Philip Larkin and 20th Century Alienation

This poem, from 1971, is probably the most famous ever written by Englishman Philip Larkin, who was born in 1922 and died in 1985.

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don't have any kids yourself.

Scholars suggest, seriously, that Larkin wrote this after spending several weeks with his mother, who outlived his Nazi-sympathizing father by many years and who was a difficult and needy person herself.  The poem's sentiment is harrowing, but he is said to have treated her kindly. She died the next year.

Larkin understood himself as a damaged individual.  As might be surmised, he never married and never procreated, frustrating the women who over the years were partners of some sort to him.  He was mostly asexual but keen for pornography, a lover of the natural beauty of the countryside but disinterested in the outer world of civilization.  He worked as a librarian and wrote poetry of steadily growing acclaim.  

Larkin's title comes from the first line in the second stanza of a less downcast poem by another Englishman, Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived a century earlier. 

Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky  

  Dig the grave and let me lie:  

Glad did I live and gladly die,  

  And I laid me down with a will.  

  

This be the verse you 'grave for me:

  Here he lies where he long'd to be;  

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,  

  And the hunter home from the hill.

The contrast between the two works could hardly be greater.  In essence, Larkin offered his personal correction to the more romantically inclined Stevenson, who was "glad" in his life and wanted his gravestone to say that he had been buried "where he long'd to be."

There is no reconciling these two poets' outlooks, but each is true to its moment.  Larkin denied sometimes that his work could be defined as modern, but the moderns admired his bleak and unsparing honesty.   The 20th century and its two world wars took their huge toll on Western sensibilities and confidence.  The period also gave us film noir, abstract impressionist art, atonal music and Brutalist architecture -- all reactions against traditional norms.  

We don't know yet what conclusions the 21st century generation, millennials, will draw of the world as they found it.  There are good signs and bad signs.

One of the bad ones is the disconnection of so many people in the wealthiest country in world history.  Coming soon:  The Kids Are Not All Right.  Other posts may follow.


More Larkin

Below is a morning song, the 1977 Larkin poem most admired by literary critics.  It is beautifully written, but its attitude is consistent with the cold eye cast in the work above. 

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.   

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.   

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.   

Till then I see what’s really always there:   

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   

Making all thought impossible but how   

And where and when I shall myself die.   

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse   

—The good not done, the love not given, time   

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because   

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;   

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,   

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being 

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   

That slows each impulse down to indecision.   

Most things may never happen: this one will,   

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without   

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave   

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.   

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,   

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,   

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring   

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Easter 1916: A Century Later

"Easter 1916" is a fabulous poem.  William Butler Yeats wrote it in the months after a violent Irish republican uprising was quickly defeated in Dublin on Easter Monday in 1916.

Ireland was still under the thumb of England at that point, and centuries of resentment had grown only deeper in the decades after England's non-response to the Irish Potato Famine of the mid 19th century.  The opposition, mostly Catholic in a majority Catholic country, had plotted with Germany, England's enemy in the middle of World War I, for the Germans to send weapons to the Irish rebels.

England knew of the weapons shipments and of the rebels' plans to stage an armed insurrection -- and the rebels knew that the English knew these things.  The Irish attacked anyway, seizing public buildings and paying a great cost as their doomed mutiny came to its defeat. Of the 1,500 Irish fighters, 300 were killed and another 200 jailed, many of them tortured.

Yeats, a prominent Irish poet and playwright (and Anglican to boot), had counseled against the republican violence though he supported their cause.  Over the coming months, he reflected on the Easter uprising and its effect. This poem is the result.

Its first stanza Yeats talks of the status quo ante -- "polite meaningless words."  In the second he describes republican patriots:  an Irish noblewoman enraged "until her voice grew shrill," a gentle teacher drawn into battle, even "a drunken vainglorious lout" whom Yeats detested.  All were "transformed utterly" by the events of that Easter Monday.  The men died fighting.  In a recurring theme, Yeats says, "A terrible beauty is born."

The third stanza compares the adamant stoicism of republican opposition to a stone in a stream, implacable and and unchanging, as life continues around it.

The fourth stanza knits it all up.  Its first lines -- "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart" -- recalls the Irish grievance and the stone in the previous verse.  Yeats memorializes the dead leaders and concludes that their bold defiance had had its effect.

The essential phrases from this poem, encountered in college, lodged themselves in my brain.  They come to me again and again and challenge me to return to the source, not just because Yeats could fashion a powerful phrase but because his vision resonates in the strange world he witnessed aborning.

"Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart."

"A terrible beauty is born."   

Yeats did not publish the poem until 1920.  Two years later, in 1922, Ireland became a free state and in 1949, a republic.

Easter 1916

by W. B. Yeats

September 25, 1916

I

I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done

Of a mocking tale or a gibe

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,

Being certain that they and I

But lived where motley is worn:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

II

That woman's days were spent

In ignorant good-will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers

When, young and beautiful,

She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school

And rode our winged horse;

This other his helper and friend

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,

So sensitive his nature seemed,

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near to my heart,

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

III

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,

The rider, the birds that range

From cloud to tumbling cloud,

Minute by minute they change;

A shadow of cloud on the stream

Changes minute by minute;

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,

And a horse plashes within it;

The long-legged moor-hens dive,

And hens to moor-cocks call;

Minute by minute they live:

The stone's in the midst of it all.

IV

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven's part, our part

To murmur name upon name,

As a mother names her child

When sleep at last has come

On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death;

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in a verse--

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Dylan Thomas and Death

Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, lived a short and tumultuous life.  The son of an English teacher who himself had wished to be a poet, Thomas began writing poetry in notebooks as a teenager.

In 1930, at 16, he left school and took a job copy-editing and, later, writing for a newspaper.  And he kept writing poetry.  Challenged by a friend to write about immortality, he composed the poem below, his first published piece of art, when he was just 19 years old.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead man naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily;

Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

And the unicorn evils run them through;

Split all ends up they shan't crack;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears

Or waves break loud on the seashores;

Where blew a flower may a flower no more

Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion.

In some ways, the poem seems to have been written by an older person, one who has seen death and resolved that it does not rule existence.  In fact, it was written by a young person, one who probably had not seen much of death and romanticized it, perhaps under the influence of earlier poetry he had read.

Years later,  when Thomas's father lay blind and dying, the poet again took up his pen to address the topic of death.  The result, his most famous work, urges his father to fight death, to fight to the last inch, to fight with every fiber of his being.  Thomas, still young at 37, cried for his father to live, to stay with his son. 

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It was not to be.  David John Thomas, 76, died in 1952.

Dylan Thomas was a master of words and images but not so much the master of himself.  His poetry was renowned in his day, but it was not profitable enough to provide a comfortable life for Thomas or his wife and three children.  He was a heavy drinker, a bit of a brawler and in poor health generally.

The poet joined his father in that good night just more than a year later, at the age of 39.  It was said that he drank 18 shots of whiskey the evening before his death.


Living Long or Living Hard 

Most people want to live long lives.  As parents, they try to raise children who are careful and responsible.  They hope to watch their children and grandchildren launch their lives, and to savor the comforts of long, satisfying friendships and marriages.

Recently a professional football player, a successful one, ended his career after a single season.  He had studied the medical results of long years in the game -- head injuries leading to early dementia, joint pains for life -- and decided the risks were not worth the effort.

He was an outlier in the sport.

Most football players seem to be wired differently.  They crave the intensity of the game.  They know the risks and play as long as they can.  After their playing careers end, most elect to take retirements in their 50s, I have read, because they assume they will die earlier than people who worked in different fields.

I think people generally fall into two camps:

First is the majority of us who avoid risk, do what our doctors tell us and, if we venture out, do so intellectually into the world of ideas.

Then there are the people who thrill to physical danger: Navy Seals who, after leaving the military, sign up as mercenaries in war zones; the two men who climbed the sheer face of El Capitan in Yosemite Park earlier this year; people who enjoy illegal drugs so much that they ignore the risks of jail or death; motorcyclists who hate riding with protective helmets; rock musicians who eschew earplugs while knowing they will lose their hearing early.

Dylan Thomas seems to have been torn.  Writing in his teens and later, he embraced the themes of eternal life and fighting to live to a long old age.  In his behavior, not so much.

W.B. Yeats -- "Under Ben Bulben"

Drumcliff churchyard with Ben Bulben in the background

A death in my family has me turning to the subject in literature, specifically poetry.

Today I read again a poem of the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats.  It is believed that he wrote it during the last week of his life in 1939, when, 74 years old and in ill health, he had been sent to southern France to recuperate and observe the gathering horror of another world war.

Yeats was absorbed with Irish folklore and then the battles to establish an Irish state.  He founded Dublin's Abbey Theater for performances of Irish art, and he was a senator in the early Irish parliament.

The poem is regarded as a last will and testament -- asserting his belief in an afterlife, challenging artists to set lofty classical aims for themselves and even leaving instructions for his burial in Sligo in western Ireland, where he was born.

When reading Yeats, it helps to have some background in Irish lore, Irish history and the classics; even without these, it is not difficult to catch the drift.  The power of his writing -- rhythm and phrase -- never fails to move me.  Section II is probably the most accessible, and VI, the final section, closes with Yeats writing his own emphatic epitaph.

Under Ben Bulben

       by W.B. Yeats

I.

Swear by what the sages spoke

Round the Mareotic Lake

That the witch of Atlas knew,

Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.

Swear by those horsemen, by those women

Complexion and form prove superhuman,

That pale, long-visaged company

That air in immortality

Completeness of their passions won;

Now they ride the wintry dawn

Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.

Here's the gist of what they mean.

II.

Many times man lives and dies

Between his two eternities,

That of race and that of soul,

And ancient Ireland knew it all.

Whether man die in his bed

Or the rifle knocks him dead,

A brief parting from those dear

Is the worst man has to fear.

Though grave-diggers' toil is long,

Sharp their spades, their muscles strong.

They but thrust their buried men

Back in the human mind again.

III.

You that Mitchel's prayer have heard,

"Send war in our time, O Lord!"

Know that when all words are said

And a man is fighting mad,

Something drops from eyes long blind,

He completes his partial mind,

For an instant stands at ease,

Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.

Even the wisest man grows tense

With some sort of violence

Before he can accomplish fate,

Know his work or choose his mate.

IV.

Poet and sculptor, do the work,

Nor let the modish painter shirk

What his great forefathers did.

Bring the soul of man to God,

Make him fill the cradles right.

Measurement began our might:

Forms a stark Egyptian thought,

Forms that gentler Phidias wrought.

Michael Angelo left a proof

on the Sistine Chapel roof,

Where but half-awakened Adam

Can disturb globe-trotting Madam

Till her bowels are in heat,

Proof that there's a purpose set

Before the secret working mind:

Profane perfection of mankind.

Quattocento put in paint

On backgrounds for a God or Saint

Gardens where a soul's at ease;

Where everything that meets the eye,

Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,

Resemble forms that are or seem

When sleepers wake and yet still dream.

And when it's vanished still declare,

With only bed and bedstead there,

That heavens had opened.

Gyres run on;

When that greater dream had gone

Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,

Prepared a rest for the people of God,

Palmer's phrase, but after that 

Confusion fell upon our thought.

V.

Irish poets, learn your trade,

Sing whatever is well made,

Scorn the sort now growing up

All out of shape from toe to top,

Their unremembering hearts and heads

Base-born products of base beds.

Sing the peasantry, and then

Hard-riding country gentlemen,

The holiness of monks, and after

Porter-drinkers' randy laughter;

Sing the lords and ladies gay

That were beaten into clay

Through seven heroic centuries;

Cast your mind on other days

That we in coming days may be

Still the indomitable Irishry.

VI.

Under bare Ben Bulben's head

in Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.

An ancestor was rector there

Long years ago, a church stands near,

By the road an ancient cross.

No marble, no conventional phrase;

On limestone quarried near the spot

By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by!

Poppies

Above is a photo of a remarkable art project taking shape around the Tower of London.

For months now, volunteers have been setting out ceramic poppies at the rate of 180 a day.  By November 11, Armistice Day, there will be almost 900,000 poppies, one for each British and Commonwealth soldier who died in World War I.

Poppies have been a symbol of the Great War for many years, partly because of a famous poem about the British war dead in Flanders.  The poem is set at the site first of an early trench battle and, then, a soldiers' cemetery.

An English ceramic artist, Paul Cummins, and a set designer, Tom Piper, came up with the idea and have cooperated on its execution.  At the end of the project, the poppies will be sold and proceeds devoted to veterans' charities.

Several elements strike me here -- beautiful flowers representing death, the mass of flowers acknowledging the staggering numbers of war dead and the placement at the Tower of London, for hundreds of years a prison notorious for the torture and execution of people deemed enemies of British kings and queens.  During World War I, 11 spies were executed by firing squad at the tower.

It looks in photographs like a thoughtful, respectful remembrance, and it makes me wish I had a trip planned to London this year.


The Poem

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row

That mark our place, and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

                           scarce heard amid the guns below

We are the Dead.  Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunsets flow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

in Flanders fields

The poem, memorized by Commonwealth children for generations, was written in 1915, early in the war, by a Canadian army doctor, John McCrae, after he watched a friend die on the field.  "In Flanders Fields" is marked by the theme of sad but honorable loss.

As the war ground on and the carnage continued, later British poets composed more graphic verses about the frustration, suffering and even horror that they had witnessed.  (More about them later.)

John McRae died toward the end of the war, still in service, of pneumonia, in 1918.

Who Said That, No. 2: The Panther

Early in my life as a newspaper reporter, I had a desk next to a columnist who has continued on to a fine career writing for magazines and film.   Very talented, and a nice guy to boot.

One afternoon, as he was ending his day gig and I was starting on the 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. night shift (chasing earlier stories our paper had missed and many, many reports of violence) we fell into conversation about Ogden Nash, the early 20th century humorous poet we both admired.

My colleague gave me this Nash quote:

   "If you hear the knock of a panther, don't anther."

I loved it.  It sustained me through one evening's share of panic and gore.  I've repeated it over the years, often to great effect, at social events.

Unfortunately, we both got it wrong.

Recently, I looked up the quote.  It comes from an Ogden Nash poem that goes like this:

Ogden Nash

The Panther

The panther is like a leopard,  

Except it hasn't been peppered.

Should you behold a panther crouch,

Prepare to say Ouch,

Better yet, if called by a panther,

Don't anther.

I still prefer my colleague's version.  Who needs the "peppered" stuff?  Or the "Ouch" business?  And the last two lines don't flow comfortably.

The whole thing works best as a couplet: "If you hear the knock of a panther, don't anther."  Several generations of amateur oral historians have improved on the original.

Nash was a smart guy, and no doubt he dashed this off quickly.  I picture him scribbling it down, perhaps on the back of an envelope, as he waited for his friends to join him for a drink in the bar at the Algonquin.

Back in the good old days, when many writers were paid by the word, it made sense for poets like Nash to stretch out their observations, sometimes, as here, in the six-line form, now known as a sestet or sestina.

Now, by contrast, everyone from reality show stars to rock stars comment on the full range of events from the silly to the complex in the extreme short form, with Twitter posts.  How things have changed.


Note: My first "Who Said That?" post on April 20 concerned a famous comment attributed to two different legendary university leaders.