A Solitary Sensibility

THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS by Philip Larkin. 46 pages. Random House. $4.

Eliot lies in ashes. Auden flogs his muse infrequently in exile. England, for so many centuries "a nest of singing birds," finds herself today unwontedly in want of a great poet she can call her own. Yet in a quiet nook of Yorkshire, a strange bird occasionally lifts his voice to cantillate the fierce interior music of a tortured and solitary sensibility:

Truly, though our element is time,

We are not suited to the long perspectives

Open at each instant of our lives.

They link us to our losses: worse,

They show us what we have as it once was.

Blindingly undiminished, just as though

By acting differently we could have kept it so.

Philip Larkin is speaking, and intellectual England turns to listen. For if Larkin is not a great poet, he is nevertheless the only British poet who still seems able to compose great poems. He is the Marvell of the age, and his finest verses speak from the heart to the heart in precise but passionate language that can capture a lifetime in a line, an era in an epithet.

Iron Cage. They speak, unhappily, too seldom. Poet Larkin writes his lines at a rate that might embarrass an arthritic tree sloth--four short poems a year, and he usually throws one of them away. In his entire career he has published (aside from two youthful novels) only three books of verse, containing fewer than 100 poems. The Less Deceived, published in 1955, was the blazing eruption of a young volcano, the work of a brilliant man discovering in disorder what he could do. The Whitsun Weddings is a prepared descent into the simmering crater of middle age, the work of a mature man discovering systematically who he is.

To judge by his day-to-day life, Larkin is a contemporary Dr. Dryasdust. Since winning a first in English at Oxford, he has passed his entire adult life tending libraries; he is now head librarian at the University of Hull. At 42, Bachelor Larkin looks the part, and likes to look it: "Nothing embarrasses me more than to be typed as a poet. My friends are very tactful. They've decided that I'm kind of the next best thing to a poet you can get in welfare-state Britain, where everything is brown and without passion."

To judge by his poetry, Larkin is anything but brown and passionless. Larkin has blood in his eye and a shout in his throat, but his emotions are caged in an iron ordinariness of language, and the cage is caged in an intricate grille of rhyme and meter. By dint of prodigious effort and still more prodigious skill, Larkin marvelously merges form and content. The bars and his imprisoned emotions disappear; in their stead a poem stands.

"Maddened Surface." It is always a true poem. Larkin writes with an almost obsessive fidelity to life as it "happened to happen." He calls himself "an oldfashioned, Housman kind of poet who feels a shiver down his spine and tries to send the same shiver down someone else's spine." He dislikes the cosmetic phrase; only when the thought is brilliant does the language glitter. He despises the planned profundity; only when the feeling is deep is the poem deep. Larkin's honesty may limit his range. But because he is accurate in particular, he is valid in general: what is true about the poet usually turns out to be true about life.

One of the things Larkin feels, though somewhat timidly, is love. In The Less Deceived, he addresses several shy but radiant lyrics to women he has loved:

Shall I be let to sleep

Now this perpetual morning shares my bed?

Can even death dry up

These new delighted lakes, conclude

Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters?

There are hate lyrics too. Women, in fact people in general, often seem to intimidate Larkin. They are part of "the maddened surface of things" he cannot control. He seeks refuge and significance in art, "whose individual sound/ Insists I too am individual." Most of his best poems describe the struggle to become an individual. It begins in solitude--"Unfenced existence/ Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach"--and from the struggle Larkin often recoils into regret for the average, gregarious life he missed.

Fecund Creed. Forced back on himself, Larkin acknowledges that he fears himself. His mind, he senses, rests upon "an unwholesome floor, as it might be the skin of a grave." In imagination he sinks through the skin into "the solving emptiness/ That lies just under all we do." There in orphic rapture he touches a dark string in his nature, and a rich defunctive music rises to the page:

Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear Sparkling armada of promises draw near . . .

We think each one will heave to and unload

All good into our lives . . .

But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black

Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back

A huge and birdless silence. In her wake

No waters breed or break.

In death Larkin seems to seek himself, or the meaning of himself, but instead he finds God, or something he connects with God. In Church Going, a celebrated poem in which he describes a deserted church, the dubious synecdoche is eloquently expressed:

A serious house on serious earth it is.

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground.

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in.

If only that so many dead lie round.

This, in a stanza, is the only religion explicitly confessed by the poet in his maturity. His art and his life, however, implicitly proclaim a more fecund creed: a minimal but immovable faith in what he is and in whatever made him what he is. In the title poem of this volume, which traces a spiritual journey in the course of a train ride to London, Larkin seems at last to make contact with the self he seeks, or rather with some larger self in which all the selves on the train find union and communion. Suddenly a surge of love and hope, unprecedented in Larkin's poetry, lifts in the lines:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across Bright knots of rail

Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss

Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail

Travelling coincidence; and what it held

Stood ready to be loosed with all the power

That being changed can give. We slowed again,

And as the tightening brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.