Someone said once that the great thing is not to be different from other people,

but to be different from yourself.

- Philip Larkin

CHAPTER
sCfck sQlPe sCfce ^Ctk sCfae sCj?e sCfoe sCbc >Cfck sCfae sCl

THE NORTH SHIP:

THE SEARCH FOR THE VISION
 29

Chapter - 2
The North Ship : The Search for the Visioh

The North Ship, the first collection of Larkin’s poems, was published in

1945. It contains the poems written mainly during 1943-44. The poems of this

volume are generally regarded as deserving merely the indulgence of juvenilia,

and it is certainly true that much of this collection is derivative poetry. Most

critics thought of these poems as the production of an immature poet in search of

his poetic vision. In his introduction to the 1966 reissue of the volume, Larkin

himself acknowledged three specific influences on his early poetry:

Looking back, Ifind in the poems not one abandoned self

but several - the ex-schoolboy, for whom Auden was the only

alternative to ‘old-fashioned'poetry; the undergraduate, whose

work a friend affably characterized as ‘Dylan Thomas, but you’ve

a sentimentality that’s all your ownand the immediately post-

Oxford self, isolated in Shropshire with a complete Yeats stolen

from the local girls’ school. This search for a style was merely

one aspect of a general immaturity.1

The influence of Auden can be traced in such poems like ‘Conscript’.

While mapping out the development of a young poet through the influence of the

Romantics. Eliot observes that in the succeeding stage,

 30

the poetry of a single poet invades the youthful consciousness

2
and assumes complete possession for a time.

For Larkin, the ‘single poet’ was Yeats and Larkin himself offered an

explanation for the predominance of Yeats’ influence in this volume. Larkin says,

I spent the next three years trying to write like Yeats, not

because I liked his personality or understood his ideas but out of

infatuation with his music. ... It is a particularly potent music,

pervasive as garlic and has ruined many a better talent.3

Larkin’s own opinion of the poems of The North Ship was extremely poor.

He wrote a letter to Charles Monteith, in which he wrote,

Many thanks for ... the good news it contained of a

prospective paper-covered edition ofmyfirst worst book Welcome,

at least, for base, commercial reasons; I am not sure how pleased

s \
4
I am at the prospect offurther dissemination of this drivel.

The North Ship reflects Larkin’s vision and portrays the struggle of a

young poet in search of his own poetic vision. The poems of this volume reveal

the experiences of a solitary person and describe nature, men and women, and

customs of Larkin’s time. This volume articulates feelings of stasis, powerlessness,

coldness, disgust and fear, in an arty manner, using a figurative language of

symbolism, full of dense, self-conscious poeticisms, similes and metaphors that

are confusing.

Andrew Motion describes The North Ship as a collection,

 31

... almost all (the poems are) languorously drooping in

their rhythms and uninventively romantic in their references. They

frequently borrow direct from Yeats, and general resemblances

abound. Their mood is invariably gloomy without justification,

their time of day dawn or dusk, their weather cold, rainy and

windy, and their symbolic details monotonous: water, stars, ice,

ships, candles, dreams, hands and beds occur with extraordinary

frequency and no distinguishing features.5

An invariably gloomy, contemplative and brooding mood pervades the

poetic collection. It colours everything in nature that the poet sees and experiences.

The poet’s mind registers the bleakness in everything in nature. The recurrence

of seasons, the perpetual snow which does not thaw, the mist which envelopes

everything, leafless trees, leaves and flowers in decay, diseased animals and

emptiness of stars. Even the dreams are nightmarish. They participate in the general

gloom of the poet. An overwhelming gloom that colours everything the poet

sees, underscoring a basic trait in his poetic vision.

Nature is important in The North Ship, because it shows his philosophy of

life. To Larkin, Nature does not inspire nor does it offer any respite from the

tedium and loneliness of life. His landscapes are half-lit, hazy and featureless. His

Nature is cold, alienating and a powerful motion. The flowers, the tree-branches

fade and rot and face the transitoriness and final destruction. The poet’s mind

picks the dismal aspect of everything; the cold and soul-chilling winter, the wind

and gales, dirt and dust, decayed leaves and tree-branches, grey stormy scenes.
 32
a

The depiction of Nature, indeed, evokes sad visions. ‘Nature lies heavily on his

soul like a sodden blanket’.

In ‘Blizzard’, he describes a snow storm,

Suddenly clouds of snow

Begin assaulting the air,

As falling, as tangled

As a girl’s thick hair.

Some see a flock of swans

Some a fleet of ships

Or a spread winding sheet

But the snow touches - my lips.

(75°N Blizzard, p.46, TNS)

The clouds of snow ‘assail’ the air. They are likened to the ‘tangled thick

hair’ of a girl, a flock of swans, a fleet of ships or winding sheet. There is a

dreamlike fantastic quality which makes him deliberately difficult. The dreams

are nightmarish and are in keeping with his vision.

The images of clouds, shadows, nights find fitting emotional parallels in

silences, solitude, darkness. It is also be seen in the following poem.

... sleep is made cold

By a recurrent dream

Where all things seem

Sickeningly to poise

On emptiness, on stars
 33

Drifting under the world.

(‘Songs 65°N', p.45, TNS)

In ‘Songs 65°N\ the sequence develops in a mysterious way as it seeks to

make palpable the ominous suggestions and sinister associations gathering round

the voyage of the North Ship. It is structured around the images of coldness and

erotic love fraught with fear. From the stylistic point of view, the poem shows

Larkin’s indulgence in self-conscious poeticism. The nature images are still his

obsession, and is diction shows an excessive dependence on similes and metaphors.

In The North Ship, Larkin experiments with that poetry which is seen by

the untutored mind as truly poetic; a representation of a mystical, neo-Gothic

world, where melancholy and mist roll together over half-lit landscapes, hinting

at some deep, inner meaning, but which, if we examine them closely, have nothing

below the surface of interest.

Some poems show that Larkin sees his own bleak sensibility in terms of

the panorama of nature. The effect of nature’s power and occasional malevolence

on the poet is not addressed in many of these poems, though it creates an

appropriate setting for their descriptions of disillusionment.

There are often trees and wind

and sound, as in Night music

At one, the wind rose

And with it,- the noise

of the black poplars

(TNS, p.ll)
 34

The star imagery in ‘Night Music’ brings out the rich background of the

stars in their blazing solitude. They are the fixed points of light and contrasted

with the moving object, the earth with its blowing winds and the black poplars.

There are bleak fields on every side; Larkin’s landscapes are assailed by

blowing winds, wastes of thistles.

And in their blazing solitude,

The stars sang in their sockets through the night,

Blow bright, blow bring

The coal of this unquickened world.

(TNS.p.U)

In the last stanza, its twofold contrast and circular, is enacted briefly as

the poet glances at the sky to measure its creative potential, lost in contemplating.

The stars sang in their sockets, he makes a feeble effort to lose himself in

the world of the divine; and in their blazing solitude, but his earthly time limitations

immediately assert themselves and render this attempt sterile. So, he has been

drawn back to earth and to this unquickened world. It is an unquickened world

because it is held in its captivity, he feels the slow passage of time.

In ‘Waiting for Breakfast’, the vision which appears more like the harsh

bell of art which sounded later in ‘Reasons for Attendance’ or at least is separate

from the nature and seems to call for the poet’s separation, as the closing lines of

‘Waiting for Breakfast’ formulate it.

 35

Will you refuse to come till I have sent

Her terribly away importantly live

Part invalid, part baby and part saint ?

(TNS, p.48)

The poem does not belong to the original collection and was written in

1947, but as Larkin confirms, he deliberately included it to introduce readers to

his discovery of his poetic vision. He said he had added it to the 1966 reprint of

the volume as a “coda” and justified it by saying,

I have added a poem written a year or so later, which,

though not noticeably better than the rest, shows the Celtic Fever

abated and the patient sleeping soundly.6

The poem is a monologue spoken by a man in a hotel room while the

woman with whom he has spent the night is readying herself for breakfast. He

stands looking out of the hotel window as she brushes her hair. He looks down

“at the empty hotel yard”, the wet cobblestones and watches the sky loaded with

mist. At the sight of this dull scene, he reflects that what he is viewing is a

“featureless morning” following a featureless night. He is seen suddenly

experiencing a feeling of joy which transforms the very appearance of the

“featureless” things he has seen outside.

This poem is noted to be, by Larkin’s critics and reviewers, as a transition

point in his poetic development, for it establishes what becomes the distinct

Larkinesque mannerism. The poem is different, more communicative and as an

ending note to The North Ship is almost positive.

 36

My world back after a year, my lost

Lost world like a cropping deer strayed near.

My path again, Bewaring the mind’s last clutch.

Turning, I kissed Easily for sheer

Joy tipping the balance of love.

(TNS, p.48)

The poem describes the advent of a kind of spiritual revelation, as he

alters his earlier perception of Featureless morning, featureless night. The

ordinariness is pronounced a ‘misjudgment’ and he, moreover, receives only love.

‘The Kiss’ has elsewhere its reasons and the spontaneity is effective. The return

of the deer-muse is welcomed and its grace solicited even if it meant sending his

love away forever.

The speaker in this poem is secure in his relationship with a lover. We find

him tom between the demands of that relationship and something which lies outside

it, in this case, his desire to write this muse, he fears, envies his girlfriend. The

poem shows how Larkin is beginning to place himself in the context of the real

world to create specific situations in which focused feelings could be vividly

described - a style which Larkin imbibed from Hardy.

The consciousness of nature works in ‘Ugly Sister’, where the speaker

ascends to her room and lies down on the bed. Once there, her first action is to

remove all other distractions,

Let the music, the violin, comet and drum

Drowse from my head. (CP, p.292)

 37

This clears the way for focused concentration on nature outside - again, it

is perceived from inside that room on that bed:

1 will attend to the trees and their gracious silence,

*

To winds that move.

(CP, p.292)

This seems a willed switch to nature images from musical ones.

Here, in this poem, the speaker is a lady whose ugliness prevents her from

being loved. Consequently, she is left to live a life of abject loneliness, which she

tries to combat partly by taking recourse to the world of “music”, and partly by

adopting a philosophical stance as suggested by her act of turning herself to the

contemplation of the objects of nature.

The seasonal process and night and day cycle are recurrent themes in

Larkin’s poetry. In ‘One Man Walking a Deserted Platform’

One Man Walking a Deserted Platform,

Dawn coming, and rain driving

Across a darkening autumn,

One man restlessly waiting a train ...

(CP, p.289)

This poem begins in a narrative mode, accommodating a descriptive strain

which is sustained in the first section, but snaps in the second, where it yields

place, quite characteristically, to semi-symbolist speculations. Dawn is approaching

and rain is,

 38

driving across a darkening autumn.

The speaker is a lonely man walking a deserted platform and then “restless

waiting” for a “train”, the rain

Beating each shuttered house, that seems

Folded full of the dark silk of dreams,

A shell of sleep cradling a wife or child.

(CP, p.289)

The images of “the dark silk of dreams” enfolding the people in the closed

houses and of a “shell of sleep”, lulling the near and dear ones into a seemingly

abiding state of coziness are all suggestive of a vast but meaningless world of

illusions that love creates. “Sleep” here becomes a symbol of delusion, while the

image of the “shell” reinforces its hard and impregnable nature. Kuby quotes,

The poem may be said to contain the seeds of Larkin's

maturer poetry in two respects -first, in its vivid realistic setting,

and secondly, in the speaker's sympathetic identification with

7
another individual.

There is an attempt here at evoking an atmospheric effect with the help of

some minute details like a lonely man, deserted platform, someone waiting for a

train, a day dawning, stars setting, cocks crowing, etc.

Man entrapped in time is the central situation in this poem. The time

imagery in the poem includes train, wind, star-set, cockcrow, dawn and darkening

autumn. Larkin sees life through the perspective of time; time with its attendant

theme of its immutability and transience.

 39

Time is like a river eternal in its flow.

The river is eternal in that its flow never ceases. It is, on the other hand,

also transient because, from a fixed viewpoint, you never watch the same quantum

of water, but that one which replaces the previous water, which has flown forward.

Today becomes yesterday, tomorrow, the next day, tomorrow changes into today,

and soon there is a continuous succession of day and night. Larkin pinpoints the

movement of transition and expresses his wonder of the advent of time. Human

life is limited by being caught in the trap of time. Time is rolling away and life is

heading for death. Time is destructive. Man has to struggle against it. Time is

heading forward but cares nothing for him.

The movement of time becomes an obsessive and corrosive concern in

‘The bottle is drunk out by one”, where the speaker pathetically and helplessly

keeps on counting the hours struck by the clock at night. The images that indicate

the passage of time - like the blowing of wind as in “Winter” or the falling of

streams as in “Night - Music” - and the abundance of verbs in participle forms so

pervasive in “One man walking a deserted platform” only reinforce the poet’s

persistent preoccupation with the passage of time. But, in these poems, the poet’s

consciousness of the movement of time is merely a secondary concern creeping

into the texture of some major thematic issue - either death or lovelessness or

loneliness or sadness as an unavoidable condition of human existence.

In these poems, in other words, the problem of time has been grappled

with only indirectly and in passing. There is, however, one poem in this collection

in which time figures as the central and only subject.

 40

This poem is “This is the first thing”, the shortest poem in the whole

collection. The poem succinctly states that ‘Time is an echo of an axe and echoes

are expressive in terms of the effect of time’. The poet visualizes time in concrete

terms and no more time is an abstract idea for him. It points out how man is

savagely brutalized by the ruthless passage of slow time.

Time here is a mighty, destructive force, a cruel tyrant, an agent of

annihilation, conceived of in terms of an axe falling inexorably, mercilessly and

mindlessly on the trees in a wood.

This is the first thing

I have understood:

Time is the echo of an axe,

Within a wood. (CP, p.295)

“I have understood”, which is followed by a colon, indicating that the

poet is here actually concerned with the effect of time on himself and, by

implication, on mankind in general, although this relation has not been developed

here. Besides, the trees should be regarded as a symbol of beauty and innocence,

which are the attributes as much of the world of nature as of the world of man;

and time in the world. The poem finally deals with a theme to which Larkin

comes back repeatedly and insistently in his later Volumes of poetry, with gradually

increasing clarity and maturer vision.

In his treatment of the theme of time, Larkin seems to be uncertain about

the concept of time, as a whole, in its three dimensions - past, present and future.
 41

In the poem, ‘Disintegration’, Larkin finds,

Time running beneath the pillow wakes

Lavers entrained who in the name of love

Were promised the steeples and

Fanlights of a dream

Join the renters of each single room

Across the table to observe a life

Dissolving in the acid of their sex.

(CP, p.298)

Not only does time underline love but in its ‘singing an annual permit for frost’

depicts the cooling off of love. The temporality of the sexual act of the lovers to

which time has been a witness is suggested in the line.

to observe a life

Dissolving in the acid of their sex.

In this poem, Larkin underlines the sexual aspect of love. Time observes,

a life

Dissolving in the acid of their sex.

Sexual love is bitter and transient. Mutability of love, indeed, is a recurring theme

in his poetry.

The flames ofpassion have been spent and

grief stirs and the left heart lies impotent.

(CP, p.298)

15038
 42

The sense of void of emptiness is doubly endorsed in ‘stubborn’, ‘left’ and

‘impotent’ gives way to the only thing that survives grief.

The theme of Larkin’s poetry is a grief which he tells us in the poem ‘The

Horns of the Morning’.

Here, where no love is

All that was hopeless

And kept me from sleeping

Is frail and ensure

For every so brilliant

Neither so silent

Nor so unearthly has

Earth grown before.

Here, one feels the emotions that are bitter but genuine. The poet is apparently

convinced that reality must be in conflict with the vision of the endlessness of

time.

The ‘Homs of Morning’ regrets lovelessness and hopelessness of the world.

The poem like ‘The North Ship’ expresses the sense of emptiness of love. He

must accept his lover now - in the present, because only present is a reality. Love

is transient and mutable and we must catch the moment of love.

It is now or for always.

Love’s promise is an empty promise. The lover’s melancholic feelings

stem from his failure in love. It is commonly believed that love has the power to

cure suffering, but for Larkin, love has no balming effect. It is only a tragic illusion.
 43

Hislgjiews^jdejected, frustrated person.

Larkin’s alienation, then, is a protest against self-dqception. He would

rather prefer to suffer while facing the facts, rather than suffer by illusions.

Larkin speaks to his imagined beloved appearing in dreams in ‘Within the

dream you said’,

Within the dream you said,

Let us kiss then,

In this room, in this bed,

But when all’s done

We must not meet again.

(CP, p.299)

This is casual love, sex masquerading as love - a momentary sexual

gratification.

Not that Larkin is not interested in the permanent love. He is constantly

in search of true love, but finds himself unable to get it. The North Ship is full of

melancholic partings.

Love, we must part now; do not

let it be calamitous and bitter.

In the past,

There has been too much moonlight

and self-pity, ...

(XXIV, p.37)
 44

This parting is like two ships drifting apart. Once the lovers get separated,

There is regret; Always, there is regret.

He prefers to be free rather than getting tied down forever.

The nest of love must be erected on the solid rock of faith. The betrayal in

love ruins the nest of true love. Love is transitory, because it is never perfect, as

only a perfect thing achieves eternity.

As Anthony.Thwaite says,

His themes - love, change, disenchantment, the mystery

and inexpli-cableness of the past’s survival and death’s finality -

are unshakdbly major. So too, I think, are the assurance of his

cadences and the inevitable rightness of his language at their best

... And those haunting closing lines to many poems ... have an
g
authentic gravity, a memorable persistence.

There is a compelling evidence of his sense of isolation, felt not only

when the poet is without companion, but even when the poet is in bed with his

lover, he is alienated. The ‘Bottle Drunk Out by One’ presents dramatically the

silences, solitude and darkness.

(XVI, p.28)

The flaws of self-pity of lovelessness occur-again and again throughout

The North Ship, but we can see the direction that Larkin was later to take in the

poem ‘XXXXIF where vestiges of his mature style are already discernible.

A sizeable number of poems in this Volume, particularly those in which

Larkin’s primary concern is love, are soaked in a spirit of melancholy. These

 45

poems were written after Larkin’s arrival in Wellington, where “for the first time,
9
he fell in love”. Some of his poems admit that love and desire are quite exciting,

but most find them impossible, even degrading, and leave him sad. In fact, each

of the speakers in those poems as well as in many others in The North Ship seem

to be trying to “induce in himself a mood of rather mandlin melancholy, rather

than to express his love, or its failure, or to understand it”.10

“I put my mouth”, for example, is a “vapid, neo-Yeatsian murmuring”,

where the speaker seems to be whispering in a sentimental vein, a lore of

lovelessness, first to running water and then to the wind,

It is not love you will find,

Only the bright-tongued birds,

Only a moon with no home.

(CP, p.276).

The images of chirping birds and a homeless, vagrant moon are attempted,

but ineffective, objectifications of the speaker’s dejected, forlorn state, which is

reinforced by the word “only” that clearly suggests loneliness.

The tide of sentimentality and self-pity also runs high in “I dreamed of an

out-thrust arm of land”, which is presumably addressed to a lady. In his sleep, the

speaker dreamed of a beautiful landscape - a plot of seaside land where sea gulls

were flying over ‘a wave’ “that fell along miles of sand”. The wind was blowing

in the upland, in the caves and in a garden and finally “broke round a house”,

where he and his beloved were sleeping cozily. His sweet dream, however, was

rudely broken when she woke him,

 46

To walk in the chilled shore

Of a night with no memory.

Till your voice forsook my sear,

Till your two hands withdrew

And I was empty of tears,

On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea,

And a cold hill of stars.

(CP, p.267)

The words and phrases in these lines are profoundly negative in their

import, seeming to well up from a heart languishing in self-pity. The speaker’s

tone is melancholy, charged with slushy sentiment - the shore is “chilled”, the

night bereft of memories, the lady’s voice “forsook” the lover, her hands

“withdrew”, the very fountain of his tears has run dry so that he is left to languish

in a “cold hills of stars”.

While “ I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land” speaks of the nightmarish

experience of loss of love, “Morning has spread again” shows the sun of love as

eternally setting. This poem is another aubade and is addressed directly by a

lover to a presumed beloved. The dawning of another day changes the lovers

into strangers, so much so that the lover-speaker finds it difficult to disclose it to

his beloved, if he meets her, that she visited him last night “Unbidden, in a dream”.

He cannot forget that they have missed the opportunity of translating love into

reality, because nervous strains prevented them from spontaneously exchanging

their passion, which was thus doomed to “die within their hearts”. The speaker
 47

watches the morning gradually progressing and wonders if,

Love can have already set

In dreams, when we’ve not met

More times than I can number on one hand.

(TNS, p.38)

The poem comes very close to corroborating Motion’s observation that

Larkin had turned Ruth Bowman into an image. “She becomes a fantasy figure,

someone he’s only really happy to meet in dreams”.11

Another poem addressed to a presumed lover is “Is it for now or for

always”. In this lyric, the lover-speaker, while walking in the woods with his

beloved, experiences a state of elation apparently so intense that the world seems

to him symmetrical, complete and satisfying as a flower hanging “on a stalk”,

even though his cheerfulness is markedly qualified by his doubt as to whether this

phenomenon is momentary or permanent.

Thematically, the lyric seems to provide some relief from the pervasive

sense of lovelessness that characterizes the world of The North Ship. But the

speaker’s own overwhelming doubt and uncertainty as evident in his iterated

questions reflect the fugitiveness of his moments of love.

In The North Ship, there are at times expressions of a desire to rise above

the sentimentality and self-pity, but these are ultimately thwarted. In “Love, we

must part now”, for instance, the speaker directly addresses his beloved and

entreats her not to make the occasion of their parting “calamitous and bitter”. In

the past, their affair had been too sentimental and too full of “self-pity”. In the
 48

present, they should be free from both, for now they are most “eager” to be

“free” from each other’s attachment, to ignore the criticisms of the world and to

defy the hostility of their surroundings. Lack of commitment to the ideal of love

has reduced them to mere “husks”. Their parting leaves room for “regret”, it is

true. But every parting is regrettable. Yet this unavoidable “regret” is “better”

than the avoidable continuation of the affair without being sincerely devoted to

the bond of mutual passion. Since their lives are destined to follow divergent

courses, it is better for both to part with mutual understanding.

There is regret. Always, there is regret.

But it is better that our lives unloose,

As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light;

Break from an estuary with their courses set,

And waving part, and waving drop from sight.

(CP, p.280)

The whole poem seeks to evoke an effect of Yeatsian music, but the appeal

of it all remains unconvincing for many reasons. The poem begins with the speaker

briskly declaring his intention to part without fuss but in the end, lapses into

sentimentality. Andrew Motion claims that the poem presents a “powerful vision
12
of separation and independence”.

As a vision of separation, the lyric is certainly “powerful”, but as a vision

of independence, it is rather simulated in effect, for the speaker’s own attitude to

their parting remains ambivalent throughout. In fact, “Love, we must part now”

shows the poet of The North Ship has fall in the mire of self-pity and sentimentality
 49

and the more he tries to lift himself out of it, the deeper he sinks into it.

Occasionally, in The North Ship, Larkin, however, seems also to be seeking

some sort of compensation for the loss of love and bliss in this world in the

abundance of moonlight, as he does in “The moon is full tonight”. The speaker

in this poem impresses us as a man who ultimately fails to rise out of the state of

torpor induced in him by persistent cheerlessness.

Another poem in which it is the poet’s heart which looms large is “Within

the dream you said”, a short, ten-line love lyric.

Within the dream, you said:

Let us kiss then,

In this room, in this bed,

But when all’s'done, *

We must not meet again.

Hearing this last word,

There was no lambing night,

No gale-driven bird,

Nor frost-encircled root,

As cold as my heart.

(CP, p.299).

The theme of the poem is the separation conveyed through the lover-

speaker’s description of his reaction to his beloved’s words, But when all’s done

/ We must not meet again. These are words that rob the speaker’s heart of all its

warmth and vitality. The images of the lambs braving the winter, bird struggling
 50

against the “gale” and the “root” enduring the “frost” together crystallize into a

total image of a life of struggle. In contrast stands the love, neither living nor

struggling. Ultimately, therefore, the poem is a statement of finality of passivity

induced by the realization of the absence of love.

“Heart” rendered “cold” by a sense of lovelessness forms the subject of

another short, six-line lyric called “Dawn”.

To wake and hear a cock

Out of the distance crying,

To pull of the curtains back

And see the clouds flying -

How strange it is

For the heart to be loveless, and as

Cold as these.

(CP, p.284)

On waking up from sleep, an occasion for celebration of certain positive

aspects like freshness, both physical and mental, and the awakening of new

consciousness, as in Donne’s “The Good Morrow”, the speaker finds his heart

“loveless” and “cold”. “Dawn” also repeats the theme of “Within the Dream, you

said”, “If hands could free you, heart”, which again mourns the state of lovelessness

and rings with a lambent note of self-pity. The heart is apostrophized in the very

beginning, If hands couldfree you, heart, /Where would you fly ?

The speaker himself answers that liberated from the bondage of his body,

his heart would cross “city and hill and sea” to fly far beyond the bounds of
 51

earthy life. The speaker could run “through fields, pit valleys” to come in contact

with all that is beautiful under the sun. But his journey would prove futile, for he

would “still end in loss”.

Larkin’s melancholy, compounded with sentimentality, finds expression

also in “Kick up the Fire”. In this poem, the speaker prolongs his talk with his

guest, possibly his beloved, till “two O’clock” at night. Yet, immediately after

her departure, he is overwhelmed by “the instantaneous grief’ of loneliness and a

feeling of “dumb idleness” overpowers him;

Yet when the guest

Has stepped into the windy street, and gone,

Who can confront

The instantaneous grief of being alone ?

Or watch the sad increase

Across the mind of this prolific plant,

Dumb idleness ?

(CP, p.285)

This lyric is another mood poem, giving expression to the speaker’s feelings

of grief and “dumb idleness” growing from his sudden and acute awareness of

“being alone”. The poem offers a blend of metaphorical and prosaic language.

Young Larkin’s melancholic thoughts reflect the realistic situations of the

time and his personal experiences. The poems in this collection were written

during the War period, though he does not directly allude to the War situation.

There are also echoes of Yeats, Auden and even T.S.Eliot. The young Larkin
 52

writes the poetry of sentimentality under the influence of Yeats. Under the influence

of T.S.Eliot, his poetry assumes a sceptical, robust, ironic tone that reflects a

‘wicked, commercial, threatened world’.

The sense of sweet pain and melancholia in his early poems is in the

tradition of Romantic and Victorian poets. The inevitability of death is the recurrent

theme of the poetic collection. Under the shadow of death, everything seems

futile. Man becomes fatalist because destiny is unavoidable; and compelled to

wear the robes of destiny and run the race of life.

One the major thematic preoccupations of Larkin in The North Ship is his

obsession with the thought of death. In some poems, it stays in the background

as a constant, cruel reminder of its menacing reality, proving “all we do” is

ephemeral and futile, as it does in “All catches alight”. This poem is made up of

four stanzas, each of which present concrete pictures of nature and a man, induced

by “the spread of spring” and each ends with a portentous refrain serving as a

ruthless reminder of the inevitable advent of winter which symbolizes decay and

death.

Birds are “crazed” with the joy of boundless flight; branches “fling leaves

upto the light”; all living qreatures - birds, beasts, plants, trees and man - join the

process of enjoyment in their respective habitats, rejoicing in their ability to

celebrate the death-defying sense of belonging to the whole that life means.

The ploughman, least troubled by his poverty, goes on tilling the land as if

in ecstasy. But every state of rapture is ruptured by the “wintry drum” which

goes on tapping relentlessly. The poet wishes that the wheel of life may continue
 53

to revolve till all living creatures shake off their past and all dead are resurrected.

Fear of death, which serves as a disturbing and recurrent motif in “All

catches alight” is uppermost in the poet’s mind in another poem called “Pair

away that youth”, where the speaker’s obsession with the thought of mortality

drives him to wish his youth away, “to take the grave’s part”.

Throw away that youth,

That jewel in the head,

%

That bronze in the breath;

Walk with the dead

For fear of death.

(CP, p.297)

Larkin here seems to have borrowed Yeat’s concept of time, of evolution

and of the second coming. “All catches alight” shows Larkin’s indebtedness to

Yeats in one more respect. His “Wheel” is just another version of the Yeatsian

“gyre” used in “The Second Coming”.

Young Larkin is sceptical about life after death. He thinks there is no

return from death, nor any hope of continuing after death. He ‘dreads endless

extinction’. He is pessimistic due to his constant awareness of death. Death is a

major theme in Larkin’s poetry. The Sonnet in The North Ship,

This was your place of birth, this daytime palace.

He is not prepared for what the night will bring,

Are you prepared for what the night will bring ?

The stranger who will never show his face

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But asks admittance, will you greet your doom,

As final, set him loaves and wine

Knowing.

The game is finished when he plays his ace,

And overturn his table and go into the next room ?

(CP, p.265)

Death arrives as an uninvited ‘faceless’ guest. ‘The Table’, ‘loaves and

wine’ are Christian symbols. The guest playing cards and winning the ‘game’ has

typically the stamp of T.S.Eliot’s image.

This poem ends with the darkness of the day. No where in the poem does

he directly mention the word ‘death’. Death is dramatized as powerful opponent

that overpowers man, defeats him and leads him silently to an unknown destination.

The North Ship, however, is not irredeemably gloomy. Amid the recurrent

obsessions with depression, lovelessness, melancholia and death, there are

moments when pain tends to dissolve into a brilliant sense of serenity for which

the Larkinesque expression is “unearthly”.

The short poem “The horns of the morning” deserves mention in this

context. It celebrates a moment of daybreak when the music bursts out and the

light explodes over the darkness. The sum seems to be a vast source of light

which now bathes the world at dawn. In contrast stands the poet’s microcosm

which consists of the just finished sleepless night with all its associations of

hopelessness and dejection which culminate in the form of insomnia.

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This poem attempts to celebrate a movement in which his suffering and

despair break down through the act of rejoining in the perception of a different

kind of reality;

For never so brilliant,

Never so silent,

Nor so unearthly, has

Earth grown before.

(CP, p.275)

The poem is remarkable as much for the poet’s ability to respond to and

imbibe the spirit of a joyous nature as for his capacity to depict the beauty of

nature at dawn in a tone of exultation as in the visual and auditory images.

Larkin’s major themes are time, nature and death and the poet shows that

they are inseparable. According to Larkin, life is nothing but uncertainty, despair

and disillusion. He realizes the sorrow of man. Death is the truth of life. Life is a

mere shadow a dark replica of death.

Larkin seems to share his vision that life is considerably hard journey

through time. The theme ofjourney and that of death are woven rather dangerously

into his youthful work, but they represent a combination to which Larkin is to

return later rather frequently with increased success. His use ofjourney and voyage

as theme involves the movement of life. The process continues and the poet

captures in movement his own sense of putrid existence. Like Dylan Thomas,
 56

Sewing a shroud for a journey

By the light of the meat-eating Sun

Dressed to die the sensual strut begin.

I

Tjhe tone carried over in Larkin’s own terms ‘Nursery Tale’ reads, So

every journey that I make leads me us in the story, he was led to some new

ambush, to some fresh mistake. This shows the feeling of the dreariness of harsh

reality and man’s hopelessness in life. The rigid journey of life is comfortless

‘unforgiving’. The sorrow in such an existence is heightened by remorse and

regret.

The lady in ‘The Portrait’ supports grief in a Chiaroscuro painting. The

lady shuts off a trembling wind with her palm shattering a candle flame. In this

way, the wind cannot bear her grief away and the candle bums to an end determined

existence.

The bleakness of Larkin’s thoughts builds up his vision and the bleakness

of vision colours his thoughts. It contains the hopelessness of life. In the ‘A

Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb’.

Nothing but death remained,

To scatter magnificence,

And now what scaffolded mind

Can rebuild experience.

(CP, p.269)

For Larkin life is a big battlefield. Unlike most of his early poems, these

thoughts convey the mature Larkin.

 57

In the course of his poetry, Larkin looks at ‘the tough realities of his time’

writing in a style which was described by an anonymous writer in ‘The Spectator’.

Anti-phoney, anti wet; sceptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as

comfortable as possible in a wicked, commercial, threatened world.

This is to say that Larkin writes truthfully and with a vision which appeals

to a wide reading public. He takes as his subject the life of ordinary men and in

the collections subsequent to The North Ship, his language geared to a truthful

representations of that life.

Thus, lovelessness, time, emptiness, hopelessness dominate in his early

phase. Larkin’s view towards life is depressing and barren. The themes carry

over slightly modified, but the images are replaced. Larkin’s wind, landscapes,

time, move to more human surroundings. The first phase in terms of themes and

images holds together an ourve that anticipates only partially the voice of the

mature Larkin.

Larkin restricts range to the seasons and the moon connecting it with a

certain lovelessness. This range Larkin reveals a personality distinct from Yeats

or Dylan Thomas. Yeat’s uninhibited use of myths and images is congenial to his

personality and galvanize his thoughts through an intense vision. On the other

hand, Larkin’s practical, empirical sensibility called for a circumscription in content

and a narrowed, yet intense focus of vision emerges through it.

 58

References
1. Larkin, Philip (1983): “Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces (1955-1982)”,
London: Faber and Faber, p.28.
2. Eliot, T.S. (1933): “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism”, London: Faber
and Faber, p.34.
3. Larkin, Philip, op.cit., p.29.
4. Thwaite, Anthony (ed.) (1992): “Selected Letters of Philip Larkin: (1940-1985)”,
London: Faber and Faber, p.479.
5. Motion, Andrew (1982), “Philip Larkin” (1986 Reprint), London: Methuen,
p.33.
6. Larkin, Philip, op.cit., p.30.
7. Kuby, Lolette (1974): “An Uncommon Poet for the Common Man : A Study of
Philip Larkin’s Poetry”, p. 166.
8. Thwaite, Anthony (1982), “The Poetry of Philip Larkin”, London: Faber and
Faber, pp.54-55.
9. Davie, Donald (1972): “Collected Poems: 1950-1970”, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, p.9.
10. Timms, David (1973): “Philip Larkin and His Poetry”, Edinburgh: Oliver and
Boyd, p.30.
11. Motion, Andrew (1993): “Philip Larkin : A Writer’s Life”, London: Faber and
Faber, p.126.
12. Ibid., p.127.

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