Curmudgeon with a Heart of Gold: Philip Larkin

(reflections on Philip Larkin's Collected Poems, Anthony Thwaite, editor, published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003.)

I didn't think I knew Philip Larkin's poetry until I came to page 57 in his Collected Poems, where I recognized a poem that I read thirty years ago for a high school exam. I didn't have to re-read it; I've remembered it by its outline all these years.

The poem is "Wires," and its eight lines rhyme in this distinctive pattern: A B C D D C B A. The "A" rhyme is "fences." The poem depicts young steers on the "wildest prairies," brushing up against the wires (rhyme D), challenging the limits of their lives only once, and, discouraged by their "muscle-shredding violence," retreating back to the A rhyme -- "Electric limits to their wildest senses." Figuring all this out, and how the poet substitutes cows for those of us who experience a pain of rejection and never try again, and seeing how the rhyme scheme mimics the sense of the poem, I got an "A" on my in-class essay for Dr. Roberts.

Coincidentally, the poem that caused me to buy this collection is on p. 58, "Church Going," a title that suggests both going to a church, and a church going to seed. Discussed elsewhere on this blog, the poem describes a man on a bike stopping to investigate an empty, barely-used antique church, sensing an importance to this "shell" of an almost extinct faith, dedicated to the most important things in life - "marriage, and birth, / and death, and thoughts of these."

Together, these two poems exemplify Larkin in two of his favorite modes. Sometimes, he looks with some regret on a wiser or more beautiful past. Sometimes he looks upon life as a thing of beauty that people like him miss because of their own cussedness, shyness, or distractedness. His earliest published poems in this collection are the least interesting, encapsulated by a bitter little poem about being outside of a dance club, looking in ("Reasons for Attendance," 48).

His mastery of language and form allow him to compress a lifetime of incidental pleasures in single lines of a seemingly bitter reflection on old age ("Sad Steps"144 between toilet and bed in early morning, looking at the cold distant moon, or "The Old Fools" 131) .

He often seems to be a curmudgeon, cynical and dismissive. The truth is, he's grateful for the beauties of life and bitterly regretful for being one of those cows afraid to take what life has to offer.