According to Larkin, life
is a texture in “a linear-time dimension”. It is a hard journey through time in
which “happiness is too going” (TLD, 44). It is the illusion of illusions as time
rules life to turn it into a supreme illusion.
All time - present, past, and future – serves as a three-fold illusion
and becomes a source for disappointments in life. Mortality and futility are
the inevitable facts of life. The future, which is unpromising, acts as a
harbinger of misfortunes including death, the harshest fact of life. The
present is seen with a series of failures and frustrations in life on the
collapse of castles built in the air. The past is past to serve as a reminder
of what we ought to have been. Life after all is in thrall to time’s constant
flux.
Key words:
Time, powers, thrall, illusion, life, birth, growth, childhood, youth, middle age, old age, death, mortality, future, expectations, aims, dreams, present, the past, futility, failures, disappointments, sadness, and miseries.
A human grows conscious of time and
its inexorable flow to bring about inevitable changes in life. He finds his child
growing from childhood to youth and his parents growing from middle age to old
age. Time in its endless fleet brings about changes like growth or decline. His
life flows with the stream of time. It is the study of life in the domain of
time. There is a poet par excellence to deal with life in the reign of time in
the British literary firmament. He is none other than Philip Larkin who as a
poet treats time as man's element and believes in time to enthrall life. He, as
a poet and man, grows conscious of the fact that human lives are in the strict
governance of time,
What
are days for?
Days
are where we live
They
come, they wake us
Time
and time over.
They
are to be happy in:
Where
can we live but days? “Days”
(TWW, 27)
Larkin
as a poet and man concurs with time as it conquers life by its invincible
powers. For him, life is rooted in time, and it is in the thrall of time, as it
exists in "a linear-time dimension". Time is not an abstract idea but
has dramatic functions as a double-edged weapon, "eroding" agent.
Time in its relentless, endless stream bestows on life mortality. It is time that bestows
on us the brevity of life in time’s flow:
Endlessly, time-honored irritant,
... ... ...
It will grow again, until we begin dying (TLD, 19)
Life
is therefore a voyage in the ocean of time with ebbs and tides. Life is after all a sojourn to traverse from
womb to tomb in time's domain. The concept of time in the life of every
creature especially man is human time that is the focus and fulcrum of Larkin’s
poetry.
Time
as a double-edged weapon turns life mortal in life on one hand. It turns life
futile in its exorable flow by shattering dreams, hopes, expectations and aims
on the other hand. As a result, life is full of failures, tensions, disappointments,
and frustrations against man's wishes in life,
On this we blame our last
Threadbare
perspectives, seasonal decease.
“Triple Time” (TLD, 35)
Man
looks at the future expecting it to be the harbinger of good fortune. It is to
bring "the sparkling armada of promises" (TLS-20) like the cloud to
shower rain, the tree to offer fruits or the ship to carry comforts to him,
Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching;
everyday
Till then we say. “Next,
Please” (TLD, 20)
Larkin has a clear perspective
about time in time future, time present and time past. Time flows from the
future through the present into the past. Man looks at the future in his childhood,
loaded with dreams, expectations and wants. In the ravages of time, the
promising future turns into the dull and prosaic present against all
expectations in life as man does not fulfill all those for his disappointment.
The present turns into the past to remind him of failures to prove that life is
futility and nullity.
All time-present, past, and future –
serves as a source of discomforts and disappointments in our lives. Larkin
realistically portrays life and failures in life with snapshot details. As
Calvin Bedient says, “Like Hardy and Frost, he uses imagination precisely in
order to show what life is like when imagination is taken out of it.”
Larkin
accepts that all facts, all emotions, and all dreams, related to man’s life and
measured by time. Life ceaselessly traverses through stages: birth, childhood,
youth, middle age, and old age to culminate in the end of age in time's
constant flux to show that life is vulnerable. Time's flow is irreversible and
so life is futility first then, it leads to mortality,
Life
is first boredom, then fear
Whether or not we use
it, it goes,
And leaves what
something hidden from us chose,
And age and then only
the end of age. “Dockery and Son” (TWW,
38)
Life is in thrall in time's domain.
Life goes against man's wishes. Man wants to live longer and happier but fails
due to the ravages of time. According to Larkin, "something" is
nothing but time in its powers that leads life,
Something is pushing them
To
the side of their own lives. “Afternoons” (TWW, 44)
Man's
life in the animal kingdom marks a clear-cut departure from floral life, plant
kingdom. Man's life culminates in death, the end of life. Larkin, as an
agnostic feels that there is no life or rebirth after death. Life culminates in
inevitable mortality, death as the deadline to the breath of life to mark a
difference from trees. The trees have the yearly trick of looking new but not
man's life that starts its voyage in the river of time with birth and advances
youth, middle age to old age and finally to inevitable death. Birth gives life
to man, but life gives death to him in its journey through time. For Larkin,
“life necessarily means time” as time is man's element. What we were, are and
will be decided by time alone. Time in
its constant flux and its effects in the life of man is the nucleus of his
poetry.
Life
is the union of three important stages: birth, marriage (growth) and death.
Life exists between two oblivions: birth and death with the shelters of womb
and tomb respectively. Church represents, “a serious house on serious earth”
for the three stages in “Church going” (TLD, 28) as it is the place, which has
much to do with birth and marriage and more to do with death.
Only
in separation – marriage, and birth
And death, and thoughts of there –
for which was built
This special shell? “Church
Going” (TLD, 29)
Birth
initiates life voyage in the ocean of time. Larkin photographically depicts
life with birth in the womb,
“...
a sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent
out of sight somewhere becoming rain.” (TWW, 21).
Here
rain serves as a symbol of energy for the creation of life by means of birth,
the first and foremost stage. The “arrow shower” and “falling” are suggestive
of life. Birth is always of interest since it is a serious aspect of life:
About being beautiful,
Or running off a spring
Of innocence and love-
They will all wish you that,
And should it prove possible,
Well, you’re a lucky girl. “Born yesterday”
(TLD, 24)
Life initiated by birth
first leads to childhood, the stage of innocence when we are "Always too
eager for the future," “Next, Please” (TLD, 20). In the stage we hope that
the future will fulfill our expectations, dreams and desires by means of “our
adult enterprise” (TLD, 35) but we are indeed ignorant of what will surely happen
to us. We experience a series of
failures, missed opportunities and disappointments,
And on another day will be the
past,
A valley cropped by fat neglected
chances
That we insensately forbore to
fleece
On this we blame our last
Threadbare
perspectives, seasonal decease.
“Triple Time” (TLD, 35)
As seen from my childhood, the future is the
stage of innocence is the harbinger of good fortune. The future is full of
dreams and expectations. Larkin focuses on childhood from two angles. One is to
see the stage in childhood days with “sparkling armada of promises” (TLD, 20)
and an optimistic outlook in fulfilling of them. He watches the stage in the
middle age of his life with the experiences as childhood with unfulfilled
promises,
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” (TLD, 20)
Life passes from the future, the stage of
innocence in childhood to that of experience in adulthood. The present that was
once the future as seen from childhood with its dreams, expectations and
desires turns dry, dull, and prosaic. Larkin as a poet finds them shattered in
the present in the ceaseless flow of time. Life encounters a series of clashes
between what we expect and what we experience. Larkin’s poetry holds mirror to
the clashes between the opposing attitudes in life: illusion and reality, truth
and hypocrisy, desire and actuality, choice and failure, hope and hopelessness,
fact and fantasy, solitariness and sociability,
work and idleness, plan and practice and so on.
Blake, Wordsworth, Dylan
Thomas, Thomas Hood, Subhadra Kumari Chowhan many other poets feel like
recalling the past and fill their hearts with happiness, but Larkin does not
sentimentalize the past.
Larkin has a unique way to forget
the past and so he does not sentimentalize it as he treats it as forgotten
boredom. In
“Coming” he treats his childhood as the uneventful, “a forgotten boredom” (TLD,
17). He never attaches any nostalgic
importance to childhood. Larkin's poem, “I Remember, I Remember” reflects the
memories of the poet’s own past without any sign of sentimentality: “my
childhood was unspent” (TLD, 38). Childhood does not look familiar to him now
in middle age. All the places connected
to his childhood or youth have nothing to remind him of anything worthy,
‘was that’, my
friend smiled, ‘where you “have your roots”?’
No, only where
my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to
retort, just where I started: “I
Remember, I Remember”, (TLD, 38)
Larkin’s
attitude towards childhood is in contrast with that of Thomas Hood, Subadra
Kumari Chowhan, Dylan Thomas and Wordsworth.
They treat it as a delightful and spectacular event. Thomas Hood’s poem
“I Remember, I Remember” is an example for its very much nostalgia and
sentiment:
I Remember, I Remember
The house where I was born
The little windows where the sun
Same peeping at noon:
He never came to wink too soon
Never brought too long a day
But now, I often with the night
Had born my breath away. Poem No: 224, pal groves golden Treasury.
Larkin
disagrees with the notions of romanticized childhood as in Thomas Hood. He
treats his childhood in Coventry as an uneventful event and the period of dire
nullity, emptiness and even dullness. He describes his childhood as the stage
“unspent” to mean that it has “scarcely happened at all.”
By
stopping the entries in his diary, the poet attempts to forget his childhood in
the past though it is an integral part of his life. Larkin draws a thick
curtain over his past because he finds the present life empty, dry, and
meaningless in the ravages of time.
Larkin
as a poet recognizes the ordinariness of childhood. He treats his whole life as an ordinary one
like that of unnumbered ordinary people.
Referring to Larkin, P.R. King says that we “cannot escape the mundane
lot of a perfectly ordinary life”.
Larkin wishes Kingsley
Amis’s daughter, Sally Amis an ordinary life: “an average of talents.”
May you be ordinary;
Have, like other women,
An average of talents.
Not ugly, not good-looking
Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off you balance “Born Yesterday” (TLD,
24)
The poem, “Maiden Name”
reflects the change in the maiden name of the poet’s former girlfriend, which
has significance up to the marriage of a girl.
In the wake of her marriage, the maiden name, associated once with her
girlhood and adolescence is transformed to a different one in life. The maiden
name is to mean now “what we feel now about you then” (LD, 23). The maiden name
embodying her young beauty is “applicable to no one” now. Life brings in this
transformation in time’s flow:
Marrying left your maiden name
disused;
Its five light sounds no longer
means your face,
Your voice and all your variants of
grace; “Maiden Name” (TLD, 23)
Larkin feels that the
maiden name, associated with her youth belongs to the past. In the present, the
maiden name is “past and gone”.
In
“Lines on a young Lady’s Photograph Album”, the Larkin speaker comments on his girlfriend’s
family album and the impossibility of photograph in preserving a moment of
reality. The photographs of the past life in the album strike a sharp contrast
in real life in the present. The girl’s youth in the past is in faithful arrest
in the photographs to contrast with her past in the present. The past is past in the constant fleet of
time,
That this is a real girl in a real
place,
… … … … …
Or is it just the past? Those
flowers, that gate
These misty parks and motors,
Lacerate
Simply by being over; you
Contract my heart by looking out of
date.
“Lines on a young Lady’s
Photograph Album” (TLD, 13)
The snapshot details in
the album appear to be “out of date” and growing “smaller and clearer as the
years go by” in the passage of time.
Larkin, as a thirty-year
old poet makes constant futile attempts to destroy the barrier of time as
stated in “Reference Back”. He opines
that the ceaseless flow of time is responsible for his separation from his mother
and his youth turning into his middle age.
He therefore firmly believes in the conviction that the shocking
transformation from youth to middle age results in time's flow. It also leads
him to “unsatisfactory age” in the 'Reference Back' (TWW, 40) in the present
life. Three decades of life in time is prone to become “unsatisfactory”.
In “verse De society”,
the poet expects much pleasure but experiences otherwise,
Only the young can be alone freely.
… … … … … … …
Not peace, but other things. “Verse De Society”, (HW,
35)
“How Distant” says that
youth is transitory, and the aims of youth are shattered as time advances life
from youth to middle age. The Larkin
speaker gains bitter experiences in middle age in the inexorable flow of time.
He feels that youth has relentlessly deserted him. He grows with the sense of
his remoteness from “being young.”
How distant, the departure of young
men
Down valleys, or watching
The green shore past the salt-white
cordage
Rising and falling.
“How Distant” (HW, 31)
Larkin
realizes the harsh realities of life, as he becomes a victim to inevitable
failure in satiation of his desires, dreams, and expectations in youth. He
experiences irreparable loss of youth, as he does not regain it.
Of being young; that it can’t come
again,
But it is for others undiminished
somewhere. “Sad Steps” (HW, 32)
In time’s endless flow,
our lives advance to death, mortality, realize the fact that life is a series
of failures and disappointments as futility. Consequently, man grows
pessimistic about the future. Bruce
Martin points out the fact that Larkin as poet and man never thinks or the
future with bright hopes in his middle age, saying, “Earlier he looks towards
the future, here he confines his attention to either his past or his present”.
Larkin presents the
picture of the emotional misery of wives in middle age in “Afternoons”. The
wives have lost their youth and charm, and experienced monotonous household
routine. They, as mothers, lead to middle age and old age.
“At Grass” presents a
graphic overview of old age. The sunrise of life leads to the sunset of life.
In decrepit old age, limbs become weak, and eyesight plays hide-and seek,
The eye can hardly pick the out. “At Grass” (TLD, 45)
Horses in the retired
stage cannot gain youth, name, and fame in the present. Retiring from the race,
the horses are leading to old age and decrepit old age and only “the end of
age” (TWW, 38).
And not a field glass sees them
home,
… … … … …
With bridles as the evening come. “At Grass” (TLD, 45)
For Larkin, man is
worried about the brevity of life. Old age like disease causes dread in life,
as it advances life to the threshold of death for endless extinction. In an
interview, Larkin refers to the dread of old age:
“Yes,
dreadfully. If you assume you’re going to live to be seventy, seven decades,
and think of each decade as a day of the week, starting with Sunday, then. I’m
on Friday afternoon now Rather a shock, isn’t it? If you ask why doesn’t bother
me, I can only say I dread endless extinction.”
Larkin identifies with
old people when he says, “Why aren’t they screaming?” (HW, 19) He shares the
suffering of old people. He calls old people “old fools” since they lose the
power of memory and cannot remember what has happened. They behave in a childish
way during old age,
…Do they somehow suppose
It’s more grown–up when your mouth
hangs open and drools.
And you keep on pissing yourself. “The Old Fools” (HW, 19).
Larkin questions the old
people on their ignorance of death: “How can they ignore it?” in “The Old
Fools” (HW, 19). Old Fools live “Not here and now, but where all they happened
once” (HW, 20). Death becomes indispensable to the old because life is
time-bound. In the voyage of life, old people are quite aware of the aging
process and the approach of death. The subject of old age is powerfully
dramatized in this poem "The Old Fools". He feels that life is “slow
dying” (TWW, 11) as man has the dread of aging. He becomes much pessimistic
because of both the fragility of man and the dread of old age that ultimately
culminates in death and futility in life. Consequently, we feel for our failure
in our attempts and realize that life is futile under the “solving emptiness”
(TWW, 33). As P R King says, Larkin “records the various ways in which man
pulls the wool over his own eyes in being tempted to believe that he can achieve
a paradise of money, or fame, or sex, or close relationship with others”.
Larkin accepts the
supremacy of time and time as the conqueror of man’s life. His attempts to fulfill his desires but fail
in the passage of time, “suffering is exact” (TLD, 37) in the governance of
time. Life leads to the state of sadness
in the tyranny of merciless passage of time since it fills life with a series
of failures and deceptions rather than adventures and rewards. As Salem K.
Hasan rightly judges Larkin’s poetry, “Truly, life becomes even thinner when we
contemplate the idea of human life being ‘dispersed’ into nothingness”.
Larkin’s own sensitivity
to human suffering is evident in his poetry, He believes that life travels
through wilderness, "The train runs through wilderness", Poem: XII
(TNS, 24) It is time to make life travel through wildness, sadness, and
nothingness in its flux, "There is regret.
Always, there is regret" “Poem: XXIV” (TNS, 37). In poem I (To
Bruce Montegomery) the refrain, “A drum taps: a wintry drum” is suggestive of
Larkin’s early awareness of sadness. Philip Gardner says that in Larkin’s
poetry there is “early awareness of sadness at the back of things, of the
passing of time and inevitability of death”.
Man struggles for the
harmony of fulfillment, but he undergoes experiences contrary to his choice despite
his constant struggle. The hopes, dreams
and desires in life will collapse leading to the realization that life has
sadness or melancholy to the core. Terry
Whalen puts it, “The North Ship is quite pale, not to mention, consciously
aiming, in its youthful and contrived sadness.”
“Home Is So Sad” echoes
the sadness of the speaker, which is in fact the inevitable state of human
condition to result in the mortal nature and futile existence because of time’s
eroding agents:
Home is so sad. It stays as it was
left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to
go
As if to win them back. Instead,
bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the
theft. “Home is so sad” (TWW, 17)
In poems like “Cut
Grass”, “The Trees”, “Sad Steps” and “Solar” the poet shows an analogy between
man and the trees as they both exist in a “linear–time dimension”. Like man,
the trees feel that “their greenness is a kind of grief” (HW, 12) as their leaves
and flowers fall to the ground in autumn. In “Cut Grass”, there is a tone of
sadness on the part of trees for transience as leaves and flowers shed for
destruction like man’s life.
Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath.
“Cut Grass”, (HW, 41)
Larkin portrays clashes
that our lives always confront in life. He draws the “thick curtains” between
what we expect earlier and what we
realize later to fill our lives with misery as man inherits misery and
passes it onto man and this is inevitable in the destructive force of time:
Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf,
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have kids yourself “This Be the Verse”, (HW,
30)
Misery persists as long
as man exists. Desires are the root cause of human misery. Consequently, man
grows pessimistic as he experiences a series of disappointments, failures, and
frustrations. The poem reflects, as Grevel Lindop says, that man’s “splendid
exposure of facile pessimism” Andrew Motion says, “Larkin has often been
regarded as hopeless and inflexible pessimist.”
Larkin presents life as a
texture in “a linear-time dimension”. It is a hard journey through time in
which “happiness is too going” (TLD, 44). When life is an illusion, time that
rules life serves as a supreme illusion.
All time - present, past, and future - serves as a three-fold illusion
and becomes a source for disappointments in life. Mortality and futility are
the inevitable facts of life. The future, which is unpromising, acts as a
harbinger of misfortunes including death, the harshest fact of life. The
present is seen with a series of failures and disappointments in life on the
collapse of castles built in the air. The past is past to serve as a reminder
of what we ought to have been. Life after all is in thrall to time’s constant
flux.
