20th Century English Literature

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

"Talking in Bed" --Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

"Ambulances" --Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

"The Explosion" --Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

No Road --Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

1922-1945
Philip Larkin was born in 1922 in Coventry, England.
He attended St. John's College, Oxford.
His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945.

1946-1953
In 1946, Larkin discovered the poetry of Thomas Hardy and became a great admirer of his poetry.

1953-1956
With his second volume of poetry, The Less Deceived (1955), Larkin became the outstanding poet of his generation.
Larkin focused on intense personal emotion but strictly avoided sentimentality or self-pity.

1956-1985
In 1964, he confirmed his fame as a major poet with the publication of The Whitsun Weddings, and again in 1974 with High Windows: collections whose burning, often mocking, wit does not hide the poet's dark vision and underlying obsession with universal themes of death, love, and human lonesome.

Larkin never married and conducted an uneventful life as a librarian in the provincial city of Hull, where he died in 1985.

"Talking in Bed" --Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Philip Larkin's "Talking in Bed" (1964) is a poem about isolation, disillusion and failure, about the gap between expectations and reality, about the ironies of love in the modern world. It is also about the difficulty of telling the truth and being nice at one and the same time. The poem is based on the assumption that "two people" in bed.
In the first stanza, we can find "Lying together", starts the second line. The word "lying" is an example of lexical polygamy: it means both "sleeping" and "telling lies."
And, in the second stanza and the third stanza, we can find that "time" passes silently; the "wind" haphazardly "builds" and "disperses" "clouds" in the "sky"; "towns" are "dark"; they heap up on the "horizon" as well as on the vision and feelings of the human experiences, none of them "cares" for or provides answers to the questions of the human at the unique distance from isolation. Actually, the human participants are not really "doing" anything. Much of their existence is invested in recollecting a wonderful past, sleeping silently, or else telling lies, watching meaningless action outside, being denied guidance as well as care, struggling in vain for salvation from isolation through language. Yet, it seems that it is more difficult to find successful human communication than to receive sympathy and care from nature.
In the poem, those who "talk in bed" must be somehow intimate or close, at least ostensibly so. "Lying together", in the sense of sleeping together, is another indication of intimacy. Absence of one condition/consequence of love, "care', characterizes nature-human relationship. The "two people" who used to be "honest" are now "lying together", isolated and unable "to find / Words at once true and kind / Or not untrue and not unkind." Somehow, the predicament has to do with sexual failure, probably resulting from dishonesty and deceit.
The poem consists of twelve lines, predominantly in the iambic pentameter, divided into three tercets, rhyming aba cac dcd, and a final triplet rhyming eee. A sense of continuity is maintained at the level of rhyme in the first three stanzas through the recurrence of one rhyming sound in each two successive stanzas - a a a ("easiest", "honest" and "unrest") and c c c ("silently", "sky" and "why").

"Ambulances" --Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Summary

"Closed like confessionals," ambulances weave through the city. One of them might come to rest anywhere. When that happens, the onlookers momentarily see "a wild white face that overtops / Red stretcher blankets" as the patient is taken into the ambulance.

Suddenly, just for a moment, they "sense the solving emptiness / That lies just under all we do." The onlookers whisper in distress. But the ambulance moves on, the traffic parts to let it by, and "dulls to distance all we are."

Commentary

Larkin captures the mystique of ambulances that appear from somewhere outside of our experience to take one of us away. A person who an hour ago was living through an ordinary day has, without warning, become a "wild white face that overtops / Red stretcher blankets." It can happen to you. It can happen to me. Ultimately, it will happen to all of us.

Reference

Thwait, Anthony, ed. Collected poems. Noonday,1993.

"The Explosion" --Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Analysis

Stanzas 1–5

Notice how Larkin tries to set a distance between himself and the miners. They are shadows pointing towards the pithead –it is to be their catastrophe. He will not become personally involved in their fate but maintain that air of detachment to be found in many of his poems. He wishes to allow the catastrophe and characters to stand independently worthy to have their suffering noted without sentimentality.

In stanza 2 “Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke”: These are simple, ordinary young men of their time swearing, smoking, proud of their strength and stature. Then, “Shouldering off the freshened silence”: The sounds almost reflect the rough humanity.

In stanza 3

The poet leads us a little closer to the men. One is shown as innocent, playful as he chases after rabbits. But on his return from the chase another side of his nature is seen. He is gentle; does not trample on the nest of lark’s eggs and returns them to where he found them. What does this action tell us about him? Is Larkin asking us to note his sensitivity? his gentleness? his unspoken respect for the mystery of procreation? (Might this have been a gesture he made to his fiancé; a proposal, almost. Only a thought.)

These men are part of a close community simply, elegantly suggested by, “Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter, ...” But all this simple, homely normality is under grave threat suggested in the line: “Through the tall gates standing open.”
These are the gates of fate, of the underworld, inescapable.

In stanza 5 their fate is met. The poet delivers the news without melodrama; we knew the explosion was coming from the title. The world of nature is unmoved by the catastrophe, “cows/ Stopped chewing for a second; sun,/ Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.” The sun was dimmed as the dust from the explosion was blasted high into the sky. We can find that Larkin leaves the aftermath, the rescue, the grief unmentioned here.

Stanzas 6 till the end

In the second part of the poem the focus is changed. Now it is the wives who are central. The italics in Stanza 6 may suggest the wording in the chapel obituaries. It is said that the poem is based on a real event and that the wives of the dead miners had visions of their men at the moment of the explosion. Larkin uses this knowledge to transform what would be a sad and meaningless accident into an occasion of transformation and grace. In the religious imaginations of the wives the men are seen “for a second” as transformed into gold, metal of purity and endurance. In this new changed appearance they will live in the memories of their wives.
The poem ends with the image of the unbroken eggs. The eggs are also transformed; now they may represent the hope of resurrection or the preciousness of memory or the strength of the bonds of love.

In the face of death we have a choice; either to accept it as the slide into nothingness or we may find in it the door to renewal. In this poem Larkin offers us the renewal vision that flashed into the shocked serious hearts of the miners’ wives.

No Road --Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Since we agreed to let the road between us
Fall to disuse,
And bricked our gates up, planted trees to screen us,
And turned all time's eroding agents loose,
Silence, and space, and strangers - our neglect
Has not had much effect.
Leaves drift unswept, perhaps; grass creeps unmown;
No other change.
So clear it stands, so little overgrown,
Walking that way tonight would not seem strange,
And still would be followed. A little longer,
And time would be the stronger,
Drafting a world where no such road will run
From you to me;
To watch that world come up like a cold sun,
Rewarding others, is my liberty.
Not to prevent it is my will's fulfillment.
Willing it, my ailment.

Analysis

The ambulatory pace is reflected in the repetition of "And..." at the beginning of third and fourth lines, scanned by the reader's eye like passing streetlamps or road markings. Likewise in the fifth line: "Silence, and space, and strangers..."

Larkin's metaphors are, as usual, both restrained and striking (bricked-up gates, screens of foliage, unswept leaves and creeping grass). His rhetoric is (at least until the final stanza) simple to follow, yet also arrestingly novel. For it is not merely "time's winged chariot" which is acting unaided upon the road between the two protagonists, but their own will; they "agreed to let the road between [them] fall to disuse".

So it is that the speaker does not merely bemoan the attrition of time on his link to the other, but rather examines how the vacillations of desire have their effect. He begins with the premise that it is the will of both parties that the cord should be broken, like a mutual severance of a frustrated contract.

The observation that even such willed negligence has failed to eradicate the connection leads to an awareness that all things in time shall pass, whether or not the passing is sought-for. Which in turn sparks a typically Larkinesque riddle of logic in the final verse.

Rather than settling upon the notion of time merely erasing all trace of the road in this world, a logical leap is made. Instead, time will bring about the dawn of a whole new world, where, by implication, no such road was ever known. In a further logical leap, the speaker envisages such a world as "a cold sun". ("cold sun"—an "oxymoron" here.)

Now, to some, this mangling of logic may appear a pretentious caprice. To this reader at least, it serves to refine the experience conveyed by the speaker. For the metaphor of a ruined road has become transformed into a glorious sun, as the second party builds new roads, "rewarding others". Although this constitutes a bright new future, to the speaker it is the dawn of a cold sun, from whose warmth he is now screened.

Once the meaning of these images is understood, one can proceed to the final couplet. Its message is couched in the syntax of double-negatives so characteristic of Larkin (see, for example 'Talking in Bed': "not untrue and not unkind"). What is "meant" by the last two lines is something like: I want this to happen / But I want it too much. The way in which Larkin expresses this manages to convey the uncertainty felt by the speaker: seeking "not to prevent" an event is less definitive than wanting something to happen. Not really desiring something but willing it on, doing what is "for the best", the duplicity of the will: all of these themes underpin the sentiment at the end of ‘No Road,’ and indeed lie at the heart of many of Larkin's best poems.