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My friend Mark Aldrich, a literary blogger par excellence, devoted a recent blog entry to a celebration of Philip Larkin’s hundredth birthday. He paid particular attention to one of my favorite Larkin poems, “Poetry of Departures.”
Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.
And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
Its specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said
He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I’d go today,
Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.
Larkin, who lived a life of limited mobility as a librarian at the University of Hull, rarely traveling very far from that campus in the north of England, created a persona in his poems that was strikingly limited in its horizons and its experience of the world. In “Toads,” his persona considers chucking up his job, because other people do it and “no one actually starves.” In “Annus Mirabilis” and “High Windows” the persona regrets having been born before people started having youthful sex, and actually enjoying it.
And in “Poetry of Departures,” the closest he comes to actually chucking up everything and clearing off is hearing about it fifth hand. He will never know anyone who did it, even know anyone who knows anyone who did it. The news thrills him in a way that it could only thrill someone who has never chucked up anything – it’s like something out of a Mickey Spillane novel*, or Horatio Hornblower.
Surely Larkin’s persona is the last person to whom anyone would reach out for wisdom and insight. And yet Larkin the poet offers us both of those: as Mark Aldrich tells us, “thirty-seven years after his death, he is consistently ranked among the top ten post-war English writers by other writers. His name tops most contemporary polls as Britain’s favorite poet.”
But what struck me this time, reading this poem I’ve read so often, was precisely that dual message—the one from the mousey provincial, the other from the superbly accomplished poet. Everyman and the sublime artist.
How is that dual message achieved? The second half of it, the unseen guiding hand, comes through the artistry. Larkin the artist is not mocking Larkin the Everyman, who is, after all, another part of himself, but that subtle presence is there to let you know that the simple, straightforward vocabulary of the poem, the voice of Everyman, is not so simple, not so straightforward.
Everyman tells you what everyone already knows, just reaffirming it for you. It takes a heap o’living to make a house a home. You light up my life. Honey I miss you, and I’m bein’ good. Larkin, in his poetry, expands your mind and your senses.
I started thinking about the form Larkin chose for the poem. It’s Everyman’s form—rhyming quatrains, simple whole rhymes, ABCB twice.
And then it isn’t. The second stanza is all slant rhymes, not quite so obvious, and in an unusual pattern – ABCBADCD. You scarcely know it’s there, yet you can feel it.
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is, as Donovan once said. The D rhymes are the only whole rhymes in the stanza, and the only ones that appear in a predictable place, the second and fourth lines of a quatrain, leading seamlessly into the whole rhyme / quatrain pattern of the third stanza, echoing the first.
Then there is no mountain again…and then there is, as the fourth stanza, after retracing the twisting rhyme pattern as the second, ends identically to it, with the D rhyme making a concluding quatrain.
You don’t run across that sort of manipulation of rhyme too often. Frost famously did it in “Stopping by Woods,” with its little fishhooked third line of every stanza, that becomes the dominant rhyme of the succeeding stanza. Thomas Hardy did it in “During Wind and Rain.”
Larkin shows his formal wizardry in other ways in other poems. “Annus Mirabilis” has five line stanzas, ABBAB, with the A lines in tetrameter, the B lines in trimeter, all of them mixing iambs with the occasional hiccup of a dactyl.
“High Windows” modulates the level of diction in much the same way, so you hardly know how you got there, from “I…guess he’s fucking her” to “high windows: the sun-comprehending glass,” the limited comprehension of something he’ll never achieve to the limitless comprehension of the infinite, which in a way he has achieved. When teaching Intro to Poetry, I used to split “High Windows” into three parts, and give a separate part to three different groups of students to analyze. Only after that discussion would I put the whole poem together, for a discussion of How He Got There.
The rhyme modulates in “High Windows” too. I never noticed it, until reading it over again for this essay, and even then not until after several readings. It begins with an ABCB rhyme pattern, and a slant rhyme, barely noticeable: she’s / paradise. The second stanza is ABCB again, but with a pulverizing whole rhyme: side / slide. The third stanza dials it back to the quieter slant rhymes, but now they’re there throughout: it’s ABAB, if / life and back / dark.
The fourth stanza is ABAB again – once he’s arrived there, there’s no turning back – And that same pulverizing rhyme, this time in the leadoff spot: hide / slide. The B rhyme is softened a bit by putting half of it on an unstressed syllable: he / immediately.
The final stanza eases back again, starting with the whole rhyme including an unstressed syllable, windows / shows, and concluding with a rhyme that is both slant and unstressed: glass / endless.
The rhyme scheme of “High Windows” is regular but subtly unpredictable. It will always keep you a little off balance.
Which is pretty much the idea behind the whole poem.
Larkin begins “Poetry of Departures” by telling us that we – he, the speaker of the poem, we, his listeners, all of us listeners to the voice of the friend of a friend of a friend – are certain to approve. After, it’s a feeling we all have. It is? Hating home, and having to be there? We all hate it, no matter how much of a heap o’ livin’ we’ve put into it? But yes, it’s so simple and direct. So why don’t we leave? Well, we could, but it won’t work. Simple, straightforward, and subtly unpredictable. It’s Larkin. It will always keep us a little off balance. And it will do what great poetry does. It will never let go of us.
* This marks the second consecutive column in which I have referenced Mickey Spillane. How many other poetry columns can make that statement?
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