Recently I noted that since I left college, where I had to actually study the stuff, I haven’t been reading much poetry. Saddened to learn that “it’s probably safe to say that Disillusioned Lefty’s Culture Monday is,for the moment, dead“, I thought I’d leap into the breach, and do my best to raise the tone of Mondays with “Poetry Monday”. I can make no promises either for my ability to stick to even a weekly blogging schedule or for the standard of my literary criticism. If nothing else, The reader will at least have been pointed in the direction of some great poetry.
Though it’s best read off the page rather than a computer screen, there’s a vast amount of poetry online. I’ll kick things off with “The Old Fools” by Phillip Larkin:
What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there’s really been no change,
And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching the light move? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange;
Why aren’t they screaming?
At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend
There’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines –
How can they ignore it?
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside you head, and people in them, acting
People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give
An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction’s alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.
By all accounts, Larkin wasn’t always the nicest of men; Apart from being a self-pitying miseryguts, he was reactionary, racist and often misogynistic. All this, when it was discovered via his collected letters and the biography by British Poet-Laureate Andrew Motion, did not endear him to the Political Philistines – if he has so very awful, then the poetry must be awful too.
On the contrary, his work is witty, lucid, and posessed of a humanity that makes Larkin the poet (as opposed to Larkin the man) a deeply sympathetic figure. This poem comes from High Windows, his collection of 1973 which, to use a music analogy, is his “classic album”, home to most of his best known poems. “The Old Fools” is less famous than “This Be the Verse” or “Annus Mirabilis”, but is a better, deeper poem. From the initial disgust at the Old Fools, we move to an attempt at understanding, a realisation perhaps that the disgust is driven by fear (Larkin was morbid even as a young man. Terrified of death, he was haunted by the notion of it’s inevitability). The second verse could almost stand alone as poem all by itself. “The bits that were you, speeding away from each other forever” both combine and contrast with “the million-petalled flower of being here”, to give a sense of life emerging preciously but heartbreakingly briefly from oblivion before returning there, like the brief patterns made by a lava lamp.
Larkin moves on inside the heads of the old fools in the next verse, his tone softened; now more elegiac, more melancholy. As he moves from third to last verse, he gives us a heartbreaking description of senility: ” An air of baffled absence, trying to be there, yet being here.” This is the amazed realisation that, unfairly, time and age affect you too, the sense of “where did it all go?”. Are they aware of what’s coming next, he wonders, before concluding with a shrug, “well, we shall find out”.
This is not a cheerful poem, but is nonetheless a life-affirming one. Though the poet fears and dreads death, he does so because of an awareness of the preciousness of life. His disgust at the old fools is, we soon learn, bravado. He’s not unsympathetic to their plight, if only because he’s terrified of facing it himself. In going from disgust to sympathy to acceptance, Larkin brings us with him, thus enriching us. The final shrug of accesptance isn’t much, but it is enlightenment of a sort.
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[…] Launched amid great fanfare, promised as the greatest cultural event of our young century, Poetry Monday went flat after a single installment. What can I say? It was a bank holiday. There was snooker on. I was watching my pick, Oulart, lose the Grand National by a mere length. Must try harder. […]