This week’s offering is the last poem in Philip Larkin’s first collection, ‘The North Ship’, first published in 1945 and then republished in 1966 after the appearance of ‘The Less Deceived’ and ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. This particular poem did not in fact appear in the original collection, not having been written until 1947, but did appear in a 1951 pamphlet ‘XX poems’. It was added to show the young Larkin at that time in transition between the influence of W.B.Yeats and one far more suited to his temperament, that of Thomas Hardy.

The poems in the ‘The North Ship’ are for the most part, as Larkin himself recognised, not very good: far too derivative of Yeats and quite lacking in what Seamus Heaney was later to call Larkin’s ‘Shakespearean felicity’. Elizabeth Jennings, reviewing the book, said somewhat inexplicably that it was good to know that the young Larkin could write so well; I thought that on the contrary that it was good to know that the young Larkin could write so badly: it gave the rest of us hope for the possibility of a radical improvement.

But the last poem in the book is a different kettle of fish, a definite foreshadowing of what was to come: precise in its evocation of an outer world while at the same time forensically honest in its examination of the poet’s inner world. Larkin appears to have spent the night with a woman, a night that while it might not have qualified for a place in what he later called ‘fulfilment’s desolate attic’ apparently fell short of expectations. ‘I thought: Featureless morning, featureless night.’ (Seems a bit ungallant, but let it pass).

And yet, the morning after triggers in him something he thought he had lost, the impulse to poetry, his ‘lost lost world’, and his euphoria at this leads to a rush of affection for the woman, ‘easily tipping the balance towards love’. Of course, all this is not entirely creditable: one’s affection for other human beings should not vary like a weather-vane according to the state of one’s poetic inspiration, but at least he is honest enough to recognise this tendency in himself, which in turn leads him on to the self-questioning last stanza where he meditates on the problem that was to preoccupy him all his life, that of reconciling his need for other people with the solitary demands of his art, that he retuns to in other poems such as ‘Wants’: ‘Beyond all this, the wish to be alone’, and the morbidly funny ‘Vers de Société’.

XXXII

Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair,
I looked down at the empty hotel yard
Once meant for coaches. Cobblestones were wet,
But sent no light back to the loaded sky,
Sunk as it was with mist down to the roofs.
Drainpipes and fire—escape climbed up
Past rooms still burning their electric light:
I thought: Featureless morning, featureless night.

Misjudgment: for the stones slept, and the mist
Wandered absolvingly past all it touched,
Yet hung like a stayed breath; the lights burnt on,
Pin-points of undisturbed excitement; beyond the glass
The colourless vial of day painlessly spilled
My world back after a year, my lost lost world
Like a cropping deer strayed near my path again,
Bewaring the mind’s least clutch. Turning, I kissed her,
Easily for sheer joy tipping the balance to love.

But, tender visiting,
Fallow as a deer or an unforced field,
How would you have me? Towards your grace
My promises meet and lock and race like rivers,
But only when you choose. Are you jealous of her?
Will you refuse to come till I have sent
Her terribly away, importantly live
Part invalid, part baby, and part saint?

Philip Larkin