The Less Deceived

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Lines 2-11: “letting the door thud shut. / Another church: matting, seats, and stone, / And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut / For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff / Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; / And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, / Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off / My cycle-clips in awkward reverence, / Move forward, run my hand around the font. / From where I stand, the roof looks almost new—” The first two stanzas are curtly dismissive in a manner often encountered in Larkin, as he describes his stop from a bicycle trip at a church that is apparently Ulster Protestant. Neither he (since he stops for a reason he cannot name and acts guilty as he looks around) nor the church (since it is not at all out of the ordinary) seems worthy of attention. He leaves, thinking the church “not worth stopping for.” In the third stanza, however, the poem shifts gears in a way typical of Larkin’s finest work: the dismissive attitude toward mundane existence, the wry observations give way to serious contemplation. “Church Going,” in fact, contains two such shifts. Larkin’s first volume of poetry, The North Ship, went virtually unnoticed at the time of its original publication and would be unnoticed still were it made to stand on its own merits. (It has few.) The poems are almost uniformly derivative Yeatsian juvenilia, laden with William Butler Yeats’s imagery but shorn of its power or meaning; this is the verse of a young man who wants to become a poet by sounding like a known poet. No one has been more critical, moreover, of the volume than the poet himself, characterizing it as an anomaly, a mistake that happened when he did not know his own voice and thought, under the tutelage of Vernon Watkins, that he was someone else. That he allowed the republication of the work in 1966, with an introduction that is more than anything else a disclaimer, suggests a desire to distance the “real” poet from the confused adolescent. Throughout his life, England was Larkin’s emotional territory to an eccentric degree. The poet distrusted travel abroad and professed ignorance of foreign literature, including most modern American poetry. He also tried to avoid the cliches of his own culture, such as the tendency to read portent into an artist’s childhood. In his poetry and essays, Larkin remembered his early years as “unspent” and “boring,” as he grew up the son of a city treasurer in Coventry. Poor eyesight and stuttering plagued Larkin as a youth; he retreated into solitude, read widely, and began to write poetry as a nightly routine. In 1940 he enrolled at Oxford, beginning “a vital stage in his personal and literary development,” according to Bruce K. Martin in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.At Oxford Larkin studied English literature and cultivated the friendship of those who shared his special interests, including Kingsley Amis and John Wain. He graduated with first class honors in 1943, and, having to account for himself with the wartime Ministry of Labor, he took a position as librarian in the small Shropshire town of Wellington. While there he wrote both of his novels as well as The North Ship,his first volume of poetry. After working at several other university libraries, Larkin moved to Hull in 1955 and began a 30-year association with the library at the University of Hull. He is still admired for his expansion and modernization of that facility.

Has Michael orchestrated Roisin’s death to gain his freedom? Was he jealous of her literary fame? Is that too obvious? (Has he not heard of divorce? Is that why we are in Ireland?) Who has taken against Ophelia and why? Apart from the fact that she is called Ophelia, which is not her fault. Bradford, Richard. First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 2005. These poems, twenty-nine in all, differ from one another in form, but not in shape. That is, all of them share the same general morphology, consisting of two main parts: The birdsong makes him feel ‘like a child/ Who comes on a scene/ Of adult reconciling/ And can understand nothing/ But the unusual laughter/ And starts to be happy.’

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 Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth."--David Bowie. Bowie and Larkin could have had a good go round about existentialism. Though the former favored the cut-up technique, the latter's wordsmithing cuts like a knife wielded with precision. One's results aren't better than another. I'm just saying a sentiment like the first stanza of "Next, Please", which says "Something is always approaching; every day Till then, we say," is a good counterpart to the seduction of time. Maybe not as catchy, but inescapably true. The poem comprises nine stanzas of five lines each. The rhyme scheme follows the pattern ABBAB in each. There are ten syllables per line, with the exception of line four of each stanza which has eight or nine syllables. There is a rhythmic energy about the poem despite its sad tone of lost past and elusive memories. 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 first two stanzas examine the ways the building in which the speaker sits resembles so many other modern buildings—high-rise hotels, airport lounges—although there is something disturbingly unlike them, as well. Not until the end of the second stanza does he reveal that it is a hospital. What unites people here is the common knowledge of their own mortality; even if they are not to die immediately, they are forced by the place to confront the fact that they will die eventually. The inescapability of that knowledge tames and calms the people in the building, as once the knowledge of death and its aftermath quieted them in church.

Larkin stopped writing poetry shortly after his collection High Windowswas published in 1974. In an Observerobituary, Kingsley Amis characterized the poet as “a man much driven in upon himself, with increasing deafness from early middle age cruelly emphasizing his seclusion.” Small though it is, Larkin’s body of work has “altered our awareness of poetry’s capacity to reflect the contemporary world,” according to London Magazinecorrespondent Roger Garfitt. A.N. Wilson drew a similar conclusion in the Spectator:“Perhaps the reason Larkin made such a great name from so small an oeuvrewas that he so exactly caught the mood of so many of us… Larkin found the perfect voice for expressing our worst fears.” That voice was “stubbornly indigenous,” according to Robert B. Shawin Poetry Nation.Larkin appealed primarily to the British sensibility; he remained unencumbered by any compunction to universalize his poems by adopting a less regional idiom. Perhaps as a consequence, his poetry sells remarkably well in Great Britain, his readers come from all walks of life, and his untimely cancer-related death in 1985 has not diminished his popularity. Andrew Sullivan feels that Larkin “has spoken to the English in a language they can readily understand of the profound self-doubt that this century has given them. He was, of all English poets, a laureate too obvious to need official recognition.” 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... Larkin arrived at his conclusions candidly, concerned to expose evasions so that the reader might stand “naked but honest, ‘less deceived’ ... before the realities of life and death,” to quote King. Larkin himself offered a rather wry description of his accomplishments—an assessment that, despite its levity, links him emotionally to his work. In 1979 he told the Observer:“I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any… Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” 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. 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).I don’t believe that only a woman can write a woman’s biography, something Sutherland modishly worries about in an afterword (in mitigation for a crime he hasn’t committed, he tells us that he showed his manuscript to feminists such as Jane Miller and Rosie Boycott). It’s possible that a female biographer might have been less timid here, or more empathic, but it’s not certain. Jones is hardly the first clever, beautiful female to have been brought to abjection like this, to have embraced, even to have exalted, such a state as her lot: think of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre or Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. But women, too, tend to balk at the idea of examining forensically the notion that love sometimes bends us out of shape. The truths involved are too agonising and shameful. My favorite poem in this collection, I think, is the seemingly slight lyric "Coming." Larkin is the kind of poet who bares his soul not directly, but indirectly, in ostensibly offhand remarks and sidelong glances. Rather than straightforwardly asserting, "Childhood, to me, is a forgotten boredom," he starts a sentence in this way: "I, whose childhood is a forgotten boredom,..." The effect is all the more piercing: we, the readers, are so blindsided that we swallow Larkin's bombshell of a confession whole. We think, "How refreshing it is to hear a post-Wordsworth poet say that childhood to him is a forgotten boredom!" And this is why the ending of the poem works as well as it does: it startles us to discover that this poet, who found his childhood to be boring and forgettable, is nevertheless able to describe childhood's emotions with such heartfelt and unadorned precision. (In fact, the poem's ending startles us in exactly the same way that springtime startles the poem's speaker; the poem enacts what it is describing.) 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'. If Rudyard Kipling’s ( 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) is the poetry of empire, then Philip Larkin’s is the poetry of the aftermath of empire. Having lived through the divestiture of England’s various colonial holdings, the economic impact of empire building having finally come home, together with the ultimate travesty of imperial pretensions and the nightmare of Nazi and Soviet colonization in Europe, Larkin was wary of the expansiveness, the acquisitiveness, and the grandeur implicit in the imperial mentality. Many features of his poetry can be traced to that wariness: from the skepticism and irony, to the colloquial diction, to the formal precision of his poems.

Lines 52-54: “For, though I've no idea / What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, / It pleases me to stand in silence here;” 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. In 1943 Vernon Watkins came to speak at the Oxford English Club. Larkin was present, and the occasion made a tremendous and lasting impression on him. He never cared much for Watkins's own poems, but he liked the man tremendously, and responded to his enthusiasm for Dylan Thomas and, above all, for W. B. Yeats. ‘Impassioned and imperative, he swamped us with Yeats … I had been tremendously impressed by the evening … As a result, 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’ ( RW 29). Much of The North Ship almost sounds like a pastiche of Yeats: the poems have little to offer save a clearly derivative music. Not only are they thinner and less interesting than Larkin's mature work; they are arguably less interesting than some of his earlier poems, written when he was still an undergraduate, where the dominant influence is Auden (Auden surfaces again as an influence in the middle stanzas of ‘The Building’, thirty years later). Some of these early sonnets (‘Conscript’, ‘A Writer’, ‘Observation’) could be taken for Auden, whereas such North Ship poems as ‘The moon is full tonight ’ or ‘To write one song, I said’ sound less like Yeats than like imitations of him: even the fact that they have no titles, when we realize how carefully chosen, and how important, the titles of Larkin's mature poems are, may be significant, suggesting that Larkin was quite right when he saw them as based on Yeat 's music rather than his ideas. Born Yesterday is a Larkin-esque reworking of Yeats’ ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’; Myxomatosis an astonishingly vivid impression of a dying rabbit; the title poem ( Deceptions) is about a rape victim who is ’less deceived’ than her rapist.The following is the list of 244 poems attributed to Philip Larkin. Untitled poems are identified by their first lines and marked with an ellipsis. Completion dates are in the YYYY-MM-DD format, and are tagged " (best known date)" if the date is not definitive. 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. Miscellaneous: All What Jazz: A Record Diary, 1961-1968, 1970; Required Writings: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955-1982, 1984. Arguably Larkin’s most seminal poetic work, The Less Deceived was a collection of 29 poems released in 1955 which marked a sea change in his evolution towards becoming the literary colossus he is regarded today. Belonging to a (then) new generation of Angry Young Man writers, Larkin established his own unique voice—cynical yet lyrical, pessimistic yet profound—with an almost effortlessly ingenious ability to reflect the times he was living in. The narrator then uses the incident as a starting point from which to launch into a melancholy philosophic meditation on the nature of art, love, death, eternity, etc.

There is a subtle humour to Larkin’s poetry which is refreshing—there’s a twisted barb for agnostics to be found in the poem Church Going (“superstition, like belief, must die”) and on Coming he even turns William Wordsworth’s notions of the importance of childhood on its head (“I, whose childhood / Is a forgotten boredom”). The influence of John Keats, W.B. Yeats and Thomas Hardy can be seen in the structure of these poems, but also found in that perfect blend of realism and classicist leanings; a stark, observational and literal-minded quality which seemed absent from much of the modernist poetry of its age.

Book contents

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. 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. The Deceived is solidly done and manages to touch gracefully on concerns about (especially emotionally) abusive relationships, power dynamics, coercion and how we navigate ever-changing mores. Ophelia and Michael’s scenes together are particularly well pitched – if she were just a little older and wiser, if he were just a little more obvious or overbearing, or just a little less confident and clever, you could see how they might all escape unscathed. But … 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.