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PARTISAN REVIEW
illusion. So the narrator is not alone as he stands, at the close of "High
Windows," where men will always stand, on the earthbound side of
freedom, looking up at the vast indifferent and oblivious blue . Looking up
is, of course, very different from the innocent country pleasure of "going
down the long slide/To happiness , endlessly ." ("endlessly," the adverb is
used figuratively; "endless," the noun which ends the poem, is literal; birds
fly in that blue; they don't slide. )
"High Windows" is a poem about space as well as time. The last four
lines create that space, suddenly slide it in under the reader, fixing the
narrator's position to those high windows. Time uses words while space is
mute.
Presiding over the generational envies is Larkin's exquisite multiplex
image- 'The sun-comprehending glass ."
It
is the comprehending, the
transferring medium, the single plane which dwells exclusively in the
present (as our eyes might be said to dwell eternally in the present but
character and linguistic style cannot). The glass "comprehends" as it is lit
and warmed by the sun and air; as it touches and is touched by it ; as it
reflects it; as it lets the sun-surrounding blue air pass through. The glass
literally does "take in" that which passes through it, yet, in an extraordi–
nary act ofgenerosity, it lets it pass unchanged to the viewer. And beyond it
is that which is endless, changeless, comprehensive, as opposed to fickle
expectations, as opposed to man's changing notions of paradise.
Presumably, the old men in the other great poem in
High Windows,
"The Old Fools," are the same as those who looked at Larkin "40 years
back ." The first stanza is a sequence offive biting rhetorical questions about
old people, asking why they drool and piss themselves and behave so
embarrassingly. The questions are addressed to no one; no answers are
given. The stanza climaxes with the fifth question:
"Why aren't they screaming?"
That, too, is left unanswered through the next three twelve-line stanzas,
ticking on like a time-bomb .
Senescent dissolution -Larkin recognizes it as both physiological and
social-begins when the old absent themselves from themselves ("At
death, you break up:"). But those absences provide their own gauzy
insulation. What follows is one of Larkin's splendid imaginative evoca–
tions:
"Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them , acting.
People you know, yet can't quite name; each looms
