148
PARTISAN REVIEW
"One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere."
Larkin is the dour unofficial poet laureate of Britishness. The most
expressive public complaint in
High Windows
is "Going, Going," apolemic
which bitterly puffs England's potential as "First slum of Europe." Larkin
has evolved a dramatic vocabulary for futility, both social and ecological,
with a cast of characters like "Mr. Bleaney" from
Whitsun Weddings ,
or
those young English mothers in "Afternoons" ("Their beauty has
thickened'!Something is pushing them/To the side of their own lives. "),
or the grumpy English provincial anti-Semite poet in "Posterity" in
High
Windows
(larkin's dramatic self-hatred goads this reader
to
respond in
kind). There is also his qualified tribute to folk responsibility at a grubby
English seaside resort, "To the Sea," and the moving "regenerate union" of
another annual outing, "Show Saturday," both in
High Windows;
the train
journeys in
Whitsun Weddings ,
especially the great title poem; his informed
poking around in out of the way places, as in the brilliant "Church Going"
(The Less Deceived)
and "An Arundel Tomb"
(Whitsun Weddings).
Larkin's poetry is filled with the fine gratuities of poetic craft; the play
of "guess" and "know," "endlessly" and "endless" in "High Windows"; the
fatigue of that last line of "The Trees," "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."; the
small surprise in "The Building" as "the rest refit/Cups back to saucers; "
his characteristic manner of holding off the qualifier till the end of a line
("Out ro the car park, free." "down the long slide/To happiness, endless–
ly"; "and people in them, acting. "); leaving a central question unanswered
through an entire poem; the abbreviated social histories: "Who half the
time were soppy-stern/And half at one another's throats" (the typical
ellipsis of "And half'); the ambivalence in "Forget What Did" of the phrase
"blank starting;" the bellows effect of that movement from low
to
high
poetic voice; a break in sqmza
to
spell out the absence in "The Old Fools";
"This is why they give/An air of baffled absence"; his extraordinarily
animate lists ("Livings"; "Show Saturday").
It is odd but illuminating that Larkin, the most classical of our major
poets in his use of meter and rhyme and his devotion
to
the dramatic
monologue, Browning's great poetic innovation, should ·be so much more
contemporary than many avowed experimentalists. This is partly because of
