andrew Swarbrick briefly touches on the tested reading of the poem as an attempt “to rise above mere mockery” (146)—mockery, of course, being the catchall word for Larkin’s attitude toward life and literary tradition. Such a limited reading seems now unjustifiable with the publication of Larkin’s earliest poetry. Among the many interesting areas of research made possible by the Collected Poems and Early Poems, one is the study of Larkin’s deep investment in the sonnet tradition, a form that almost never appears in his previously published work, and perhaps is best known for its notable absence in “Sad Steps.” The early sonnets contextualize a fuller reading of the later poems such as “Sad Steps” by revealing Larkin’s deep preoccupation with poetic form, and the tenuous survival of a specifically English poetic sensibility in post-war England. Rather than mere juvenilia and the product of “immaturity,” the overwhelming number of sonnets among Larkin’s earliest poems indicate the start of a continuing poetic dialogue with the early modern period and with themes salient to the early modern poetic tradition; they also help to explain his chief preoccupations with the problem of time and the function of art as a monument of survival. Instead of a schoolboy conventionalist, this young Larkin appears more like an artist innovatively experimenting with the sonnet form in the crafting of poetic voice. That the sonnet would appeal to Larkin is hardly surprising. Always in conflict with influences and with himself, Larkin no doubt found in the space of the sonnet the dynamics of analysis. Analysis, at least according to Paul Oppenheimer in his discussion of the sonnet in The Birth of the Modern Mind, is the unique historical function of the form, since it is “the first lyric form since the fall of the Roman Empire intended not for music or performance but for silent reading. As such, it is the first lyric of self-consciousness, or of the self in conflict” (3). It is this latter self, the self in conflict—in a struggle with time, and thus ineluctable mortality—that produces self-consciousness and the stinging awareness of human limitations in the calculus of Larkin’s early sonnets. Notably it is the futility of the struggle that runs throughout Larkin’s sonnets, a recognition that would guide one of his most memorable poems, “Aubade” (1977), where “Death is no different whined at than withstood” (209). As a young poet, he imagines this struggle in two opposite settings, the natural and the social, settings which would fuse seamlessly in his later verse, when, for example, parting “thick curtains” in “Sad Steps” reveals a contrastingly vital natural world, “the rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness” (169). The early sonnets bear the traces of Larkin’s meditation on this fusion as he revises his literary heritage. One of the oldest poems in the new collections is a sonnet from his sixteenth year, a poem that demonstrates, if not a probable reading of the first English sonneteer, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, at least a remarkable grasp of English poetics that Surrey employed in importing the sonnet from Italy. Larkin’s sonnet, “Winter Nocturne” (225), is a meditation on the self in relation to the natural world. Such a relationship seems stable to Larkin precisely because of the time and the season: a winter evening is stealing in, and the poet, reflecting on the coldness of the outside world, clearly realizes that such desolation is invariably his lot. Larkin’s identification with end times will continue throughout his career, providing the setting for “Aubade,” a sunrise song that refuses to shake the morbid aura of its opening in “soundless dark” (208). Arguably, “Winter Nocturne” is his winter revision of Surrey’s “The soote season,” one of the first sonnets in the English language, a lengthy catalogue of the “bud and bloom” of Spring that contrasts the external world with the internal state of the speaker. Surrey’s catalogue utilizes the alliterative line of the Anglo-Saxon tradition: Summer is come, for every spray now springs. The hart hath hung his old head on the pale; The buck in brake his winter coat he flings; The fishes float with new repaired scale… (Jones 103)
Structured around a repeated ABAB quatrain, Surrey’s form tends less to analysis and more to the accumulation of detail, compiling the evidence of the season’s fertility. Surrey’s couplet, a concluding (AA) finale of repetition, is thus loaded with the weight of refutation, or, at least, differentiation, unaided by a volta in the previous lines. Line 13 marks the moment the poet withdraws from the promise of the season, signaled by the appearance of “I”: “And thus I see among these pleasant things / Each care decays; and yet my sorrow springs.” The poem ultimately yields to a sentimentality that belies the heavy consonantal thrust of its preceding lines.
It is worth noting that the season itself is not responsible for the sentimentality. The Italian sonnet, “Spring,” by Gerald Manley Hopkins, another sonneteer familiar to Larkin, employs the volta to undermine the effusion of the season: “What is all this juice and all this joy?” (Jones 130). Like Hopkins, the Larkin of 1938 appears determined to defuse sentimentality wherever he finds it; unlike Hopkins the vision he cultivates is decidedly irreligious. In his nature poems Larkin is reluctant to celebrate the Spring for fear of sentiment; such reluctance arises again and again in Larkin’s verse, notably in poems that announce their suspicion of new life, “A slight relax of air where cold was” (1962), for example. Thus, Larkin turns to winter not so much to celebrate as to catalogue. Larkin’s interrogation of Surrey’s poetics and the literary tradition is clear from the opening lines:
Mantled in grey, the dusk steals slowly in,
Crossing the dead, dull fields with footsteps cold.
The rain drips drearily; night’s fingers spin
A web of drifting mist o’er wood and wold… (225)
The alliteration, the heavy caesuras, perhaps even the diction (“wold”) all reveal a youngster playing fast and loose with the trademarks of early English poetry. The sonnet as a whole is unremarkable for its language and imagery; what deserves pause is the form Larkin employs. An English sonnet, “Winter Nocturne” holds out the promise of analysis and change, the kind felt in Hopkins’ and weakly in Surrey’s couplet. The expectation of such a change is the expectation of the poet’s assertion of difference from the natural world, staking the claim of an interiority inured to the sound of rain that “drips drearily.” Line 9 properly begins with “But” (the only appearance of the word in the poem), however, the signal is false, an early insight into Larkin’s awareness of readerly expectations and experimentation with poetic conclusion: The pale pond stands; ringed round with rushes few And draped with leaning trees, it seems to wait But for the coming of the winter night 9 Of deep December; blowing o’er the graves Of faded summers…
In short, there is no true volta in “Winter Nocturne,” a statement about the reader’s sentimental expectation of the sonnet form as well as the poet’s self-deprecating analysis of the sonnet and literary tradition. The appearance of change starting line 9 is Larkin’s way of puncturing the illusions of the poetic mindset that privileges the poet’s inviolable relationship to the world. In fact, a speaker does not even appear in the poem: the “footsteps” belong to the dusk, the “silent face” belongs to the wind. Only the couplet locates humanity, and, unlike Surrey’s, the sense of independence and difference is anything but sentimental: “The rain falls still: bowing, the woods bemoan; / Dark night creeps in, and leaves the world alone.” “The world alone” might be both a world unaffected by the onset of winter and darkness, and a world marked by solitude, alienation, and misery (note the masculine rhyme with “bemoan”). Striking the delicate balance between these two poles is a dominating motif in Larkin’s poetry. Again and again in poems such as “The Whitsun Weddings” the poet investigates whether, in fact, the world is at peace, if indeed the poet alone is afflicted by misery in an otherwise benign universe where, as in “High Windows,” everyone but Larkin is “going down the long slide / to happiness, endlessly” (165).
Larkin’s work against the kind of nature sonnet first modeled by Surrey suggests where he comes down on the issue. Larkin is, however, a surprisingly slippery poet, and any attempt to sum him up with catchwords such as mockery, nostalgia, or pessimism, as critic Randall Stevenson has most recently done, is naïve. In a review of Stevenson’s account of contemporary British poetry that gives Larkin small standing, James Wood chastises Stevenson for dismissing Larkin with the accusation that the poet is “backward-looking in theme as well as style” (qtd. in Woods 12). Apologetically, Woods points to the mutivalent quality of his mature work, poems such as “Aubade,” “MCMXIV,” and “The Old Fools.” Such a defense, however, should also be pitched on account of the early sonnets. Together they exploit the backward glance in order to revise and upset traditional expectations of the form. One of the more interesting disturbances registered by Larkin, as felt in “Winter Nocturne,” is in the position of the poet effaced from a world defined by solitude and temporal change. What the poet can contribute to the world, if anything, is never decided in Larkin’s work. Consequently, he is caught between bemoaning the fate of humanity and celebrating the mystery of the human spirit and its artistic achievement that endures in the face of overwhelming odds. This tension, of course, informs “Arundel Tomb,” where the sculptor’s “faithfulness in effigy” shapes for all time, poetically, the “final blazon” of undying love for a couple who “would not think to lie so long” (110-111). It is yet another poem that meditates on the power of the sonnet (“blazon”) and poetic form in general. That many critics are not sensitive to the ways Larkin questions radical instability in his own poetry Larkin, an instability that prompts his turns to tradition, is due in no small part to the ignorance of his early poems.
One sonnet that engages these questions is “Street Lamps,” a 1939 meditation on the function of the poet and the permanence of art. The poem again is concerned with darkness and temporal change; like “Aubade,” it is sensitive to the implications of morning light, here the time when the street lamps stop burning. An English sonnet, the poem nevertheless uses the octave/sestet division to map the temporal (night/dawn) shift. This practice of temporal mapping is employed throughout many of Larkin’s sonnets and becomes a dominant feature in his mature work (again “Sad Steps,” “Aubade”). In effect, the poetic space becomes also a dynamic dramatic space, where the poet/speaker moves in a seemingly real-time relationship with the outside world. While Larkin eventually abandons the sonnet, it is clear that he never forgets the lessons learned from his first experiments. Chief among these lessons is the shaping of a seemingly standardized form to his purposes. Note, for example, how the flexible volta, ironically absent in “Winter Nocturne,” reemerges in “Street Lamps,” when all but one lamp goes out:
Hearing the hours slowly topple past
Like cold drops from a glistening stalactite,
Until grey planes splinter the gloom at last;
Then they go out.
I think I noticed once (9)
—T’was morning—one sole street-lamp still bright-lit,
Which, with a senile grin, like an old dunce,
Vied the blue sky, and tried to rival it;
And leering pallid though its use was done,
Tried to cast shadows contrary to the sun. (230)
The tone, as well as the subject, of this sestet is troubling in its ambiguity. Is this Larkin the pessimist merely metaphorizing the trivial, the ordinary, to demonstrate what he knows already to be the truth—all action is invariably and absurdly futile over time? Such a reading gathers evidence from the poem itself (“though its use was done”), but it seems naïve to excuse the poetic project from the implications here. Indeed, the dramatic break at the volta suggests that the solitary street lamp burning is the correlative of the solitary poetic act (“I think I noticed once”). Such a reading makes explicit the trope already implicit in the poem, the ambition of art to outdo nature. Larkin’s attitude towards this ambition, on the one hand, is flatly cynical: images of dementia (“senile,” “old dunce”) figure the poet as nothing short of delusional, not “hearing the hours slowly topple past.” However, vitality energizes the assonantal poetic effort of the street lamp, as it “Vied the blue sky, and tried to rival it.” The end of the poem leaves undecided the question whether or not the street lamp is to be pitied in its rather heroic but vain effort of challenging the sun. Incidentally, the image of the “old dunce” Larkin develops here should temper readings of one of his most well-known poems from High Windows, “The Old Fools.” That poem, which R.P. Draper rightly reads as a moving “identification with the subject of senile decay” (qtd. in Swarbrick 127), becomes also, like many of Larkin’s late poems, a consideration of the role of poet and poetry. Thus, pause should be given to opening lines even as caustic as these: What do they think has happened, the old fools, To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools, And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember Who called this morning? (196)
In light of “Street Lamps” it is now possible to read the self-accusation in these lines, the image of the poet as “old fool” still wondering about his task, whether what seems really “grown-up” is merely delusional insanity. The allusion to “pissing,” of course, points back to “Sad Steps,” another poetic meditation on mortality prompted by the night time demands of aging: “Groping back to bed after a piss.” Remarkably in “Street Lamps,” at the age of seventeen, the young poet shapes his vision of the artist both enabled by and threatened by the process of aging. Of course, it is the lamp that is delusional here, as it is the elderly in “The Old Fools”; Larkin constantly remains hesitant to place himself square in the middle of the confrontation with death. When he does, however, as in “Sad Steps” and “Aubade,” the result is his most celebrated work.
The discussion thus far has highlighted ways in which the sonnets provide a fuller picture of Larkin’s development, specifically by suggesting how the mature work continued themes that preoccupy Larkin as a very young poet. And yet, this brings us no closer to refuting the historicist charge against the early poetry, as “mellifluous, mystifying, and resolutely apolitical,” essentially rooted in the quietist mood pervasive in World War II poetry. This mood is thought to have been best articulated in Auden’s 1939 elegy for Yeats, where “poetry makes nothing happens.” As seen in “Street Lamps,” the efficacy of poetry is indeed at question in the early sonnets, poems which by and large avoid direct treatment of the nearing upheaval in British and world politics. However, far from mystifying, I believe that many of these sonnets reveal a poet most interested in critiquing the mood of safe compliance that hamstrings himself and others into accepting a life of suburban ease and turning a blind eye to the larger, explosive issues of the day. In his own idiom, the young Larkin practices the methodology Auden outlined in his 1935 introduction to The Poet’s Tongue, where he wrote: “Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear…” (ix). Significantly, both Larkin and Auden poetically “extend knowledge” by means of the sonnet; their similarities and differences are instructive. An example of an Auden sonnet from the period is “Here War Is Simple,” the twelfth in a sequence published in the collection Journey to a War (1939). The poem, more vigorously confrontational than anything Larkin would write, is the product of Auden’s experience in China at the start of the Second World War after Japan had invaded China. Auden’s choice of the sonnet derives in part from a need to complicate expected responses to the traditional form, driven by the similar desire to undo the customary responses to war. Such responses are easy, traditional, and distorting: Here war is simple like a monument: A telephone is speaking to a man; Flags on a map assert that troops were sent; A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan… (190)
The plan, of course, finds its ally in the easy structure of the poem itself; the sonnet as poetic “monument” is complicit in the traditional (dehumanizing) aura that surrounds modern warfare, where objects (“Flags on a map”) have the ring of truth. It is the poet’s task to muster the force of the sonnet to his own ends, to “extend our knowledge of good and evil” by exposing what horrors a simplistic attitude to the inevitably of war leads. Such extension occurs by contraction: immediately after the volta the lines are shortened as the poet harnesses the simplicity of maps to expose the truth that war is no monument, but a reality of the moment, producing unseen genocide around the world: But ideas can be true although men die, And we can watch a thousand faces Made active by one lie: And maps can really point to places Where life is evil now: Nanking. Dachau.
The startling couplet is a clear reversal of the expectation that the simple sonnet form promises; shockingly reversed is its status as a quaint leftover, a monument, an artifact unable to communicate in the contemporary world. Of course, such was the apparent epitaph for the sonnet in the modernist imagination once T.S. Eliot was through with it in the opening 14 lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” There, the sonnet form merges into the modernist long poem, an ironic commentary on its status as nothing more than cultural bric-a-brac in the cluttered rooms of cultural waste; or, perhaps, it is a room itself, a poetic space for analysis where serious questioning (“What is it?”) is no longer an option, as the couplet lightly concludes (but doesn’t really): “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (11). In light of Eliot, Auden’s sonnet is bold in the ethical material he expects the couplet to freight. Note, however, rather than making a call to action, the poem is descriptive, but in a way that attacks the artifice (“And maps can really point to places”) of politics (and poetry) that ignore life as it is really lived. While Larkin’s comment from the North Ship acknowledges the influence of Auden as his “alternative to old-fashioned poetry,” only by studying their sonnets together from these years can a sense of his debt as well as difference be realized. Three sonnets from 1940 and 1941, “Schoolmaster,” “Story,” and “Observation,” capture the spirit of forgetting and flight from the trauma of the present. Larkin’s interests, however, are insistently domestic, and the form is used to comment on the ways in which form and tradition can insulate the self from the outside world. Naturally, the poet’s own insularity is at stake, and I would argue that this realization eventually makes Larkin abandon the form, associating it too closely with his own perceived failure as a poet. Indeed, “Schoolmaster,” a dreary depiction of a provincial school teacher, eerily reads like Larkin as a twenty-year-old predicting his own bachelor future, spent largely as a librarian out of the limelight at the University of Hull: He sighed with relief. He had got the job. He was safe. Putting on his gown, he prepared for the long years to come That he saw, stretching like aisles of stone Before him. He prepared for the unreal life… (248)
The familiar Auden staccato of the first line introduces a world of measured declaratives, where form and ritual conspire in covering up “the unreal life” the teacher leads. Likewise, “unreality” defines the life at the center of “Story,” in which another “he,” tired of provincial life with its “boring birds,” moves away from home and
Recognized at once his wished-for lie
In the inhabitants’ attractive mouth,
The church beside the marsh, the hot blue sky.
Settled. And in this mirage lived his dreams… (257) The pronounced volta at line 9 of “Story” (“Settled”) revisits Larkin’s habit for experimentation. The weight of the change never settles, of course, immediately it is a “mirage” of “dreams.” This recognition of the fraud that lies beneath the most humdrum of existences is the poetic vision unique to Larkin that reaches maturity in High Windows. It is, no doubt, what makes him such a powerful and relevant (perhaps, even, spiritual) voice for postwar generations living in the “paradise” of pills and diaphragms in “High Windows,” which “Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives” (165). Its appearance at the outset of World War II in his young poetry is worth noting; the creation of this “paradise” is, in part, a direct byproduct of the war, a people’s attempt to bury themselves in creature comforts rather than risk engaging with the metaphysical heft of the outside world, where, as Auden writes, “life is evil now.” Unique to Larkin is the desire for blindness in his characters, the willful dissipation that deadens the sense of fraud behind their lives. Like Auden, he is loathe to condemn or teach; he experiments with the traditional form to mimic the sense of dissolution that plagues his characters. Note, for example, how the English octave of “Story” unwinds into a corrupted sestet (EFEGFG) of remarkably weakened half-rhymes by which the form itself, like the character, seems to forget itself: Settled. And in this mirage lived his dreams The friendly bully, saint, or lovely chum According to his moods. Yet he at times Would think about his village, and would wonder If the children and the rocks were still the same. But he forgot all this as he grew older. (257)
Particularly telling is the difference in the finality of the couplet in the sonnets of Larkin and Auden at this period. In his search for a style Larkin is unrelentingly experimental, obviously drawn to the structural conceit of the sonnet, his ability to play with readerly expectations of finality, and hesitant to concede to, what Stephen Booth calls in his work on Shakespeare’s sonnets, the “comfort of the couplet” (221), the flare of resolution that turns off many a reader even to Shakespeare. That the issue of poetic closure concerned Larkin is evident in his critical writings; concerning Emily Dickinson, he writes: “Only rarely, however, did she bring a poem to successful conclusion… [T]oo often the poem expires in a teased-out and breathless obscurity” (Required Writing 194). It should be obvious by now that his famous knack for closure (“Get out as early as you can / And don’t have any kids yourself”) owes no small part to his work with the sonnet form. Instead of “obscurity” or the comfort of resolution, Larkin shaped endings, as evident in “Story,” that commented directly on the reading experience, on the poet’s choice of form, and the power of poetry to communicate in the modern world. Such is the agenda of “Observation,” a sonnet from 1941 that most directly engages the war cloud hanging over England. It is, like Auden’s “Here war is simple like a monument,” an interrogation of the role of poetry, the purpose of traditional forms in a time of unrest, but more specifically it is a poem about finality: Only in books the flat and final happens Only in dreams we meet and interlock, The hand impervious to nervous shock, The future proof against our vain suspense; But since the tideline of the incoming past Is where we walk, and it is air we breathe, Remember then our only shape is death When mask and face are nailed apart at last. Range-finding laughter, and ambush of tears, Machine-gun practice on the heart’s desires Speak of a government of medaled fears. Shake, wind, the branches of their crooked wood, Where much is picturesque but nothing good And nothing can be found for poor men’s fires. (248)
As a metapoetic observation, it is easy to track how the slightly altered form of the Italian octave (ABBA / CDDC) does not disturb the expectation of what is “flat and final” about “books” or “dreams.” The octave, in short, promises the flat and final formal regularity in the coming sestet that will assure a “future proofed against our vain suspense,” the comfort of traditional form in a time of war. However, by means of the volta Larkin immerses the reader into the problem of time, particularly an awareness of the present world outside of books and dreams. With this temporal shift he effectively separates the literary “mask” from the human “face”—destroying poetic comfort and illusion—with a sestet directly addressed to the horrors of now. The pomp of tradition conspires to disguise fears (“medalled fears”) in a world where “range-finding laughter,” “ambush of tears” and “machine-gun practice” all bear witness that truly no “hand [is] impervious to nervous shock.” In such a world all sense of clean finality is undermined; not unlike the government medals, traditional poetic form is held up as suspect. Thus, a fascinatingly premature couplet arrives in lines 12-13 that basks in its sentimentalized apostrophe while calling for a poetic break with the picturesque poesy of the past (sentimentalized apostrophe, included): Shake, wind, the branches of their crooked wood, Where much is picturesque but nothing good , And nothing can be found for poor men’s fires. The GG couplet of the sonnet effectively strands the final F line, a conclusion mourning the plight of poor men who lack resources in a world that has destroyed their means for survival. Read in light of Larkin’s search for a style, “Observation” might be read as Larkin’s farewell to the sonnet form. While he continued to use the form (almost none of which he published), Larkin too closely associated it with a poetics “where much is picturesque but nothing good,” a form that, despite his insistent experiments and the valuable lessons he wrestled from it, he ultimately understood he must leave behind. With this in mind, a brief return to “Sad Steps” is possible, one that understands, chiefly, why the poem is not a sonnet. Rather than a mockery of Sidney’s work, “Sad Steps” is nothing less than a tribute to a tradition that helped shape Larkin’s unique poetics, a poetics that revels in abrupt reversals, the undoing of literary expectations, and an acute awareness of the problem of time (all themes familiar to the sonnet tradition). The poem that considers Larkin’s literary heritage properly opens with “Groping,” signaling the fumbling quest that defined his search for style. Quickly registering the shock of the moon and the vitality of the outside world, by line 4 Larkin considers time (it’s “four o’clock”), suburban dreams, and lives lived in the face of time and death: Four o’clock: wedge-shaped gardens lie Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky. There’s something laughable about this. (169)
The second stanza, essentially, rehearses much of what Larkin realized in his work with the sonnets of the war; naturally, the gardens “lie”—they are part of the “wished-for lie” of “Story.” And yet, this is undoubtedly the poet’s world. Is he destabilizing the very ground beneath his feet, his tradition and heritage? Readings of the poem that dwell on the loaded mock apostrophes to the moon assert that this is precisely Larkin’s method. Questionable is the “Medallion of art” (reminiscent of “medalled fears”) mentality against which Larkin struggled in his youth. Undoubtedly this is so, but perhaps Larkin is also acknowledging that such a mentality is necessary for survival, is the very means by which he reached this moment, aided by the pomp and artifice of tradition. Such a reading means Larkin’s “volta” (“No”) is not nearly as dramatic as it seems, hardly a surprise to readers familiar with his youthful experiments:
High and preposterous and separate—
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,
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. What follows “No” is not a dismissal of the moon as a symbol, but precisely the opposite: the moon becomes yet another symbol (“a reminder”), but this time fashioned along the lines of Larkin’s idiom—something hard, bright, and plain. It is nothing less than an image of poetic form that returns Larkin, as does Sidney’s Sonnet 31, to the struggle of his youth, a time of success and failure working with and against the sonnet form. In this reading the poem becomes a charged tribute to the way in which the literary tradition, unlike the poet, always survives, remaining always new, unspent, for someone “somewhere.” This returns us, ultimately, to Auden, Larkin’s most contemporary mentor in his “groping” for style, to complete that line that so often is left incomplete, but which, no doubt, Larkin knew well: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives….”
Bibliography
Auden, W.H. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Booth, Stephen. An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.
Eliot, T.S. Selected Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1964.
Hopkins, Gerald Manley. The Major Works. Ed. Catherine Phllips, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.
Jones, Emrys. The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Larkin, Philip. The Collected Poems. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988.
----. Early Poems and Juvenilia. Ed. A.T. Tolley. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.
----. Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982. London: Faber and Faber, 1983.
Oppenheimer, Paul. The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.
Regan, Stephen. Philip Larkin. London: Macmillan, 1992.
Swarbrick, Andrew. Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin. London: Macmillan, 1995.
Wood, James. “The Slightest Sardine.” Rev. of The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. XII 1966-2000: The Last of England?, by Randall Stevenson. London Review of Books 20 May 2004: 11-12.
All references to Larkin poems are to The Collected Poems. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988.