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Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair. ..
147
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 ro be there
Yet being here."
The question of why aren 't they screaming is referred
to
with .macabre
comic matter-of-factness . "This must be what keeps them quiet."
Finally, that question's answer comes in the form of four more
questions and one short statement (the symmetrical match of the first and
last stanza is disrupted by the substitution of that final statement for what
would have been the fifth and final question):
"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 ouc. "
The question has always been addressed to the reader; the final line thrusts
upon us the answer, and this is the only "we" that appears in "The Old
Fools ."
As a clerk of the factual, Larkin cannot falsify what he knows; his
dogged integrity can lead him, also,
to
moments of generosity, moments
beyond the reach of the first-hand that the generous imagination gropes for
and, occasionally, carries us
to .
Something like this must be the religious
impulse. In "Coming" from
The Less Deceived :
"And
I,
whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy. "
"Sad Steps" from
High Windows
is a poem addressed
to
the moon; after a bit
of high-style poetic clowning ("Lozenge oflove! Medallion of art!" ), Larkin
continues :
