What does the forum think of the poetry of this Angry Young Man?
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Cut Grass
Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death
It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,
White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine...
AN ARUNDEL TOMB
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His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.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. ... {excerpt} Larkin as "the angry young man" more than distorts his overall identity. Let me agree with most of what the Poetry Foundation has to say about him. "...King suggests that the work is "a poetry of disappointment, of the destruction of romantic illusions, of man's defeat by time and his own inadequacies," as well as a study of how dreams, hopes, and ideals "are relentlessly diminished by the realities of life." To Larkin, Brownjohn notes, life was never "a matter of blinding revelations, mystical insights, expectations glitteringly fulfilled. Life, for Larkin, and, implicitly, for all of us, is something lived mundanely, with a gradually accumulating certainty that its golden prizes are sheer illusion." Love is one of the supreme deceptions of humankind in Larkin's worldview, as King observes: "Although man clutches at his instinctive belief that only love will comfort, console and sustain him, such a hope is doomed to be denied. A lover's promise is an empty promise and the power to cure suffering through love is a tragic illusion." Stanley Poss in Western Humanities Review maintains that Larkin's poems demonstrate "desperate clarity and restraint and besieged common sense. And what they mostly say is, be beginning to despair, despair, despair." --- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...t.html?id=3940
Last edited by quasimodo1; 10-16-2009 at 03:12 PM. Reason: "On Being Twenty-Six" ... http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178043
I think the first stanza establishes the biblical image - of man like grass - mortal.
I think Larkin in stanza 2 is establishing a kind of premature death in June - when the natural world he is using is coming into flower, and when the expectation is of a summer blossoming. White hours and snow images take us prematurely to winter. Is this some kind of spiritual death, or the death of opportunity? It could also be disillusionment - a kind of death of the spark. Larkin was certainly disillusioned with life.
Stanza three seems to compound this theme with lost lanes and bowed lilacs. The high builded cloud reminds me of a castle in the air - which seems to fit the dashing of aspirations.
Certainly anti-romantic, Larkin seems to be using romantic images to dash the romantic ideal.
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What the f......
A slightly miffed middle-ager, more like.
Yoga and Larkin? now there's a fresh angle.
I think Larkin really establishes the idea of isolation through his poem "Talking in bed"!Lack of communication,loneliness are the main themes and subjects in this poem!I think this poem is so classic because it can express feelings of all times!Talking in bed is not just the communication problem between a couple but also the universal crisis in human relationships.
I've not read this poem before, and I like it very much. Thanks Alexandra S.
The images easily evoke some of the grim north England towns, such as Hull where he lived for the latter part of his life.
I think his spoiling of the rhyme on line 4
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
is a great touch underlying the discord in the marriage.
I think it is hopeful in that the narrator is trying to find kind words, and that the poem expresses the difficulty of this in a long relationship against the tide of ageing.
It is again anti-romantic, though I think there is a kind of romance in the effort to say kind things.
http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems...alking-in-bed/
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far
As you can also see in these stanzas the word "lying" is ambiguous!It is not just lying on the bed but also lying to each other,lying about their lives and the situation of their relationship.Generally the poems has many meanings and words that hide beneath feelings and emotions of these people.
Glad I helped you discover this fabulous poem!
One of my favourite poems is Mr Bleaney. It's such a stark poem of lonely depression. A sobering thought about ageing loneliness.
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetrya...do?poemId=7077
I like the reference to The Bodies - which may be a car factory/ components firm in Coventry where he was born. I used to think of this every time I passed "carbodies" on the bus.
It is veeeery melancholic and with a first glance you may think that this man has gone mad!
Well he did choose to live in Hull...
I always think of him in black and white, though he was working as a librarian when I was at Uni in the late 80s. He just seems to typify the 1950's British austerity and the character repressions of that time in his poems. It's hard to think of him in the more colourful sixties.
Larkin was a strange case: a politically right-wing bigoted racist [or "a political blockhead" as one of his friends put it] I really feel like I shouldn't like his work at all; yet there's something about the way he used words that does draw me back to his poetry time and again.
High Windows is one of my favourites:
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's ****ing her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
What are regrets? Just lessons we haven't learned yet - Beth Orton
A superb poem for a 45 year old like me to think and reflect on. I like his nihilistic description of the deep blue air that reflects his atheism. He makes this lack of faith rather beautiful.
As for the theme, I'm sure it is so easy to start the jealousy that leads to bitterness with the young. It might explain why kids are pilloried in the press so much.
I like his work too neilgee. He's such a miserable git - great for those melancholic days - but I think his poems are insightful and quite brilliant.
Sorry - double post.
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