A Little Dose of Optimism

I can’t remember the last time I felt that bubbly, optimistic, really the world isn’t all that bad, attitude.  After all, the world really is that bad, but we might as well smile as the ship is sinking. 

Sure the world is decaying and getting worse all the time, but in the juvescence of the year came Christ the tiger and all that.  (Yes, he devours us, but even still…) 

Yet, here I am reading a book, thinking the whole time:  “Oh, please Philip, it isn’t that bad.  Seriously, now.  Must you be so bleak and glum and dismal?”

That’s what Philip Larkin does to me…he is so unrelentingly depressing that he makes me feel like a giddy optimist. How in the world is he is such a popular poet? 

The general spirit of the age is that if things go just right, if the right people are elected or the forces of evil can be stopped, then we can remake the world in our own image and everything will be all warm and cuddly and cheerful. Are there really enough pessimists who buy poetry to explain Larkin’s popularity?

Maybe I spend too much time with Americans.  Maybe the British are really all dour and sad—come to think of it, maybe they have every reason to be glum—the weather’s bad and all they have to look forward to is King Charles.

After reading a review of Larkin, I bought a copy of Collected Poems.  Well, one of the volumes entitled Collected Poems.  

The same editor, Anthony Thwaite, has put together two different collections of Larkin and cleverly gave them both the same title.  So, this is the one that has Larkin’s original books republished instead of putting all the poems in chronological order. 

(Can I just say that Thwaite belongs in the Hall of Shame for this. How could he not notice that the two collections had the same title?  Was he trying to confuse?  Where were the editors in all this?)

I’ve read The North Ship, The Less Deceived, and The Whitsun Weddings.  (He has one other book, which I still have not yet read: High Windows. One can only take so much dark sky before wanting a little sun in one’s poetry reading.) 

The North Ship really isn’t worth reading.  If he hadn’t published anything after that, we wouldn’t be talking about Larkin today.

The other two were good, quite good.  But, bleak—did I mention that already?

Consider the poem “Next, Please.”  I like this poem a lot, so it makes a useful means of seeing how Larkin works. 

It starts:

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.

The poem then tells how we stand on a bluff waiting for a ship to drop off the good things in life.  It concludes:

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break

And after reading that, my first reaction is, Oh Please, Philip.  It isn’t that bad. 

Surely every now and then a ship drops off at least a small bit of cargo to brighten our days.  Surely we get a trinket every now and then, don’t we? 

And, therein lies the brilliance of Larkin and the tedium of Larkin.  Poem after poem with the same tone and the same message.  All is pointless and lost. 

You are a toad, merely going to your dull job and learning to enjoy your dull, pathetic life (“Toads” and “Toads Revisited”).  Your memories of good times are just that, memories—there is nothing to them and everything you remember as making you happy is gone, long gone (“I Remember, I Remember”).  Seeing a dead body loaded into an ambulance is really just a picture of the emptiness of our lives (“Ambulances”).

So, what can we conclude about Larkin? 

Technically, he is very good.  He has a consistent message and relates it well.  He is worth reading.  Well worth reading. 

But, it clearly takes a different temperament than I have in order to deeply enjoy reading him.  Once can admire his work, one can even enjoy it.  But only in small doses.