The Less Deceived

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Lines 36-37: “Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky, / A shape less recognizable each week,”

Again, that constant strain of alienation insinuates its way into poem after poem. Throughout The Whitsun Weddings, the poet feels himself cut off from his fellow humans, often struggling to retrieve a spirit of community with them, sometimes simply wondering why it is so. The volume, while it represents little change from its predecessor, renders a picture of a man in middle age who feels life passing him by, and who sees more and more clearly the inevitable. Settings are close, small; lives are petty, insignificant; society is filled with graffiti and pollution. In “The Importance of Elsewhere,” he finds comfort in being a foreigner in Ireland, since at least he can explain his estrangement from his fellow inhabitants there. In England, ostensibly at home, he has no such excuse. High WindowsLines 38-41: “I wonder who / Will be the last, the very last, to seek / This place for what it was; one of the crew / That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?” Larkin, though, was ever detached: a large cool store, you might say. He would not live even in the same city as her and, as all the world knows, he was always cheating. His long affair with Maeve Brennan, his colleague in Hull, caused her particular pain, tipping her, at moments, into madness. But while he could certainly be blithely cruel, as well as cowardly and muddled, there’s no avoiding the fact that Jones preferred half a loaf than no bread at all. Struggling to comprehend this, Sutherland dutifully suggests (he knows the lingo) that Larkin coercively controlled her, a judgment that wilfully ignores the physical distance between them, her financial independence and, above all, her abiding conviction that life was better with Larkin than without him. If the desolate story this tells is extreme, it’s also universal. How little we understand our desires During those years, in my reading, I sought out outrageous images and shunned clear-eyed assessments; I sauntered, oblivious, through the topiary gardens of the heart and shunned the desert blooms of the soul. Now that I am in my sixties, however, my inner landscape seems simpler and starker, years of drought having greatly reduced the local population of illusions. And—behold!--the poetry of Philip Larkin looks better all the time. Lines 45-52: “Or will he be my representative, / Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt / Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground / Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt / So long and equably what since is found / Only in separation—marriage, and birth, / And death, and thoughts of these—for whom was built / This special shell?” Larkin's commentary and observations about aging and disappointment and the fears and uncertainties that keep us trapped in conformity despite our wishes for freedom, or desire to get the girl, or hopes (in vain) to evade the disappointment that successive looks in the mirror yield over time--frequently have a (gut) punch line. It's as he said himself, in the aptly named poem entitled

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) also published other poems. They, along with the contents of the four published collections, are included in the 2003 edition of his Collected Poems in two appendices. The previous 1988 edition contains everything that appears in the 2003 edition and additionally includes all the known mature poems that he did not publish during his lifetime, plus an appendix of early work. To help differentiate between these published and unpublished poems in our table all poems that appear in the 2003 edition's appendices are listed as Collected Poems 2003; of course, they also appear in the 1988 volume. A striking development in Larkin’s second book of poems, The Less Deceived, is his insistence on the mundane, the unexceptional, the commonplace. In “Born Yesterday,” a poem on the occasion of Sally Amis’s birth, for example, he counters the usual wishes for beauty or brilliance with the attractive (for him) possibility of being utterly unextraordinary, of fitting in wholly by having nothing stand out. This wish he offers, he says, in case the others do not come true, but one almost has the sense that he wishes also that the others will not come true, that being average is much preferable to being exceptional. The first poem in it, chronologically, to be written was "Going," of February 1946. It is about death, and, according to Andrew Motion, is the kind of poem for which Larkin "is so often regarded as an unrelievedly pessimistic poet" [6] Its concluding lines, "What is under my hands, / That I cannot feel? / What loads my hands down?", presage the helplessness, the dread of the atrophying of emotion, the despair, and the magnetic terror of death in the poems that follow. These are Larkin's most persistent themes. Throughout the collection, the feeling of diminishment and loss is pervasive, whether in the visit of a cyclist to a church in the volume's best known poem, "Church Going," or in the alienation of the speaker looking at a photograph of a young lady, or in the man in "Toads" beaten by work into an imprisonment he then wills, or even in the "I" who "starts to be happy" when light strikes on the "foreheads" of houses. "Beneath it all," ends the poem "Wants," "desire of oblivion runs." This desire for death simultaneously horrifies and allures.Much that is admirable in the best of [Larkin’s] work is felt [in Collected Poems]: firmness and delicacy of cadence, a definite geography, a mutually fortifying congruence between what the language means to say and what it musically embodies,” asserted Seamus Heaneyin the Observer.The collection contains Larkin’s six previous volumes of poetry as well as 83 of his unpublished poems gleaned from notebooks and homemade booklets. The earliest poems (which reflect the style and social concerns of W.H. Auden) date from his schooldays and the latest close to his death. Writing in the Chicago Tribune Books, Alan Shapiropointed out, “Reading the work in total, we can see how Larkin, early and late, is a poet of great and complex feeling.” Larkin “[endowed] the most commonplace objects and occasions with a chilling poignancy, [measuring] daily life with all its tedium and narrowness against the possibilities of feeling,” adds Shapiro. Miscellaneous: All What Jazz: A Record Diary, 1961-1968, 1970; Required Writings: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955-1982, 1984. The early work of an important poet always has a potential interest, since it is likely to contain anticipations of his later, finer poems; in Larkin's case, however, this interest is limited because of the sharp break in his writing after The North Ship.

His first collection (The North Ship) seems to me more ‘romantic’, but also more prosaic. The Less Deceived then seems to find Larkin a little more worldly, bitter, and rejected (though not always), but it’s entirely more interesting, beautiful, and sharp as a result. The Whitsun Weddings continues on this trajectory and is similarly excellent. And since it is now four minutes into Valentines Day, I'll cut and paste a poem from this book that I think is sort of tangentially appropriate for this day of consumerist romance and love (as in it's not about consumerist love, nor really about love at all, but has a certain nice bitterness that I think is relevant (you can also listen to this song, which I was hoping to find a non-live version of, but it's still pretty listenable).How could I have neglected this great poet for so long? After all, I have an abiding love for 20th century verse, and I remember encountering—and admiring—that masterpiece of his, “Church Going,” more than two decades ago. Osborne, John. Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. The list of poems by Philip Larkin come mostly from the four volumes of poetry published during his lifetime: [1] [2] Bradford, Richard. First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 2005. Monica Jones photographed by Philip Larkin on the Isle of Mull, Scotland, 1971. Photograph: Philip Larkin archive

Lines 52-54: “For, though I've no idea / What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, / It pleases me to stand in silence here;” Larkin can at times be mordantly humorous. In “If My Darling” he speculates about what his girl might think if she could view the vile contents of his mind (“monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles/ Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate”), in “Toad” he compares his day-job to an intrusive amphibian (“why should I let the toad work squat on my life?), and in “I Remember, I Remember,” he excuses Coventry, the town he lived in for the painfully uneventful first eighteen years of his life, from any specific responsibility (“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”) His irony, in this poem as in so many, is used defensively; he wards off criticism by beating everyone to the punch. Irony is in some respects safer than laying oneself open for inspection. In many of his finest poems, however, he drops his guard and allows himself to think seriously about serious subjects. The foremost example in The Less Deceived is “Church Going.” The title turns out to be marvelously ambiguous, appearing at first blush to be a mere reference to attending church, but then becoming, as the poem progresses, an elliptical, punning reference to churches going out of fashion. But there are times, too, when he grows weary of the masks he is forced to wear, and cannot restrain a genuine childlike sense of hope from coming forth in his work. Then we catch a glimpse of a different Larkin, as in Coming, which despite describing his childhood as a ‘forgotten boredom’, is filled with an immense sense of hope, even purity (the ‘fresh-peeled’ voice of the thrush), which seems to come directly from nature. This is a very short collection (not Larkin's first, but the first one he liked), and I would not wish any of these twenty-nine sharply crafted lyrics away. The title is a reference to Hamlet (Ophelia, when Hamlet says he never loved her, replies “I was the more deceived”) and most of the poems here deal in some way with deception. All of us fall prey to it, Larkin believes, but the sufferer is invariably “less deceived” than her oppressor who, filled with desire—specifically lust in the poem “Deception”--ends up deluded and filled with sadness: “stumbling up the breathless stair/ to burst into fulfillment's desolate attic.” Indeed Larkin can be eloquent--and daring--on the subject of lust, as he is in “Dry Point”:Take a look at Larkin's likeness, rendered in both paintings and photograph, in the National Portrait Gallery's six portraits of the poet himself. The title of this early collection of Larkin's poems comes from 'Deceptions'--an empathetic reflection on a real-life act of sexual violence ('I would not dare / Console you if I could')--as well as being a reversal of a quote from Hamlet. The poem contains one of the most striking images in the book (with much competition): 'All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives'. Larkin’s Selected Letters,edited by his longtime friend, poet Anthony Thwaite, reveals much about the writer’s personal and professional life between 1940 and 1985. Washington Post Book Worldreviewer John Simon noted that the letters are “about intimacy, conviviality, and getting things off one’s heaving chest into a heedful ear.” He suggests that “these cheerful, despairing, frolicsome, often foul-mouthed, grouchy, self-assertive and self-depreciating missives should not be missed by anyone who appreciates Larkin’s verse.” Philip Larkin said on more than one occasion that his discovery of Thomas Hardy's poetry was a turning point in the writing of his own poetry: "I don't think Hardy, as a poet, is a poet for young people. I know it sounds ridiculous to say I wasn't young at twenty-five or twenty-six, but at least I was beginning to find out what life was about, and that's precisely what I found in Hardy. In other words, I'm saying that what I like about him primarily is his temperament and the way he sees life. He's not a transcendental writer, he's not a Yeats, he's not an Eliot; his subjects are men, the life of men, time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love...