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Bonds and gestures pushed
to
one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought,
That'll be 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
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
Nothing, and is nowhere , and is endless ."
145
"High Windows" is a startlingly compressed history of time and
expectation, in which Larkin transmutes sex, and the beliefs about others'
happiness into a durable, universal irony . The casual but calculated vulgar–
ity of the first free-verse quatrain, or from another point of view, the verbal
freedom, is clearly tied to the widespread dissemination of birth control
devices. The once imposing fears of the pre-War generation , its "sweating
in the darklAbout hell and that," are dressed up in more formal rhymed
quatrain. Style depicts history; arguments and expectations jostle, are
poised and counterpoised until, at the end of the poem, they are superseded
by a perspective that is viewable but unattainable in this life. In our day,
two simple nouns are used to describe centuries of tradition, the most
complex social mechanisms - "Bonds and gestures pushed ro one side."
("to
one side" comes at the end of the line .) Likewise, that "outdated
combine harvester" was once a great laborsaving device, a revolutionary
invention which, in 1875, replaced twO separate machines , providing the
2-in-l answer
to
the farming world's needs . Today's brash linguistic strut
has not created paradise, just as the 19th century's belief in progress has not;
as yet there has not been, as far as I know, "A brilliant breaking of the
bank,/A quite unlosable game. " Man's relation
to
happiness is not altered
by god's death or improved means of contraception, even if these "ad–
vances," naturally, have their pleasures .
The same grass-is-greener mentality existed then and will always
exist. Larkin has not noted any appreciable change in the pigment of the
