nancybella
06-06-2012, 06:24 PM
Does the poet often die inside his poem? Philip Larkin died in his poem and made me pause for grief.It's a brief poem, called 'Going'. It starts with evening time. Dusk, like dawn, usually gives relaxing and consoling thoughts to the mind. But the fading of the lights in this poem is sinister and encroaching, 'coming in across the fields, one never seen before', as the poet says.
A couple of lines later, the evening has made rapid progress and 'is drawn up over the knees and breast'. One moment, it is across the fields and the next moment, it is in his room and on his bedclothes. This dying man is ridden and defenceless too suddenly. The reader, shoved into the scene and stood unwillingly by the bedside, the reader's neck is contricted in sympathy.
The poet, from his deathbed, still holds his gaze out the window into the field and asks himself where the tree has gone, 'that locked earth to sky'. If that lock between earth and sky has collapsed, it can only be that the blackness of the night is fully covering the man in his room and his entire landscape and world.
There are two more quick questions the poet has left remaining to ask himself: 'What is under my hands, that I cannot feel? What loads my hands down?'
He is completely besieged, from above and below, on all sides of him. It is on his knees and breast, and comes into the intimacy of his hands, and then his hands are flattened from on top. He is completely flattened out in pitch darkness. How can one not feel for this man? Our fate is absolutely the same.
That last question, the last moment of consciousness, 'what loads my hands down?'. It is very sad, the surprise and panic in the question, conveying the harassed alertness, like when we ask - what is that? what is that? - when we feel something suddenly crawl under our clothes. Is there no peace? Why must nature be rough when a dying man is already so meek? The poem gives the evening time a new association in our minds: it is voracious.
Such is this reporter's firsthand account from the very front line of the poetry fields, in this instance the fourth poem in a selection of Philip Larkin's poems as chosen, and with an introduction, by Martin Amis, and as published in 2011. The book contains 58 poems speaking, with bite or poignance, of the things that constitute us: sex, death, work, and love, among other things.
But it is Larkin's sense of mortality which seems most finely tuned. If it was any more finely tuned, it would be a sixth sense and he would be seeing dead people. I don't know what he'd be writing at that point, but it would not be poetry and I'm sure Martin Amis would not be taking time out of his day to make a selection of his work on his behalf.
Larkin's illuminating morbid receptiveness is found in a number of poems in this selection, very strikingly in one of the last poems, which seems to have something to say alongside the early poem mentioned above. They may just make an odd couple, but this later poem I will relate it to is called Aubade, which means a romantic separation at dawn.
In the first poem, there was every reason to fear death; it was upon us. In this later poem, the event is not immediately anticipated and there is space for breath. The poet is in his room, in bed, in the pre-dawn darkness, once again getting down to putting his finger on what his fear is about. It is the certainty of the event: 'most things may never happen: this one will' and it makes 'all thought impossible but how and where and when I shall myself die'.
But then the poet strikes a strange note, when he believes that willfully fortifying himself by 'courage is no good: it means not scaring others'. Courage doesn't always mean that. It can mean not hiding your fear when fear is acceptable. I won't say he needs to let himself off the hook, here; he knows what he's doing. Perhaps the measure of his fear would mean confiding it would in fact scare. I will offer no complacent contradiction of his point.
He points out that some might say the reason he can't cope with how his life is ending is because of remorse, 'the good not done, the love not given, time torn off unused', or because of how hard it is to escape our past and remake ourselves. But he says it is none of these things; 'the total emptiness for ever, the sure extinction that we travel to' is the source of the intolerable anxiety.
There are other poems in this volume describing relationships and love. In one, called Dockery and Son, he thinks of a dead friend, the same age as he, who had a son and a wife, whereas he, the poet, has 'no son, no wife, no house or land' and 'only a numbness registered the shock of finding out how much had gone of life, how widely from the others'. In another poem, he intimates that he 'loves the wrong way round' and doing so entails being 'ever wholly rebuffed'.
The loves of the poet's life, by whom he is deeply and tenderly engaged, with a conscientious, labyrinthine curiosity that does honour to his relationships - the loves of his life do not reach conventional fulfilment. The reader can see he is unhappy but suspects he is determined in that course.
What the love poems enable us to see is how little support he allows himself, how stoical and undermined his courage already is by the time he gets round to the death poems. Conventional fulfillment in love may not have helped with his fear of death; he may well be right; but it couldn't have hindered. On the other hand, our faculties are false categories; we are not made as man makes his machines; we are all of a package and are to be understood by acceptance, not rectification. Larkin's mortality is intertwined with his sensuality, in good times and bad, in sickness and in health, unto death. As he said, we 'are a swill tub of finer feelings'.
A couple of lines later, the evening has made rapid progress and 'is drawn up over the knees and breast'. One moment, it is across the fields and the next moment, it is in his room and on his bedclothes. This dying man is ridden and defenceless too suddenly. The reader, shoved into the scene and stood unwillingly by the bedside, the reader's neck is contricted in sympathy.
The poet, from his deathbed, still holds his gaze out the window into the field and asks himself where the tree has gone, 'that locked earth to sky'. If that lock between earth and sky has collapsed, it can only be that the blackness of the night is fully covering the man in his room and his entire landscape and world.
There are two more quick questions the poet has left remaining to ask himself: 'What is under my hands, that I cannot feel? What loads my hands down?'
He is completely besieged, from above and below, on all sides of him. It is on his knees and breast, and comes into the intimacy of his hands, and then his hands are flattened from on top. He is completely flattened out in pitch darkness. How can one not feel for this man? Our fate is absolutely the same.
That last question, the last moment of consciousness, 'what loads my hands down?'. It is very sad, the surprise and panic in the question, conveying the harassed alertness, like when we ask - what is that? what is that? - when we feel something suddenly crawl under our clothes. Is there no peace? Why must nature be rough when a dying man is already so meek? The poem gives the evening time a new association in our minds: it is voracious.
Such is this reporter's firsthand account from the very front line of the poetry fields, in this instance the fourth poem in a selection of Philip Larkin's poems as chosen, and with an introduction, by Martin Amis, and as published in 2011. The book contains 58 poems speaking, with bite or poignance, of the things that constitute us: sex, death, work, and love, among other things.
But it is Larkin's sense of mortality which seems most finely tuned. If it was any more finely tuned, it would be a sixth sense and he would be seeing dead people. I don't know what he'd be writing at that point, but it would not be poetry and I'm sure Martin Amis would not be taking time out of his day to make a selection of his work on his behalf.
Larkin's illuminating morbid receptiveness is found in a number of poems in this selection, very strikingly in one of the last poems, which seems to have something to say alongside the early poem mentioned above. They may just make an odd couple, but this later poem I will relate it to is called Aubade, which means a romantic separation at dawn.
In the first poem, there was every reason to fear death; it was upon us. In this later poem, the event is not immediately anticipated and there is space for breath. The poet is in his room, in bed, in the pre-dawn darkness, once again getting down to putting his finger on what his fear is about. It is the certainty of the event: 'most things may never happen: this one will' and it makes 'all thought impossible but how and where and when I shall myself die'.
But then the poet strikes a strange note, when he believes that willfully fortifying himself by 'courage is no good: it means not scaring others'. Courage doesn't always mean that. It can mean not hiding your fear when fear is acceptable. I won't say he needs to let himself off the hook, here; he knows what he's doing. Perhaps the measure of his fear would mean confiding it would in fact scare. I will offer no complacent contradiction of his point.
He points out that some might say the reason he can't cope with how his life is ending is because of remorse, 'the good not done, the love not given, time torn off unused', or because of how hard it is to escape our past and remake ourselves. But he says it is none of these things; 'the total emptiness for ever, the sure extinction that we travel to' is the source of the intolerable anxiety.
There are other poems in this volume describing relationships and love. In one, called Dockery and Son, he thinks of a dead friend, the same age as he, who had a son and a wife, whereas he, the poet, has 'no son, no wife, no house or land' and 'only a numbness registered the shock of finding out how much had gone of life, how widely from the others'. In another poem, he intimates that he 'loves the wrong way round' and doing so entails being 'ever wholly rebuffed'.
The loves of the poet's life, by whom he is deeply and tenderly engaged, with a conscientious, labyrinthine curiosity that does honour to his relationships - the loves of his life do not reach conventional fulfilment. The reader can see he is unhappy but suspects he is determined in that course.
What the love poems enable us to see is how little support he allows himself, how stoical and undermined his courage already is by the time he gets round to the death poems. Conventional fulfillment in love may not have helped with his fear of death; he may well be right; but it couldn't have hindered. On the other hand, our faculties are false categories; we are not made as man makes his machines; we are all of a package and are to be understood by acceptance, not rectification. Larkin's mortality is intertwined with his sensuality, in good times and bad, in sickness and in health, unto death. As he said, we 'are a swill tub of finer feelings'.