http://www.englishworld2011.info/

PHILIP LARKIN / 2565 careful, because she did not want, today, to be surprised by Fred's knock at five o'clock. The demons were not here. They had gone forever, because she was buying her freedom from them. She was slipping already into the dark fructifying dream that seemed to caress her inwardly, like the movement of her blood . . . but she had to think about Matthew first. Should she write a letter for the cor- oner? But what should she say? She would like to leave him with the look on his face she had seen this morning—banal, admittedly, but at least confidently healthy. Well, that was impossible, one did not look like that with a wife dead from suicide. But how to leave him believing she was dying because of a man— because of the fascinating publisher Michael Plant? Oh, how ridiculous! How absurd! How humiliating! But she decided not to trouble about it, simply not to think about the living. If he wanted to believe she had a lover, he would believe it. And he did want to believe it. Even when he had found out that there was no publisher in London called Michael Plant, he would think: Oh poor Susan, she was afraid to give me his real name. And what did it matter whether he married Phil Hunt or Sophie? Though it ought to be Sophie, who was already the mother of those children . . . and what hypocrisy to sit here worrying about the children, when she was going to leave them because she had not got the energy to stay. She had about four hours. She spent them delightfully, darkly, sweetly, letting herself slide gently, gently, to the edge of the river. Then, with hardly a break in her consciousness, she got up, pushed the thin rug against the door, made sure the windows were tight shut, put two shillings in the meter, and turned on the gas. For the first time since she had been in the room she lay on the hard bed that smelled stale, that smelled of sweat and sex. She lay on her back on the green satin cover, but her legs were chilly. She got up, found a blanket folded in the bottom of the chest of drawers, and carefully covered her legs with it. She was quite content lying there, listening to the faint soft hiss of the gas that poured into the room, into her lungs, into her brain, as she drifted off into the dark river.

1963

PHILIP LARKIN 1922-1985

Philip Larkin was born in Coventry; was educated at its King Henry VIII School and at St. John's College, Oxford; and was for many years librarian of the Hull University Library. He wrote the poems of his first book, The North Ship (1945), under W. B. Yeats's strong enchantment. Although this influence persisted in the English poet's formal skill and subdued visionary longings, Larkin began to read Thomas Hardy seriously after World War II, and Hardy's rugged language, local settings, and ironic tone helped counter Yeats's influence. "After that," Larkin said, "Yeats came to seem so artificial—all that crap about masks and Crazy Jane and all the rest. It all rang so completely unreal." Also rejecting the international modernism of Eliot and Pound because of its mythical allusions, polyglot discourse, and fragmentary syntax, Larkin http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2566 / PHILIP LARKIN

reclaimed a more direct, personal, formally regular model of poetry, supposedly rooted in a native English tradition of Wordsworth, Hardy, A. E. Housman, Wilfred Owen, and W. H. Auden. Even so, his poetry is not so thoroughly antimodernist as are his declarations: witness his imagist precision and alienated personae, his blending of revulsion and attraction toward modernity. Larkin was the dominant figure in what came to be known as "the Movement," a group of university poets that included Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, and Thorn Gunn, gathered together in Robert Conquest's landmark anthology of 1956, New Lines. Their work was seen as counteracting not only the extravagances of modernism but also the influence of Dylan Thomas's high-flown, apocalyptic rhetoric: like Larkin, these poets preferred a civil grammar and rational syntax over prophecy, suburban realities over mythmaking. No other poet presents the welfare-state world of postimperial Britain so vividly, so unsparingly, and so tenderly. "Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are," Larkin said; "I don't want to transcend the commonplace, I love the common- place life. Everyday things are lovely to me." Eschewing the grandiose, he writes poetry that, in its everyday diction and melancholy wryness, worldly subjects and regular meters, affirms rather than contravenes the restrictions of ordinary life. Love's failure, the erosion of religious and national abutments, the loneliness of age and death—Larkin does not avert his poetic gaze from these bleak realities. As indicated by the title of his 1955 collection The Less Deceived, disillusionment, drabness, and resignation color these poems. Yet Larkin's drearily mundane world often gives way to muted promise, his speakers' alienation to possible communion, his skepticism to encounters even with the sublime. At the end of "High Windows," the characteris- tically ironic and self-deprecating speaker glimpses both radiant presence and total absence in the sunlit glass: "And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless."

Like Hardy, Larkin wrote novels—Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947)—and his poems have a novelist's sense of place and skill in the handling of direct speech. He also edited a controversial anthology, The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973), which attempted to construct a modern native tradition in England. But his most significant legacy was his poetry, although his output was limited to four volumes. Out of "the commonplace life" he fashioned uncommon poems—some of the most emotionally complex, rhythmically polished, and intricately rhymed poems of the second half of the twentieth century.

Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut 5 For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

io Move forward, run my hand around the font. From where I stand, the roof looks almost new— Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: 1 don't. Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few http://www.englishworld2011.info/

CHURCH GOING / 2567

Hectoring large-scale verses,1 and pronounce is "Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant. The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,2 Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do, 20 And always end much at a loss like this, Wondering what to look for; wondering, too, When churches fall completely out of use What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep A few cathedrals chronically on show, 25 Their parchment, plate and pyx3 in locked cases, And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep. Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come To make their children touch a particular stone; 30 Pick simples0 for a cancer; or on some medicinal herbs Advised night see walking a dead one? Power of some sort or other will go on In games, in riddles, seemingly at random; But superstition, like belief, must die, 35 And what remains when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week, A purpose more obscure. I wonder who Will be the last, the very last, to seek 40 This place for what it was; one of the crew That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts4 were? Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique, Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?5 45 Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground6 Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt So long and equably what since is found 50 Only in separation—marriage, and birth, And death, and thoughts of these—for which was built This special shell? For, though I've no idea What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, It pleases me to stand in silence here;

I.e., Bible verses printed in large type for read- 5. Gum resin used in the making of incense; one \ aloud. of three presents given by the Three Wise Men to An Irish sixpence has no value in England. the infant Jesus. "Gown-and-bands": gown and Box in which communion wafers are kept. decorative collar worn by clergypeople. Galleries on top of carved screens separating 6. Most churches were built in the shape of a • nave of a church from the choir. cross. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2568 / PHILIP LARKIN

55 A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising 60 A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round.

1954 1955

MCMXIV'

Those long uneven lines Standing as patiently As if they were stretched outside The Oval or Villa Park,2 5 The crowns of hats, the sun On moustached archaic faces Grinning as if it were all An August bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached, io Established names on the sunblinds, The farthings and sovereigns,3 And dark-clothed children at play Called after kings and queens, The tin advertisements 0 15 For cocoa and twist, and the pubs tobacco Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring: The place-names all hazed over With flowering grasses, and fields 20 Shadowing Domesday lines4 Under wheat's restless silence; The differently-dressed servants With tiny rooms in huge houses, The dust behind limousines;

25 Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word—the men Leaving the gardens tidy,

1. 1914, in Roman numerals, as incised on stone valuable British coins, respectively. memorials to the dead of World War I. 4. The still-visible boundaries of medieval farmers' 2. London cricket ground and Birmingham foot- long and narrow plots, ownership of which is ball ground. recorded in William the Conqueror's Domesday 3. At that time the least valuable and the most Book (1085-86). http://www.englishworld2011.info/

AMBULANCES / 2569

30 The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.

1960 1964

Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest, Lying together there goes back so far, An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently. 5 Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon. None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why At this unique distance from isolation

10 It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.

1960 1964

Ambulances

Closed like confessionals,1 they thread Loud noons of cities, giving back None of the glances they absorb. Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque, 5 They come to rest at any kerb: All streets in time are visited.

Then children strewn on steps or road, Or women coming from the shops Past smells of different dinners, see 10 A wild white face that overtops Red stretcher-blankets momently As it is carried in and stowed,

And sense the solving emptiness That lies just under all we do, 15 And for a second get it whole, So permanent and blank and true. The fastened doors recede. Poor soul, They whisper at their own distress;

1. Enclosed stalls in Roman Catholic churches in which priests hear confession. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2570 / PHILIP LARKIN

For borne away in deadened air 20 May go the sudden shut of loss Round something nearly at an end, And what cohered in it across The years, the unique random blend Of families and fashions, there

25 At last begin to loosen. Far From the exchange of love to lie Unreachable inside a room The traffic parts to let go by Brings closer what is left to come, 30 And dulls to distance all we are.

1961 1964

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids And guess he's fucking her and she's Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise

5 Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives— Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester,1 And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if io Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought, That'll he the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest. He 15 And his lot will all go down the long slide Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows 20 Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

1967 1974

1. Farm machine for harvesting grain. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

HOMAGE TO A GOVERNMENT / 257 1

Sad Steps'

Groping back to bed after a piss I part thick curtains, and am startled by The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.

Four o'clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie 5 Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky. There's something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart (Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

10 High and preposterous and separate— Lozenge0 of love! Medallion of art! diamondlike shape O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there. The hardness and the brightness and the plain

15 Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain Of being young; that it can't come again, But is for others undiminished somewhere.

1968 1974

Homage to a Government

Next year we are to bring the soldiers home For lack of money, and it is all right. Places they guarded, or kept orderly, Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly. 5 We want the money for ourselves at home Instead of working. And this is all right.

It's hard to say who wanted it to happen, But now it's been decided nobody minds. The places are a long way off, not here, 10 Which is all right, and from what we hear The soldiers there only made trouble happen. Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country That brought its soldiers home for lack of money. 15 The statues will be standing in the same Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.

1. Cf. Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella 31: "With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies." http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2572 / PHILIP LARKIN

Our children will not know it's a different country. All we can hope to leave them now is money.

Jan. 10, 1969 1974

The Explosion

On the day of the explosion

Shadows pointed towards the pithead:0 mine entrance In the sun the slagheap0 slept. pile of scrap, refuse

Down the lane came men in pitboots 5 Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke, Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them; Came back with a nest of lark's eggs; Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

io So they passed in beards and moleskins,1 Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter, Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows Stopped chewing for a second; sun, 15 Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they Are sitting in God's house in comfort, We shall see them face to face—

Plain as lettering in the chapels 20 It was said, and for a second Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed— Gold as on a coin, or walking Somehow from the sun towards them,

25 One showing the eggs unbroken.

1970 1974

This Be The Verse1

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.

1. Clothes of heavy fabric. he lies where he longed to be, / Home is the sailor, I. Cf. the elegy "Requiem," by Robert Louis Ste- home from sea, / And the hunter home from the venson (1850-1894), of which the final verse hill." reads, "This be the verse you grave for me: / Here http://www.englishworld2011.info/

AUBADE / 2573

They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

5 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. 10 It deepens like a coastal shelf.2 Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.

Apr. ? 1971 1974

Aubade1

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: 5 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, 10 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 15 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, 20 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, 25 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, 30 The anaesthetic from which none come round.

2. Underwater land off a coast 1. Music or poem announcing dawn. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2574 / NADINE GORDIMER

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, 35 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. 40 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. 45 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. 50 Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

1977 1977

NADINE GORDIMER b. 1923

Nadine Gordimer's fiction has given imaginative and moral shape to the recent history of South Africa. Since the publication of her first book, The Lying Days (1953), she has charted the changing patterns of response and resistance to apartheid by exploring the place of the European in Africa, selecting representative themes and governing motifs for novels and short stories, and shifting her ideological focus from a liberal to a more radical position. In recognition of this achievement, of having borne untir- ing and lucid narrative witness, Gordimer was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born to Jewish immigrant parents in the South African mining town of Springs, Gordimer began writing early, from the beginning taking as her subject the patholo- gies and everyday realities of a racially divided society. Her decision to remain in Johannesburg through the years of political repression reflected her commitment to her subject and to her vision of a postapartheid future. In the years since apartheid was dismantled in 1994, Gordimer has continued to live and write in South Africa, and her recent novels, such as The House Gun (1998) and The Picku-p (2001), retain an uncompromising focus on the inhabitants of a racially fractured culture.

In her nonfiction Gordimer self-consciously places her writing within a tradition of European realism, most notably that defined by the Hungarian philosopher and critic Georg Lukacs (1885-1971). Her aim—as shown in her incisive and highly acclaimed novels of the 1970s, The Conservationist (1974) and Burger's Daughter (1979)—is to evoke by way of the personal and of the precisely observed particular a broader political and historical totality. This method gives her characters, and the stories in which they reside, their representativeness. As Gordimer has famously said,