(January, 2016)
As the twentieth century churned onwards, Britain faced an unprecedented national identity crisis. Shifting power relations on a global scale confronted the small island in the North Atlantic with a creeping diminishment, bringing into question its status as the world’s dominant Western sovereign power. Poet Philip Larkin, among others, took up the challenge of cataloguing and recording this identity slippage, articulating a national loss of direction and certainty in neat accessible verse. In Larkin’s poetry, Britain’s national loss takes on a personal existential dimension, as he examines the omnipresent anxieties of a life that bars us agency and constantly confronts us with the vacuity of Being inscribed within the confines of mortality. Though Larkin’s poetry oscillates between bitter sarcasm and explicit pessimism, it nevertheless speaks to a reality we know and experience. The power of Larkin’s verse lies in its cathartic release, and in its capacity to reveal the way shifting global politics can radically alter our national and personal experiences.
Perhaps some of Larkin’s most direct political commentary comes in his poem, “Homage to a Government.” The poem, in keeping with the language prescriptions of The Movement, works in simple short words, none longer than three syllables. Each stanza employs repetition (ABCCAB) to create rhyme, yet the words Larkin chooses to repeat also serve to set the poem’s resigned, matter-of-fact tone: home, orderly, country, money, among others. He writes, “Next year we are to bring the soldiers home/ For lack of money, and it is all right” (Larkin 222, 1-2). The phrase “is all right” occurs twice more in the poems three short stanzas, and becomes a pacifying, yet potentially ironic slogan, its repetition serving to undercut its sincerity. Larkin also articulates a pervasive apathy surrounding the return of the soldiers, which, by proxy, speaks to an apathy regarding Britain’s identity as a global sovereign force: “It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen,/ But now it’s been decided nobody minds” (Larkin 222, 7-8). This political alienation becomes reinforced two lines later when Larkin employs the phrase, “from what we hear,” indicating a degree of disconnection, or communication entropy between Britain’s populace and its mechanism of government (Larkin 222, 10). In the final stanza, Larkin describes statues “standing in the same/ Tree-muffled squares” which “look nearly the same,” but are invisibly changed by what it means for Britain to become “a country/ That brought its soldiers home for lack of money” (Larkin 222, 13-16). The image of tree-muffled squares further replicates the buffering Larkin sets up between Britain’s people and the external world from which they are now distinct. The poem’s last words solidify the divide between imperial past and isolate present. Larkin writes, “Our children will not know it’s a different country,” suggesting that this divide between past and present manifests itself in Britain’s posterity, who will not really understand the kind of transformation that occurred at the end of empire.
Larkin’s anxiety surrounding posterity also plays out in his poem, “This Be The Verse.” In keeping with Larkin’s remarkable capacity for pessimism, the poem is a reflection on the way in which “Man hands on misery to man” over generations, while also parodying the far more cheerful poetry of Britain’s past (Larkin 224, 9). The poem’s structure and rhyme scheme borrow overtly from the Romantic tradition, a reference to Britain’s past literary and cultural dominance which may also have been fading by the poem’s publication in 1971, shrinking behind the behemoth cultural force of Hollywood and the rise of foreign literary movements. In a sickeningly sing-song rhyme scheme, Larkin tells us, “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” (Larkin 223, 1-4). The poem is overt in its message of parental overdetermination — by its logic, we are not, nor can ever be agents capable of originating any kind of action, but are instead condemned to react endlessly to conditions passed down generation to generation. In the poem’s second to last line, Larkin’s speaker tells us to “Get out as quickly as you can,” presumably meaning to end one’s own pointless, automatic existence, to forsake humankind entirely, to die (Larkin 224, 11).
Despite this dark and rather blunt advice, Larkin’s poetics of death and mortality become more complicated in his poem, “Aubade.” The speaker lies awake in the early hours of the morning, paralyzed by the thought of “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” (Larkin 226, 4-7). In the place of Larkin’s speaker’s stark dismissal of human life in “This Be The Verse” comes an insurmountable fear of what comes at its conclusion, at “the total emptiness for ever,/ The sure extinction that we travel to/ And shall be lost in always” (Larkin 226, 16-18). Despite the speaker’s visceral fear of dying, the language of the poem nonetheless emphasizes life’s meaninglessness, it’s tedious cyclicality. The title “Aubade” refers to a poem announcing dawn, yet dawn for Larkin’s speaker is merely the start of another day in an “uncaring/Intricate rented world,” rented, because mortality renders it wholly temporary (Larkin 227, 46-47). Larkin juxtaposes the grim profundity and inevitability of death with the empty banality of life, writing, “It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,/ Have always known, know that we can’t escape/ Yet can’t accept,” followed by, “Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring/ … Work has to be done” (Larkin 227, 42-49). Death, for Larkin’s speaker, “stays just on the edge of vision,/ A small unfocused blur, a standing chill/ That slows each impulse down to indecision” (Larkin 227, 31-33). This sense of indecision, of paralytic apathy, echoes “Homage to a Government” in its political indifference, and seems to suggest that all things fade to equivocality and triviality in the face of such a totalizing nothingness.
This feeling of existential doom pervades Larkin’s poetry, yet Larkin’s clear and explicit verse allows us the opportunity to engage with mortality, identity, and questions about the meaning of life in an unmediated, direct way. Though there seems to be no redeeming grain of optimism to be found in any of these poems, Larkin’s poetry contains the power to remind us of our insignificance, and through the poetry’s unrelenting pessimism, produce a smile or chuckle acknowledging the smallness of our lives in a vast cosmos. In this sense, “Homage to a Government,” “This Be The Verse,” and “Aubade” all offer us affirmation of aspects of the modern and postmodern experience — Larkin depicts a grim position on reality, but perhaps it is the reader’s capacity to feel and laugh at and with Larkin’s words that gives these poems potency. Larkin’s poetry is a product of a changing Britain, and the feeling of deflation that seems to mark his poetry offers an articulation of what, in part, the end of empire has meant.
WORKS CITED:
Larkin, Philip. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Print.
Collected Writings of Nolan Bishop 