Reading the 20th Century discussion

Myxomatosis

by Philip Larkin

Caught in the centre of a soundless field

While hot inexplicable hours go by

What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?

You seem to ask.

I make a sharp reply,

Then clean my stick. I’m glad I can’t explain

Just in what jaws you were to supperate:

You may have thought things would come right again

If you could only keep quite still and wait.


***************
When I was in school a long time ago I had to do some sort of "science project" and I chose to base it on this poem. I looked up the way the disease was introduced to get rid of rabbits. And I explained how well Larkin conveys the rabbit's point of view.

The final two lines always make me burst into tears.

A great poet - he reminds me a bit of Hardy, and this is very Hardyesque subject matter too, as he always had a strong feeling for suffering animals. I believe there is a rabbit in a trap in Jude the Obscure.

I am thinking about reading his A Girl in Winter sometime soon - December or January. I have liked the poems of his I have read but have never read any of his prose.

MCMXIV


Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day--
And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

Philip Larkin

Larkin conjures up a past world in which children named Albert or Bertha play innocently in the brilliant sun of August not yet aware of the impending Guns of August. His tone is nostalgic but I read a good deal of irony infusing the nostalgia. These men are about to go to the deaths. They don’t know if they are on a lark or in the dark. Nature, silent, does not embrace them. Larkin mentions the servants in their tiny rooms and the poem almost necessarily becomes a critique of the past just as it remains nostalgic.

As a title, “MCMXIV” conjures up war memorials and the kinds of mostly solemn occasions in which Roman Numerals are used (I know my Roman numerals because movies like to “sign themselves” with their dates).

Like all great poems, it opens up questions instead of resolving them. Is the speaker imagining a memory? Glancing at a photograph? Trying to share sentiments that are not ruled by a subject and a predicate—in one sentence that goes on for 32 lines?

The latest episode of....


The Frank Skinner Poetry Podcast

...is about The Whitsun Weddings (1964) by our main man Philip Larkin

It's a wonderful listen which, inevitably, makes me want to go out and buy the book...

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) remains England's best-loved poet - a writer matchlessly capable of evoking his native land and of touching all readers from the most sophisticated intellectual to the proverbial common reader. The late John Betjeman observed that 'this tenderly observant poet writes clearly, rhythmically, and thoughtfully about what all of us can understand'. Behind this modest description lies a poet who made greatness look, in Milton's prescription, 'simple, sensuous and passionate'.

This collection, first published in 1964, contains many of his best-loved poems, including The Whitsun Weddings, An Arundel Tomb, Days, Mr Bleaney and MCMXIV.

I will look forward to listening to this, Nigeyb, as I love The Whitsun Weddings. The title poem of the collection is a great one.