This week a rather affecting poem by Jonathan Price (1931-1985) that contrasts the ease with which small children express their affections with the inhibitions that adults sometimes bring to the task. On this note I remember how when my daughter was five, and had just discovered the fascination of large numbers, I was for some reason explaining to her the plot of ‘King Lear’, and she couldn’t understand why Cordelia wouldn’t simply tell her daddy that she loved him. ‘I would have said I loved you one thousand and forty nine’, she said. I was touched; admittedly I couldn’t help feeling that this was a bit low on the scale according to which she had previously claimed to love strawberries ‘one hundred million trillion and one’, but it’d do to be going on with.

Jonathan Price was loosely associated with the nineteen-fifties Movement poets, and his work was praised by Philip Larkin. An exacting craftsman, he published very little, and the collected poems, entitled ‘Everything Must Go’, that appeared towards the end of his life comprise just thirty-four pieces. Perhaps as a result he is pretty much forgotten: he deserves better.

A Considered Reply to a Child

‘I love you,’ you said between two mouthfuls of pudding.
But not funny; I didn’t want to laugh at all.
Rolling three years’ experience in a ball,
You nudged it friendlily across the table.

A stranger, almost, I was flattered – no kidding.
It’s not every day I hear a thing like that;
And when I do my answer’s never pat.
I’m about nine times your age, ten times less able

To say – what you said; incapable of unloading
Plonk at someone’s feet, like a box of bricks,
A declaration. When I try, it sticks
Like fish-bones in my throat; my eyes tingle.

What’s called ‘passion’, you’ll learn, may become ‘overriding’.
But not in me it doesn’t: I’m that smart,
I can give everything and keep my heart.
Kisses are kisses. No need for souls to mingle.

Bed’s bed, what’s more, and you’d say it’s meant for sleeping;
And, believe me, you’d be absolutely right.
With luck you’ll never lie awake all night,
Someone beside you (rather like ‘crying’) weeping.

Jonathan Price

A lot of people seem to be celebrating the centenary of the birth of Philip Larkin, so I thought this week I’d add my twopenceworth.

Some of the celebration, it must be admitted, is a little guarded. When Andre Gide was asked who he thought was the greatest French writer of the nineteenth century, he is said to have answered ‘Victor Hugo, hélas’ (Victor Hugo, alas). In the same spirit, some people asked to name the best English poet of the second half of the twentieth century wish to add a ‘hélas’ to the name of Larkin. I suppose one can see why – as a role model for poetic skill and integrity he is superb, as a role model for social attitudes less so ­– but I can’t be bothered with such niggardliness: let’s just give the man his due. My choice this week is perhaps not one of Larkin’s very best poems, but it’s a very characteristic one that unites a skilful and pleasure-giving verbal surface with a moving and memorable insight into the human condition.

True, I find the register of the opening line a little jarring, but then I feel a bit prissy for feeling that. After all, one does grope back to a bed after a piss, and there should be nothing wrong with saying so in a poem, except that Larkin takes perhaps slightly too mischievous a delight in occasionally subverting his readers’ more genteel expectations.

Moving on from that minor cognitive dissonance on my part, one is soon on surer ground with eight lines that capture beautifully the kind of nocturnal scene that must be familiar to all of us, or at least to all of us who bother to look out of the window at night. I love that ‘loosely as cannon-smoke’, that ‘stone-coloured light’. The fourth stanza then strikes a slightly odd and discordant note, but I take Larkin to be sending up the kind of pretentious apostrophe to the moon that might be indulged in by more affected poets – an indulgence that he then rejects with a firm ‘No’, confronting us with the chilling recognition of an inhuman reality that cares nothing for us, yet has power to evoke in us our own all too human feelings of loss and regret. It’s a characteristically bleak ending, yet there is a kind of exhilaration here too, as if the poet were in some way relishing that inhumanness, that otherness of the scene, for the way it absorbs him, temporarily unburdening him of his own identity. As he remarks in another poem, ‘Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!’.

In one way, Larkin’s poems don’t need a lot of working at, since what he says is usually perfectly clear to any competent reader, one of the things that no doubt contributes to his popularity with the general reading public. But at the same time it is possible to go back to his poems and appreciate them a little more each time for the pleasure of their art and the quality of their insight. Clarity of thought, accuracy of observation, felicity of expression: these are what make poetry, and these at his best is what Larkin gives you.

The title, incidentally, is taken from one of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets in the sequence ‘Astrophel and Stella’: ‘With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies!’

Sad Steps

Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by 
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate— 
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

Philip Larkin

This week’s piece was written by the folk artist Martin Simpson, and appears on his album ‘Prodigal Son’. As poetry it may be a bit rough and ready (and of course it’s better with the music), yet I find it very moving in the way it speaks for a whole generation of fragile, unfulfilled, war-torn twentieth-century lives, and also portrays a father-son relationship that will resonate with many. Certainly I see in his portrayal much of my own kindly but improvident father, a man who was deeply unsettled by any surplus funds that came his way and disposed of them as quickly as possible in slot machines or by improbable bets with the local bookmaker. Money, in the phrase of the time, ‘burned a hole in his pocket’, and this left my much thriftier mother to keep the family finances just about afloat, which she did by squirrelling away small sums from her meagre weekly housekeeping allowance into a complex system of secret purses hidden around the house. Thus, when a big bill like the annual rates came around (this being nominally my father’s responsibility) and he professed himself unable to pay it, she would produce her ‘rates purse’ with a triumphant flourish and the words ‘You’d better have this then!’. At which he would say, ‘Well, girl, what a good little manager you are!’, and she would glow with pride. Yes, I know – modern women everywhere will be tearing their hair out, but what can I say: it was a different world back then; he loved her and he played her and when he died of cancer at seventy after a lifetime’s heavy smoking she mourned him every day for twenty-three years.

‘Not hard enough for the hod’: not tough enough for physical labour, such as on a building site.
‘Norton’: a long-established make of motorcycle, much esteemed by some even if, according to the song, ‘they don’t have a soul like a Vincent 52’.
‘Split cane rod’: a kind of fly-fishing rod made of bamboo; I’m no angler but I believe these would now be regarded as a bit vintage, having been replaced by more modern materials such as carbon fibre.
‘Pirate King’: a song from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera ‘The Pirates of Penzance’.
’Fulmars’:  a genus of seabirds, breeding on cliffs and superficially resembling gulls.
’Eyebright’ a wildflower of the Euphrasia genus, formerly used to treat eye infections.
’Traveller’s Joy’: another name for the woody hedgerow climber wild clematis.

Never Any Good With Money

You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job,
Not steady enough for the office
Not hard enough for the hod.
You’d rather be riding your Norton
Or going fishing with your split cane rod.
You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job.

When your grammar school days were over
It was nineteen-seventeen
And you did the right and proper thing
You were just eighteen.
You were never mentioned in dispatches
You never mentioned what you did or saw,
You were just another keen young man
In the mud and stink of war.

You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job,
Not steady enough for the office
Not hard enough for the hod.
You’d rather be singing the ‘Pirate King’
Or fishing with your split cane rod.
You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job.

You came home from the Great War
With the pips of a Captain’s rank,
A German officer’s Luger
And no money in the bank.
Your family sent you down the coal mine
To learn to be Captain there
But you didn’t stand it very long
You needed the light and the air.

You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job,
Not steady enough for the office
Not hard enough for the hod.
You’d rather be watching the fulmars fly
Or fishing with your split cane rod.
You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job.

When the second war came along
You knew what should be done
You would reenlist to teach young men
The booby trap and the gun
And they sent you home to Yorkshire
With a crew and a Lewis gun
So you could save your seaside town
From the bombers of the Hun.

You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job,
Not steady enough for the office
Not hard enough for the hod.
You’d rather be finding the nightjar’s nest
Or fishing with your split cane rod.
You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job.

And when my mother came to your door
With a baby in her arms,
Her big hurt boy, just nine years old,
Trying to keep her from harm,
If you had been a practical man
You would have been forewarned,
You would have seen that it never could work
And I would have never been born.

There’s no proper work in your seaside town
So you come here looking for a job,
You were storeman at the power station
Just before I came along.
Nobody talked about how you quit
But I know that’s what you did.
My mother said you were a selfish man
And I was your selfish kid.

You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job,
Not steady enough for the office
Not hard enough for the hod.
And your Norton it was soon gone
Along with your split cane rod
You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job.

You showed me Eyebright in the hedgerow,
Speedwell and Traveller’s Joy,
You showed me how to use my eyes
When I was just a boy
And you taught me how to love a song
And all you knew of nature’s ways,
The greatest gifts I have ever known
And I use them every day.

You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job,
Not steady enough for the office maybe
Not hard enough for the hod.
You’d rather be riding your Norton
Or going fishing with your split cane rod
You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job.

Martin Simpson