Published
Eternity
A Spiritually Enlighted International Magazine
11th Year 2022 Vol. 9 No. 1
Saturday, January 1, 2022
Light in Darkness
What a Nation! (Rondeau in Pentameter)
Published
IIP Iterative International PublishersDiamond India Unheard Songs of Obscure Heroes
Vol First 2022
Love for the Soil
Published
Diamond India Unheard Songs of Obscure Heroes
IIP Iterative International PublishersVol First 2022
A Review of Katta Rajamouly's Cherished Cherries (A Collection of Nine Anthologies)-By D.C Chambial
A Review of Katta Rajamouly's Cherished Cherries (A Collection of Nine Anthologies)
By D.C Chambial
Published
Eternity
A Spiritual Enlightened International Magazine
11th Year 2022 Vol. 9 No. 1
Time
Poems for leisure pleasure & contemplation (Anthology)
How you stepped in to this world is strange
Your endless flow is bound up in mystery
Your galloping speed for incessant change
Left imprints in ever living history.
The milestones mark your age on the milky way
It’s race on wheels at a high pace
A wayfarer’s journey without stay,
Yet, no trace of weariness on your face.
You manifest eroding powers in all circles
Even pliant limbs and sharp mind grow decrepit
The petal-soft countenance carves wrinkles.
The sculpture in a quake breaks into many a bit.
You resemble a river in its ceaseless glide
Your resolve is like the planets’ orbit
You look like an eternal traveler in his ride,
And travel like the flash of light brightly lit.
Five senses, in strict governance of the mind,
Fail to unravel and charter your powerful role
Mysterious are your ways to humankind.
Everything manifests under your iron control.
Published
First Edition 2022
Print Publication Pvt Ltd
Also published
Published in Triveni, Hyderbad & Kakatiya Journal of English Studies,
KJE: Vol: 9/1999.
Virtues Shine
No evils taint virtues
Like drops not to wet lotus leaves
Virtues remain stars
Published
METVERSE MUSE
67th & 69th Triple Issue - Jan 2022
Dogs' Tails
Rogues are rogues ever
Maybe peace-mongers in speech
Like dogs' tails to teach
Published
METVERSE MUSE
67th & 69th Triple Issue - Jan 2022
Snakes in the Grass
Unheard and unseen
They are like snakes in the grass
Gross loss and pain
Published
METVERSE MUSE
67th & 69th Triple Issue - Jan 2022
Villain
One to bring in tears
As cheat to crush fresh flowers
A villain indeed
Published
METVERSE MUSE
67th & 69th Triple Issue - Jan 2022
SON INDEED
He forgoes crown on call
To fulfill aunt's boons as son
In father's word-reign.
Published
METVERSE MUSE
67th & 69th Triple Issue - Jan 2022
BOOK READING
Book is the hand-ornament
For all to read in rest
Full, if not half, at moment
A page, if not the whole in arrest;
A line or a sentence, you select
It gives you some message
A word or phrase if not all to effect
It enriches your language usage.
He is a sage; he is scholar
For he read books, found in looks
He is a traveler; he is a sailor
To store his experiences in books;
Writers record their observations
Feelings and happenings
In books sans any reservations
For amusing with musings
Books are rivers sans in motion
With all knowledge in flow
Books are trees at their location
With all wisdom in glow;
Library is an institution-bower
For abundant self-learning
Books are the beacon in shower
Indirect teachers for teaching
Published
METVERSE MUSE
67th & 69th Triple Issue - Jan 2022
NOT SMALL, BUT BIG
however, they look small
they are big in effect;
it is not a trifle like the ball
to be out to be a defect;
a small spark can turn all
into ashes in the fire
a pest can make a tree fall
all huge and tall in mire;
a small hole of a big ship
can sink it to the ground
a slip of tongue can dip
the heart in throe-bound;
a small drop of poison
can cause pain or life-claim
a seed of weed, the reason
can spoil the garden name;
a brute can spoil the name
of his or her family in shatter
good character to get fame
small spot shrouds its glitter;
one point less in a tough
game, leads to defeat of one
the other is fit enough
with the point, the game one;
a small lapse is not an error
of children in word-spelling
it is not like losing as a player
to cover the loss in drilling.
Published
METVERSE MUSE
67th & 69th Triple Issue - Jan 2022
ABDUCT OF BEAUTY (Mini Mock-epic)
Muse! Full tearful is my majestic heart,
Let the spurt gush in my poetic art;
Tears to the brim, at the barbaric sight
Of a fair woman in pathetic plight;
The abduct of her beauty to excel,
She was proud of her charms as a damsel
She bitterly wept on her beauty loss;
For a gang of villains, Asur was the boss;
He adored well her unsurpassed beauty;
He craved to own it as his entity
To own her by efforts for a life time;
Stole her beauty to leave her sing tear-chime:
One morning she, Pamela was in sleep,
She cried aloud in her agony deep;
In dream, told Pretty, her friend butterfly,
'Sad event that day to you'; it's to fly,
She woke up all of a sudden; her mind,
Not capable to recall the dream kind;
Her dear in rush to help her in decking,
She looked far more beautiful in looking,
What an angel to excel all on earth!
How she filled all the eyes and hearts with mirth!
Moved she in grace to the pretty garden;
Along with mates with their lips smile-laden;
Pretty and other butterflies on flight,
Hovered around Pamela in delight,
Drag along with its dragonflies in rush,
All enjoyed her pretty sight in their blush,
Bee with other bees were busy buzzing,
Blond, black bee-brigade flew to her shining,
Pamela with all flies was an eye-feast,
To the onlookers at sunrise in the east;
All sailed in a ship as their jolly ride;
Pamela glittered in all eyes in pride,
Her full smiles delighted all in sunshine,
There was all paradise in her glow reign;
At the Bliss-club slowly arrived the ship
All in smiles, in the spirit of friendship
With all kinds of items of breakfast cuds;
Opened all flavor-items, their taste buds;
Pamela was reurned just hot;
She was sipping it, admiring it a lot;
Around her dear Pretty hovered in grace,
Blond, Drag and Wasp teams as guards in the race;
Their gambling started for all in bet-play;
Pamela was keen on card-play's win-way;
The songs of melodies were echoing.
They were busy speaking in well playing.
Asur, her fan did heinous on the scene,
Poured some on her, her beauty was unseen,
Her beauty was in his capture sudden,
She turned ugliest; no more to gladden,
Was it due to foul means or by magic?
None knew it but it was too horrific;
He felt it a grand success in joys high;
Her deafening cries were rocking the sky;
She claimed her beauty back in all fury
She hated herself in her fiery;
Women jealous of her in secret joys,
Applauding the action of his great choice;
Some in praises; some to show her lapses;
Threw on her a volley of harsh curses,
War began, Pamela, friends on one side;
With clips, combs, tins, pins, scissors, all in pride;
Gents were in trials to conquer women;
Some got wounds as Pamela fought to win,
She demanded Asur in grief-anger,
A roar to get beauty like a tiger;
He said, "No pride in your near victory,
Owned I your beauty for all mockery."
He showed the moon in the sky shine brighter,
It shone fuller with her beauty glitter,
The poet on the scene, brimming with tears,
To console Pamela, fallen in fears,
"Every inch, follies and frivolities,
Men blinded by lust own women's beauties;
Women are opposing love-manacles,
Pour acid men with no fear of shackles.
Rape in lust; tease for fun, no sin as goon;
Published
METVERSE MUSE
67th & 69th Triple Issue - Jan 2022
COMPLEXITIES OF RELATIONS (Villanelle in Pentameter)
Man is born high for grand celebration;
So does he humanist activities;
To suit the ways for justification;
Days changed the ways in modernization
For his whole resort to frivolities;
Sure to achieve the status-possession;
The ways for his identification
Of humanistic sensitivities;
To suit the ways for justification;
To turn rich overnight by deception
Leads many to live in adversities;
In money and power false temptation;
Man craving for all fame to his nation,
Human relations, no complexities,
To suit the ways for justification;
Nation is for all, no domination.
Joys in life, the right for equalities;
To man, it is indeed coronation;
To suit the ways of justification;
Published
METVERSE MUSE
67th & 69th Triple Issue - Jan 2022
GOD'S COUNSEL
Divine to counsel
Man to grow to His status
But man turns demon
Published
METVERSE MUSE
67th & 69th Triple Issue - Jan 2022
The Concept of the Past: "The Forgotten Boredom" In the Poetry of Philip Larkin
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Synopsis
Larkin established as a poet with special characteristics and thematic concerns to carve a niche for himself in the literary firmament of the post-war British era. He as man and poet finds time as man's element and it occurs and recurs in his poetry. Time is not an abstract idea but a moving force. Life is rooted in time with “eroding agents”. Life initiating with birth looks into the future as seen from childhood. It traverses from the future to the present and finally to the past. Time is practical for him as fate to a fatalist, reason for a rationalist and the divine to a theist or spiritualist. Time as a destroying force corrodes the sense of life and fills the life of man with a series of disappointments as the sense of loss or futility in life in the annihilating forces of time as our hopes, desires and ideals will never become reality. Time has mysterious powers to turn life into mortality and futility. In life, birth initiates childhood to have all expectations about the future, proceed to manhood or womanhood to find them unfulfilled in the present that turns into the past. He treats the past as the uneventful experience. He considers childhood in his middle age “forgotten boredom” and “unspent”. He does not sentimentalize the past nor does he have any hopes for the future and his poetry reflects the past sans sentimentality. For him, the past is unique. “Past was dead and Useless." As man and poet, he feels sorry for the sense of mortality to turn life into transience and the sense of futility to turn life of nothingness in time's flow. He deals with the past to voice no concern for his past in time as a destroying, disrupting element. He treats the past and childhood as a forgotten boredom but not as the source for bliss to treat time as the healing power as well.
Key words:
Time, man's element, traverse, future, present, past, source, destruction, mortality, futility, nothingness, disappointment, frustration, forgotten, boredom, no-sentimentality, feeling, unspent, reality.
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Larkin established as a poet with special characteristics, distinctive features, artistic merits and thematic concerns to carve a niche for himself in the literary firmament of the post-war British era. Larkin as man and poet finds time as man's element and delineates it as the nucleus of all the themes underlying life. The concept of time occurs and recurs in his poetry. Time is not an abstract idea but a moving force. Time flows eternally from the future through the present to the past. Time's functions are multifarious and multifaceted, "kaalah karoti karyani". Time brings about multitudinous changes prominently to result in the mortality of life and the futility of life, for time is the essential element and concomitant factor of life.
For Larkin, life is rooted in time. Time is the perennial and eternal source for destructive and disruptive changes in life by means of its “eroding agents” (TLD, 26). He wakes up to grow in the constant consciousness of time and its effects:
This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood. “Poem XXVI” (CP, 295)
Larkin portrays time in a unique way in spite of influences of the poets of earlier generations and affinities with the contemporary poets. He concurs with time as it conquers him by its destroying powers and disrupting forces. As a result, he firmly believes in the practical perspective of time, “Truly, our element is time” (CP, 106).
Life exists in the domain of time and experiences innumerable happenings in its traverse. Larkin looks at time from his point of view that life in time starts with birth and grows in the present, expecting all good in the future. He lives further in the present, leaving behind the past full of experiences. Life thus exists in a linear-time dimension,
Days are where we live.
They come; they wake us
Time and time over. “Days” (CP, 67)
Time as a vehicle leads life ahead in its endless race, bestowing on it age. It neither stops nor rears as it is unstoppable and irreversible in its flow, "Whether or not we use it, it goes" (CP, 152).
Time fleets neither faster nor slower as it races in its speed. No force makes its pace speedier than its race. Alan Brownjohn puts it, “Time seems to ‘be passing slowly, luxuriously like thick cream pouring from silver jug’." (117)
Larkin presents the fact that time is "always" in flow and it is evident in his frequent use of present participles like “flying”, "approaching", “running”, “shining”, “crying”, “blowing”, “walking”, "banging" and “journeying” in his poetry. The poem, “Dawn” signifies the continuous motion of time as a moving force,
To wake, and hear a cock
Out of the distance crying,
To pull the curtains back
And see the clouds flying. "Dawn" (CP, 284)
Time is always in flux like the river in flow, the wind in blow and the light in glow. Larkin’s use of “swift”, “flutter”, “run”, and “fly” signifies the speeding of time. His use of images like train, wind, ship, train, river, sun, moon, water, ocean, star, etc., is suggestive of the incessant flow of time. As Meyerhoff says, “…now we are conscious of every second ticking off” (12) in Larkin’s sense.
Time is of permanently fleeting nature. It ceaselessly races to bring about several changes, leaving milestones in life. Time moves to turn our lives mortal. Life with the initiation of birth journeys through ageing to death in the incessant flow of time,
Whether or not we use it, it goes
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age. “Dockery and son” (CP, 152)
Life is therefore a transient journey between birth and death in the domain of time, "Life is slow dying." (TWW, 11) Larkin as a poet and man grows conscious of transitory nature of life in time's reign,
Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly "Nothing to Be Said" (CP138)
Life initiating with birth looks into the future as seen from childhood. It traverses from the future to the present and finally to the past. Time, the mixture of the future, the present and the past serves as a three-fold or triple time, recurrent in Larkin’s poetry. Larkin does not consider past, present and future as distinct and discrete units but finds them mutually exclusive but not mutually oblivious. Time brings about inevitable changes in life against one's wishes as it governs life and exists in the texture and measure of triple time: the future, the present and the past.
For Larkin, time is purely practical as all changes that take place in time, emerging into time to become one with it. People look at time in diverse ways: spiritual, practical and so on. Time is a destroyer and inflictor but not a preserver and healer. Time is practical for Larkin as fate to a fatalist, reason for a rationalist and the divine to a theist or spiritualist.
Larkin primarily deals with time as the nucleus of all the themes underlying life, makes man exist in its domain. All facts, all emotions and values and dreams are not only measured by time but also they merge into it, becoming one with it. For Larkin, time is the unbroken thread used to weave the texture of life. As Bruce Martin says, “the major consideration of his poetry is Time.”(46)
For Larkin, time is in its triple-fold of the future, the present and the past. Time flows from the future via the present to the past. Time turns life mortal in its traverse from birth through growth and to death on one hand and destroys all desires, expectations, aims and all to turn life futile on the other. Time serves as a perennial source of disappointment and pain, discomfort and tears in life. As a poet and man, he appears to attempt to fly away from it by rendering it abstract and remote from the actuality he goes through.
Time as a destroying force corrodes the sense of life and fills the life of man with a series of disappointments. As a result, it destroys all our expectations, pretensions, desires, dreams and aims in life as a series of illusions in time’s domain. Hence, life is a series of illusions. The illusory nature of choice in life tends to lead our lives to endure disappointments and frustrations rather than to enjoy fulfillments and enjoyments in time’s disruptive and destructive forces,
Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses. “Reference Back” (CP, 106)
Larkin's poetry reflects the sense of loss or futility in life in the annihilating forces of time as our hopes, desires and ideals will never become reality. Time has mysterious powers to turn life into mortality and futility. 'Time is pushing them/ To the side of their lives' ('Afternoons', TWW, 44). We wake up to the reality that life has the sense of inevitable loss and compulsive futility, as we are to encounter failures rather than successes in reality. Life is full of discomforts, disappointments and discouragements as it has clashes between the two opposite attitudes: eternity and mortality, success and failure, want and despair, happiness and sorrow, and so on. The secret of life is that there is a clash between what we expect and what happen to us against our expectations. We encounter many clashes in the world of reality. We learn the truth that life is a series of illusions as time is a three-fold illusion to turn life illusory but we, in spite of the fact, we hope that the future is the harbinger of good fortunes:
Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say. “Next, Please” (CP 52)
Larkin believes that time is in endless flow and “Something” which “is always approaching" (TLD, 20) is time to effect changes in life against one's wish by corroding powers. In time's in eternal flow, the future turns the present, filling our minds with dissatisfaction and frustration rather than enjoyment and encouragement as it relentlessly destroys our desires and leaves us, “holding wretched stalks/Of disappointment” (CP, 52). Larkin's view is that "we are wrong" in expecting fulfillments in life,
We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong: “Next, Please” (CP, 52)
We attain the knowledge of bitter reality because of our “bad habits of expectancy” (TLD, 20). Our “expectancy”, developed and sustained, dies out and this loss or futility, we rarely compensate it. Life’s “armada of promises” (CP, 52) is mere a series of illusions in the ravages of time.
In the poem “Triple Time”, Larkin unfolds the mystery of time that neither the past nor the future bestows on our lives the sense of meaning in the present because time destroys our desires, expectations, hopes and so on to turn our lives into futility and nullity. Time, that fills our lives with a series of illusions, is also the illusion of illusions because past is past and uneventful, the present is empty, dry, futile and void of meaning and the future is unpromising. All time – the past, the present and the future – brings no comfort. As P.R. King says, “We are also time’s accomplices in the sense that we ourselves employ time as an instrument with which to deceive our selves…" (7) The poem, “Triple Time” presents the snapshot detail of the fact that time being a source of disappointment, discomfort and discouragement, serves as “a three-fold illusion" (7). Hans Meyerhoff points out that Larkin seems to echo Hume’s theory: “time is evil and illusory" (31)
Larkin believes that time is in endless flow and “Something” which “is always approaching" (TLD, 20) is time to effect changes in life against one's wish by corroding powers. In the unending flux of time, the future, that looks bright, is bound to turn into the present to be dry and dreary, and then the present into the past, “a past that no one now can share” (CP, 78). The past is past in the eternal motion of time. Life traverses from stage to stage in time. Milton calls time as 'subtle thief' when it steals his youth, the twenty-three year age. For Larkin, time moves ahead is not cyclic as in “Next, Please”, “its/No sooner present than it turns to past /Right to the last” (CP, 52)
For Larkin, the future is uncertain and unpromising, the present is dull and dreary and the past is dead and past. The past is a forgotten boredom. He juxtaposes them as mutually exclusive but not as mutually oblivious concepts. Time is a destroyer as it has annihilating powers. For Eliot and Bergson, time is both the creator or preserver and the destroyer as the past enlivens the present and modifies the future. Eliot presents the idea:
Time present, time past
Are both perhaps present in time future?
And time future contained in time past. “Burnt Norton” (FQ, 13)
In the spiritual aspect of time, the present contains both the past and the future as Lord Krishna counsels the warrior, Arjuna,
Time past and time future
Point to one end, which is always present “Burnt Norton” (FQ, 41)
For Eliot, the past is not dead. Time is cyclic and past lives in memory in the eternal flow of time:
You shall not think the past is finished
Or ‘the future before us’ “The Dry Salvages” (FQ, 41)
Under the influence of the Gita, that depicts time as God and He is present in the past, the present and the future, "Kaalah kalayatha maham" ('Vibhooti Yoga', 30), TS Eliot also views that time is eternally present. Only through time, time is conquered but for Larkin, only through time or in time, life is conquered and made mortal 'Life is slow dying'(TWW, 11) because time advances life to death to put an end to life. Man exists temporarily in human time and dies not to exist again as per the Christian idea of rebirth or renewal. In time’s flow life traverses to death otherwise in Larkin.
… it goes
And leaves what something hidden from us chose
And age, and then the only end of age. “Dockery and son” (CP, 152)
Eliot believes in the sense of communion or union of the present, the past and the future in multiplicity,
What we call the beginning is often the end
And make an end is to make a beginning. “Little Gidding” (FQ, 58)
Eliot asserts the unity of all the three units and believes in the concept: “The end is where we start from” like Bergson who says that the sense of continuity and unity is evident between the past, the present and the future as Hans Meyerhoff puts it, “unity within multiplicity". (15)
For Eliot, time is psychic, spiritual and historical but not practical in Larkin’s sense. From the agnostic background, Larkin sees time from the perspective of human life as it exists in time’s terrain and becomes a victim to mortality to mark the transience of life. Time, at the same time, turns life to feel disappointment and discouragement against the wish.
Larkin, as an agnostic, believes that life passes through the stages of human life: childhood, adulthood, middle age, and old age and "the only end of age" (CP, 152). Life is after all to exist between birth and death. We witness growth and decline or decrepitude between birth and death. In life, birth initiates childhood to have all expectations about the future, proceed to manhood or womanhood to find them unfulfilled in the present that turns into the past. He treats the past as the uneventful experience. He considers childhood in his middle age “forgotten boredom” (TLD, 17) and “unspent” (TLD, 38). He does not sentimentalize his past as in “I Remember, I Remember”. When his friend refers to the birthplace, Coventry, he presents his feelings for childhood:
‘Where you “have your roots”?’
No, only where my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to retort, just where I started. “I Remember, I Remember, (CP, 81)
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. “Coming” (TLD, 17)
Larkin turns a pessimist when he finds life prosaic and dull. In the passage of time, he loses all hopes about life. To him the future appears unpromising, the present, displeasing, and the past, boring, He comments on his childhood as a forgotten boredom and considers his birthplace, Coventry nothing for him as it has nothing to do with his later life except the function of reminding him of his childhood. Childhood is past, is nothing for Larkin in the present. As a child in his childhood, he has “sparkling armada of promises” (TLD, 20) to be fulfilled in his adulthood by means of “adult enterprise” (TLD, 20) but fails to fulfill them.
Larkin treats his childhood at Coventry as uneventful and the time of dire nullity, emptiness or even dullness. He forgets the excitement of his childhood and rejects his past unlike the Romantics who recall and enjoy the recalling of the past. He always rejects to sentimentalize his childhood, false notions, traditional escapes and romantic illusion and establishes as a simple, ordinary man in the world of reality.
In “Dockery and Son”, Larkin delineates his attitude towards the past. He pays a visit to his Oxford College. The poet tries to see his old classroom in college in the nostalgic mood but finds the door locked. Without concern, he recalls the experiences of the past as narrated by the Dean about Dockery in the return journey by train “ignored”,
‘Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now’
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. “Dockery and son” (TWW, 37)
The locked door suggests the poet’s outsider-status. Michael Schmidt says that Larkin frequently “presents himself as an outsider, a man without a past to be nostalgic for and without much in the future …an isolated bachelor". (332)
Larkin recalls his experiences in the past without any concern, sentimentality or attachment. His emotions of the past do not make him go away from the world of reality to the realm of his experiences in the past. The recollection of experiences in the past does not establish a union between the past and the present. He abandons the past and concentrates on the present and Dockery’s fatherhood in the present,
Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase? “Dockery and Son” (TWW, 37)
The idea of the recalling of Dockery’s age at the time of his marriage and of his age in the past “In 43” makes us realize the consciousness of time and its devastating powers on our lives,
… But Dockery, good Lord,
Any one up today must have been born
In 43, when I was twenty-one
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? “Dockery and Son”(TWW, 37).
There is a contrast between Larkin's life and Dockery's life. The poet’s bachelor-hood and Dockery’s paternity are mere happenings in the domain of time.
For Dockery, a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage. “Dockery and Son” (TWW, 38)
In “Lines on young Lady’s Photograph Album”, Larkin comments on his girl friend’s family album with the photos of the past. The photographs of the past in the album contrast with the life in the present. The speaker feels bewildered at the sight of the “pages” in the album:
Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages
Matt and glossy on the thick pages!
Too much confectionery, too rich:
I choke on rich nutritious images.
“Line on Young Lady’s Photograph Album” (TLD, 13)
Pages in the “album” reflect the graphic picture of different “ages” in human life and life is like an “album” to reflect the inevitable changes in the domain of time. The poet finds a hiatus between the past and the present since life necessarily means time and it is life rooted in time. The relation between the past and the present: “the gap from eye to page” reflects unconcern. The past that shows the records of experiences without changes and “leaves us free to cry” (TLD,14) over the gap without much concern for it
The snapshots of the past, “a past that no one now can share” (TLD, 14), attracts and disturbs him, as the past is past. The past reality throws light on the present. The sense of the past of the girl in the photograph hurts him,
That this is a real girl in a real place,
… … … … … … … … …
Or is it just the past? Those flowers that gate
Simply by being over; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date. (TLD, 13)
There is a contrast between the past and the present to mark “The gap from the eye to page” (TLD, 14) and leave “to mourn” in the future also.
In short, a past that no one now can share,
No matter whose your future; calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie
Invariably lovely there,
Smaller and clearer as the years go by. (TLD, 14)
In “Maiden Name” Larkin presents a complete transformation in the name of woman after the marriage. The maiden name in her girlhood and adolescence in the past has nothing to do with the changed name in the present. Her maiden name recalls “her beauty and youth” (TNS, 23) in the past, “what we feel now about you then” (TNS, 23). The past with all her impressions voices no concern for the past in the present. The poet however seems to accept that past happiness is not ignored, as it does not belong to the present.
Larkin never sentimentalizes his student stage in college. He treats his childhood as boredom and birthplace as “unspent". Nothing of the past is encouraging to him in the present. No stage of life and component of time in time's flow bestow on him pleasure and comfort. Andrew Motion presents Larkin's views, “When I try to tune into my childhood, the dominant emotions, I pick up are, overwhelmingly, fear and boredom." (13) He has no attachment with the places he lived and his childhood in contrast with the Romantics who think that the past is the cud of memories, chewed in times of loneliness and tiredness for solace and comfort. Life goes contrary to our expectations, aims and wishes,
No, I have never found
The place where I could say
This is my proper ground,
Here I shall say;
Nor met that special one
Who has an instant claim
On everything I own
Down to may name; “Places Loved Ones” (TLD, 16)
Time as a double edged weapon turns life first transient in its constant movement by advancing life to the state of nothingness and emptiness, “Only one ship…/No waters breed or break” (CP, 52). Time at the same time shatters our charming hopes in life by its ravages as seen in adulthood in spite of adult enterprise and manhood efforts. It fills failures and disappointments in life. As a result, life experiences futility and nullity against wish. He consequently feels that it is wrong on his part to have “bad habits of expectancy.” Larkin as a man and poet finds nothing promising in life against his choice.
Larkin as a pessimistic accepts time’s dominance over our lives, as he grew older. Salem K. Hasan says that Larkin was very much obsessed with “the change mostly for the worse everywhere around him." (44) As a result, time kept on pressing his thinking deeply. If he had experienced all the changes mostly for the better, he could have seen the positive dimension of time. Through out his life he did not see the positive one because of his bitter experiences in life as time is just a destroyer rather than a preserver.
The Larkin speaker poses a question: “It is for now or for always/The world hangs on a stalk?” (TNS, 41).He asks whether life is permanent or impermanent. He fuses the past and the future:
I take you now and for always,
For always is always now. Poem: XXVIII (TNS, 41)
Here Larkin does not sentimentalize the past nor does he have any hopes for the future. The present that was once the future presents in harsh realities of life. Thus, time past and time future seem to accumulate into the present moment in Eliot’s sense, Time present and time past/And both perhaps present in time future in “Burnt Norton” (EQ, 13)
In the late 1940's, Larkin's poetic startling transformation is evident in his second volume, The Less Deceived (1955). He presents time as a governing force on memory and the past, missed opportunities, disappointment, pessimism, old age and death underlying life. The volume and the succeeding volumes reflect the past sans sentimentality, the present with disappointment and the future with unpromising nature.
Time as a destructive and disruptive force mercilessly destroys and disrupts dreams. That is why the present is dry, gloomy and desolate. The poem, “Triple Time” also presents Larkin’s attitude towards time. The dreariness and emptiness of the present are evoked by the “empty street” and “indistinct” air. The present “on another day will be the past” (TLD, 35), a frustrated past: “A valley cropped up fat neglected chances”. We witness the “inevitable decrease” (TLD, 35) and decline in our lives.
Our life is a series of missed opportunities in time's reign. Hence, life is futile, empty and desolate. The sound of the siren brings in “horny dilemmas at the gate once more” (TLD, 44). As David Timms says, “the siren is symbolic of the desolation and emptiness of life due to our wrong choice."(13) The phrase, “come and choose wrong” (TLD, 44) reflects man’s wrong choice that leads us to the inevitable disappointment in life, “happiness too is going” (TLD, 44).
A series of disappointments in the ceaseless flow of time have had an insidious effect on our minds to have no fascination for the future and no hope for a better morrow or a paradise with ideal circumstances of life to come:
And wiser to keep away
From thinking you still might trace
Uncalled – for this day “Places, Loved Ones” (TLD, 16)
The poet makes futile attempts to escape from “the eroding agents (TLD, 26) of time through music. His enjoyment of jazz has much to do with its instant nostalgia. The record reminds him of his association and sharing of pleasure of jazz music with her. The repetition of the adjective, “unsatisfactory” shows the poet’s profound sorrow and irreparable loss.
That was a pretty one, I heard you call
From the unsatisfactory hell
To the unsatisfactory hell
Placed record after record, idly,
Waiting for time home, that you
Looked so much forward to. “Reference Back” (TWW, 40)
Through the memory of the music record and of the specific details of his initial experience on his visit to his mother’s house, the thirty-year old poet makes futile efforts in destroying the barriers of time. The poet feels that time is responsible for his separation from his mother and for making their relationship “unsatisfactory”,
The year after I was born
Three decades later make this middle bridge
From your unsatisfactory age
To my unsatisfactory prime. “Reference Back” (TWW, 40)
Larkin himself makes clear that we feel deprived of happiness, success and fulfillment in our lives due to a series of failures in the disruptive forces of time. Neither the past nor the future fills happiness in our lives. As Larkin says, “deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth."(89)
Larkin’s concept of the past is unique. The past will never be the future. The past is past and dead. As per Larkin’s concept, the Past is past and is similar to Meyerhoff’s concept of the Past: “Past was dead and Useless." (47)
For Larkin, life is full of clashes between what man wants and happenings in life. Time relentlessly destroys the expectations, promises, hopes and desires to turn life into futility and nullity. He grows pessimistic in the reign of time for loses his hope for the future for which we eagerly wait. He gets disappointments and discouragements, as there is no remedy for the loss. He finds the future unpromising, the present dry and desolate and the past serve as a source for forgotten boredom.
Time is man's element to turn life to traverse from birth through life to death and turns mortal on one hand. Life passes from the hopeful future through the dry present to the uneventful past to turn futile on the other. As man and poet, he is against the sense of mortality to turn life into transience and the sense of futility to turn life of nothingness in time's flow. He feels the past and childhood as a forgotten boredom. He deals with the past to voice no concern for him in time as a destroying, disrupting element. He treats the past and childhood as a forgotten boredom but not as the source for bliss to treat time as the healing power as well.
Works Cited
Larkin, Philip. Collected poems (CP). London: The Marvel Press, 1988
--------------- The North Ship (NS). London, Fortune Press, 1945
---------------- The Less Deceived (LD). Yarkshire: Marvell Press, 1955.
----------------The Whitsun Weddings (WW). London:Faber&Faber, 1964.
---------------- High Windows (HW). London: Faber&Faber, 1974.
Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets (FQ). London: New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Vyasa, Veda. Srimad Bhagavadgitha. Madrs: Sri Ramakrishna Printing Press, 1993.
Brownjohn, Alan. “Novels into poems” Larkin at sixty. London: Faber and Faber, 1982.
Meyerhoff, Hans. Time in Literature. London: University of California Press, 1974. Martin, Bruce. Philip Larkin. Boston: Thwayne, 1978.
King, P.R. Nine Contemporary poets. London: Methuen, 1979.
Quoted in Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, London: Faber & Faber, 1988.
Schmidt, Michel, 50 Modern British poets. London: Barnes &Noble, 1979.
Quoted by Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life. London: Faber& Faber, 1988.
Hasan, Salem K. Philip Larkin and His Contemporaries: An Air of Authenticity,London: Macmillan, 1988.
Timms, Timms, Philip Larkin, Einburgh: Oliver& Boyes, 1973
Larkin, Philip. (Interview with Observer) Required Writing,
POETCRIT
Jan-Jun 2022. Vol. 35 No. 1
Time Tree
The tree grows in time
From stage to stage for the life prime
From the past of the seed sown,
To the present of the sprout rising on its own
In the shower of rain
For its birth from the soil sans pain
For the future of exuberance
For the life of forbearance.
Leaves from the past tenderness to the present sheen,
For the future-yellow to turn from lush-green,
For fall to mark the life for full living,
Giving scope to new leaf-bearing,
The annual trick of looking new
To shine in verdant hue.
The past of the buds in dreams
For the present of flowers in gleams
For their temporary game
In Time's power-ring to tame
With full glitters to welcome all creatures
As guests to swallow their treasures,
Gets a clarion-call in the future for their fall
For day-in and day-out life, a life all.
The past unripe turns the present ripe in service
For the future-mellow fruit for tactile bliss.
The tenderness of the baby in innocence
Shapes into the youth, beauty in excellence
In the flowering of charms, glittering.
The bees are busy love touring
In flowery bowers, full of youthful flutters
To echo their courting with duet twitters.
Time sees in its flow twinkles
Turns by fading away all over with wrinkles
All calling it old, as it is likely to fall.
All the time, that has stood tall
Changes in stages, Time is the witness
To vanquished life beyond guess.
Published
POETCRIT
Jan-Jun 2022 Vol. 35, No. 1
Tears of Flowers
The gardener renders long toil
For a rise from the womb of the soil,
Germination for sole fertilization,
A child to be father in destination,
Beams of blooms all over just born
All of a sudden, the flowers feel shorn,
On the raid for pluck them in sulk
The shovel of female folk in bulk
Falls on the shining beauties
For their daylong gaieties:
Glows of hues, waves of scents
Graces of lilts, joys of ascents.
The hunt of the female to pluck
So soon for the flowers' ill-luck
To deck them in the hair-knot
To enrich their charms a lot
The blooms feel them selfish to kill
Just for their daylong thrill
Before they love to sway aloft
In their home lovely croft
With their winsome glitters
In spree as their free offers.
When plucked by unkind fingers,
The flowers shed the rivers of tears
When deprived of the fest of pleasures,
As the host to feast with their treasures
For the joys of senses until their fall
Transient but excellent to enthrall all.
When their eyes welled with tears
Their hearts filled with fears,
The females in joy-towers said to flowers,
"We adorn you, so adore you at all hours."
Published
POETCRIT
Jan-Jun 2022 Vol. 35, No. 1
Sheens of Greens
Green in the wide expanse
To the verdant exuberance
To look tall and majestic
With the image fully symmetric,
Feasting the eyes with green sheen,
The hearts with cool green
In green rustles in the air
In being selflessly fair.
How beautiful all green looks!
How delightful like magnanimity-books!
For the earth, green is never burden
To feel a novel world mirth-laden
Greens in shines
Shines in greens
On the stem, it lively sways
Like swinging in lovely grace.
Green is the sign of youth,
Robust, lively truth
To offer all life and cool shade to all
Expecting nothing in return until fall,
The stage of turning yellow
In the age, mellow,
A lifelong service, indeed, whole
As a true substitute for the role
The heart of green
Knows real the real sheen
For display not for fancy-green show,
The face should reflect the glow
Greens in sheens teach a lesson
It is the life-truth as a sermon.
POETCRIT
Jan-Jun 2022 Vol. 35, No. 1
UNFAILING PROGRESS
UNFAILING PROGRESS
Dr. C. Narayana Reddy
Wearing the shield of time
If the heart of any one
Ventures to display valor, putting at stake
The blows however serious they may be,
It is able to withstand.
If swimming hands
Have firm decision to support
The opposite shore of the widest sea
Comes to stand in the presence.
The trees, inhaling greenness as oxygen
Accord a shelter to the birds perching on them
In the scorching sun
In the shivering chill
Offering them blessings.
Their glances
Fly, raising their wings,
Hatching in the eyes
The restlessly collected sights in tours
They take a rest.
Crawling like a baby,
The creek at the lap of mount-ridges
Rhythmically steps down to the earth
And forms the branch of a river.
It, falling and falling
Flows rushing
Although its angles are different
Substance is same
As per the angle of investigation,
The secrets of matters
Come out in the form of a verse,
Capturing contemporary realities
Every living proceeds
To pave a way to unfailing progress.
POETCRIT
Jan-Jun 2022 Vol. 35, No. 1
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