There is enormous vigour in the new-found ‘comic’ conviction of the poet that he must divest himself of convictions, come to experience with the pure readiness which an angel brings to the activity of witnessing reality:
Away, away away on wings like Joyce’s
Mother Earth is putting my brand new clothes in order
Praying, she says, that I no more ignore her
Yellow buttons she found in fields at bargain prices.
Kelly’s Big Bush for a button-hole. Surprises
In every pocket – the stream at Connolly’s corner,
Myself at Annavackey on Armagh border,
Or calm and collected in a calving crisis.
Not sad at all as I float away, away
With Mother keeping me to the vernacular.
I have a home to return to now. Ο blessing
For the Return in Departure. Somewhere to stay
Doesn’t matter. What is distressing
Is walking eagerly to go nowhere in particular.
‘Walking eagerly’ belonged to the old world of ego; now he is in the new world where, like the lilies of the field, he considers not his raiment nor what he will put on – Mother Earth, after all, is putting his brand new clothes in order. Where Kavanagh had once painted Monaghan like a Millet, with a thick and faithful pigment in which men rose from the puddled ground, all wattled in potato mould, he now paints like a Chagall, afloat above his native domain, airborne in the midst of his own dream place rather than earthbound in a literal field. Or perhaps it would be even truer to say that the later regenerated poet in Kavanagh does not paint at all, but draws.
Painting, after all, involves one in a more laboured relationship with a subject – or at least in a more conscious and immersed relationship with a medium – than drawing does. Drawing is closer to the pure moment of perception. The blanknesses which the line travels through in a drawing are not evidence of any incapacity on the artist’s part to fill them in. They attest rather to an absolute and all-absorbing need within the line itself to keep on the move. And it is exactly that self-propulsion and airy career of drawing, that mood of buoyancy, that sense of sufficiency in the discovery of a direction rather than any sense of anxiety about the need for a destination, it is this kind of certitude and nonchalance which distinguishes the best of Kavanagh’s later work also.
This then is truly creative writing. It does arise from the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, but the overflow is not a reactive response to some stimulus in the world out there. Instead, it is a spurt of abundance from a source within and it spills over to irrigate the world beyond the self. This is what Kavanagh is talking about in the poem ‘Prelude’, when he abjures satire which is a reactive art, an ‘unfruitful prayer’, and embraces instead the deeper, autonomous and ecstatic art of love itself:
But satire is unfruitful prayer,
Only wild shoots of pity there,
And you must go inland and be
Lost in compassion’s ecstasy,
Where suffering soars in a summer air –
The millstone has become a star.
When I read those lines in 1963, I took to their rhythm and was grateful for their skilful way with an octosyllabic metre. But I was too much in love with poetry that painted the world in a thick linguistic pigment to relish fully the line-drawing that was inscribing itself so lightly and freely here. I was still more susceptible to the heavy tarpaulin of the verse of The Great Hunger than to the rinsed streamers that fly in the clear subjective breeze of ‘Prelude’.
I have learned to value this poetry of inner freedom very highly. It is an example of self-conquest, a style discovered to express this poet’s unique response to his universal ordinariness, a way of reestablishing the authenticity of personal experience and surviving as a credible being. So I would now wish to revise a sentence which I wrote ten years ago. I said then that when Kavanagh had consumed the roughage of his Monaghan experience, he ate his heart out. I believe now that it would be truer to say that when he had consumed the roughage of his early Monaghan experience, he had cleared a space where, in Yeats’s words, ‘The soul recovers radical innocence, / And learns at last that it is self-delighting, / Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, / And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will’. If the price of this learning was too often, in poetic terms, a wilful doggerel, writing which exercised a vindictiveness against the artfulness of art, the rewards of it were a number of poems so full of pure self-possession in the face of death and waste that they prompt that deepest of responses, which the archaic torso of Apollo prompted in Rilke. These poems, with their grievously earned simplicity, make you feel all over again a truth which the mind becomes adept at evading, and which Rilke expressed in a single, simple command: ‘You must change your life’.
Opening Address, Kavanagh’s Yearly, Carrickmacross, November 1985
The Main of Light
Ε. Μ. Forster once said that he envisaged A Passage to India as a book with a hole in the middle of it. Some poems are like that too. They have openings at their centre which take the reader through and beyond. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60, for example:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crooked eclipses ’gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Something visionary happens there in the fifth line. ‘Nativity’, an abstract noun housed in a wavering body of sound, sets up a warning tremor just before the mind’s eye gets dazzled by ‘the main of light’, and for a split second, we are in the world of the Paradiso. The rest of the poem lives melodiously in a world of discourse but it is this unpredictable strike into the realm of pure being that marks the sonnet with Shakespeare’s extravagant genius.
In so far as it is a poem alert to the sadness of life’s changes but haunted too by a longing for some adjacent ‘pure serene’, the sonnet rehearses in miniature the whole poignant score of Philip Larkin’s poetry. With Larkin, we respond constantly to the melody of intelligence, to a verse that is as much commentary as it is presentation, and it is this encounter between a compassionate, unfoolable mind and its own predicaments – which we are forced to recognize as our predicaments too – that gives his poetry its first appeal. Yet while Larkin is exemplary in the way he sifts the conditions of contemporary life, refuses alibis and pushes consciousness towards an exposed condition that is neither cynicism nor despair, there survives in him a repining for a more crystalline reality to which he might give allegiance. When that repining finds expression, something opens and moments occur which deserve to be called visionary. Because he is suspicious of any easy consolation, he is sparing of such moments, yet when they come they stream into the discursive and exacting world of his poetry with such trustworthy force that they call for attention.
In his introduction to the reissue of The North Ship, Larkin recalls a merry and instructive occasion during the period of his infatuation with Yeats. ‘I remember Bruce Montgomery snapping, as I droned for the third or fourth time that evening When such as I cast out remorse, so great a sweetness flows into the breast …, “It’s not his job to cast off remorse, but to earn forgiveness.” But then Bruce Montgomery had known Charles Williams.’ Larkin tells the anecdote to illustrate his early surrender to Yeats’s music and also to commend the anti-Romantic, morally sensitive attitude which Montgomery was advocating and which would eventually issue in his conversion to the poetry of Thomas Hardy. Yet it also illustrates that appetite for sweetness flowing into the breast, for the sensation of revelation, which never deserted him. The exchange between Montgomery and himself prefigures the shape of the unsettled quarrel which would be conducted all through the mature poetry, bet
ween vision and experience. And if it is that anti-heroic, chastening, humanist voice which is allowed most of the good lines throughout the later poetry, the rebukes it delivers cannot altogether banish the Yeatsian need for a flow of sweetness.
That sweetness flows into the poetry most reliably as a stream of light. In fact, there is something Yeatsian in the way that Larkin, in High Windows, places his sun poem immediately opposite and in answer to his moon poem: ‘Sad Steps’ and ‘Solar’ face each other on the opened page like the two halves of his poetic personality in dialogue. In ‘Sad Steps’, the wary intelligence is tempted by a moment of lunar glamour. The renaissance moon of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sails close, and the invitation to yield to the ‘enormous yes’ that love should evoke is potent, even for a man who has just taken a piss:
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
His vulnerability to desire and hope is transmitted in the Tennysonian cadence of that last line and a half, but immediately the delved brow tightens – ‘There’s something laughable about this’ – only to be tempted again by a dream of fullness, this time in the symbolist transports of language itself – ‘O wolves of memory, immensements!’ He finally comes out, of course, with a definite, end-stopped ‘No’. He refuses to allow the temptations of melody to chloroform the exactions of his common sense. Truth wins over beauty by a few points, and while the appeal of the poem lies in its unconsoled clarity about the seasons of ageing, our nature still tends to run to fill that symbolist hole in the middle.
However, the large yearnings that are kept firmly in their rational place in ‘Sad Steps’ are given scope to ‘climb and return like angels’ in ‘Solar’. This is frankly a prayer, a hymn to the sun, releasing a generosity that is in no way attenuated when we look twice and find that what is being praised could be as phallic as it is solar. Where the moon is ‘preposterous and separate, / Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!’, described in the language of the ironical, emotionally defensive man, the sun is a ‘lion face’, ‘an origin’, a ‘petalled head of flames’, ‘unclosing like a hand’, all of them phrases of the utmost candid feeling. The poem is unexpected and daring, close to the pulse of primitive poetry, unprotected by any sleight of tone or persona. Here Larkin is bold to stand uncovered in the main of light, far from the hatless one who took off his cycle clips in awkward reverence:
Coined there among
Lonely horizontals
You exist openly.
Our needs hourly
Climb and return like angels.
Unclosed like a hand,
You give forever.
These are the words of someone surprised by ‘a hunger in himself to be more serious’, although there is nothing in the poem which the happy atheist could not accept. Yet in the ‘angels’ simile and in the generally choral tone of the whole thing, Larkin opens stops that he usually keeps muted and it is precisely these stops which prove vital to the power and reach of his work.
‘Deceptions’, for example, depends upon a bright, still centre for its essential poetic power. The image of a window rises to take in the facts of grief, to hold them at bay and in focus. The violated girl’s mind lies open ‘like a drawer of knives’ and most of the first stanza registers the dead-still sensitivity of the gleaming blades and the changing moods of the afternoon light. What we used to consider in our Christian Doctrine classes under the heading of ‘the mystery of suffering’ becomes actual in the combined sensations of absolute repose and trauma, made substantial in images which draw us into raw identification with the girl:
The sun’s occasional print, the brisk brief
Worry of wheels along the street outside
Where bridal London bows the other way,
And light, unanswerable and tall and wide,
Forbids the scar to heal, and drives
Shame out of hiding. All the unhurried day
Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
It is this light-filled dilation at the heart of the poem which transposes it from lament to comprehension and prepares the way for the sharp irony of the concluding lines. I have no doubt that Larkin would have repudiated any suggestion that the beauty of the lines I have quoted is meant to soften the pain, as I have no doubt he would also have repudiated the Pedlar’s advice to Wordsworth in ‘The Ruined Cottage’ where, having told of the long sufferings of Margaret, he bids the poet ‘be wise and cheerful’. And yet the Pedlar’s advice arises from his apprehension of ‘an image of tranquillity’ which works in much the same way as the Larkin passage:
those very plumes,
Those weeds, and the high spear grass on the wall,
By mist and silent raindrops silvered o’er.
It is the authenticity of this moment of pacification which to some extent guarantees the Pedlar’s optimism; in a similar way the blank tenderness at the heart of Larkin’s poem takes it beyond irony and bitterness, though all the while keeping it short of facile consolation: ‘I would not dare / Console you if I could’.
Since Larkin is a poet as explicit as he is evocative, it is no surprise to find him coining terms that exactly describe the kind of effect I am talking about: ‘Here’, the first poem in The Whitsun Weddings, ends by defining it as a sense of ‘unfenced existence’ and by supplying the experience that underwrites that spacious abstraction:
Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken.
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
It is a conclusion that recalls the conclusion of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ – and indeed Dubliners is a book very close to the spirit of Larkin, whose collected work would fit happily under the title Englanders. These concluding lines constitute an epiphany, an escape from the ‘scrupulous meanness’ of the disillusioned intelligence, and we need only compare ‘Here’ with ‘Show Saturday’, another poem that seeks its form by an accumulation of detail, to see how vital to the success of ‘Here’ is this gesture towards a realm beyond the social and historical. ‘Show Saturday’ remains encumbered in naturalistic data, and while its conclusion beautifully expresses a nostalgic patriotism which is also an important part of this poet’s make-up, the note achieved is less one of plangent vision, more a matter of liturgical wishfulness: ‘Let it always be so’.
*
‘If I were called / To construct a religion / I should make use of water’ – but he could make use of ‘Here’ as well; and ‘Solar’; and ‘High Windows’; and ‘The Explosion’; and ‘Water’, the poem from which the lines are taken. It is true that the jaunty tone of these lines, and the downbeat vocabulary later in the poem involving ‘sousing, / A furious devout drench’, are indicative of Larkin’s unease with the commission he had imagined for himself. But just as ‘Solar’ and ‘Here’ yield up occasions where ‘unfenced existence’ can, without embarrassment to the sceptical man, find space to reveal its pure invitations, so too ‘Water’ escapes from its man-of-the-world nonchalance into a final stanza which is held like a natural monstrance above the socially defensive idiom of the rest of the poem:
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
The minute light makes its presence felt in Larkin’s poetry he cannot resist the romantic poet in himself who must respond with pleasure and alacrity, exclaiming, as it were, ‘Already with thee!’ The effects are various but they are all extraordinary, from the throwaway surprises of ‘a street / Of blinding windscreens’ or ‘the differe
ntly-swung stars’ or ‘that high-builded cloud / Moving at summer’s pace’, to the soprano delights of this stanza from ‘An Arundel Tomb’:
Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
– and from that restraint to the manic spasm in this, from ‘Livings, II’:
Guarded by brilliance
I set plate and spoon,
And after, divining-cards.
Lit shelved liners
Grope like mad worlds westward.
Light, so powerfully associated with joyous affirmation, is even made to serve a ruthlessly geriatric vision of things in ‘The Old Fools’:
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
And it is refracted even more unexpectedly at the end of ‘High Windows’ when one kind of brightness, the brightness of belief in liberation and amelioration, falls from the air which immediately fills with a different, infinitely neutral splendour:
And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
All these moments spring from the deepest strata of Larkin’s poetic self, and they are connected with another kind of mood that pervades his work and which could be called Elysian: I am thinking in particular of poems like ‘At Grass’, ‘MCMXIV’, ‘How Distant’, and most recently, ‘The Explosion’. To borrow Geoffrey Hill’s borrowing from Coleridge, these are visions of ‘the spiritual, Platonic old England’, the light in them honeyed by attachment to a dream world that will not be denied because it is at the foundation of the poet’s sensibility. It is the light that was on Langland’s Malvern, ‘in summer season, when soft was the sun’, at once local and timeless. In ‘The Explosion’ the field full of folk has become a coalfield and something Larkin shares with his miners ‘breaks ancestrally … into / Regenerate union’.
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