By Esme Bell
January does not rank highly amongst the months, in my opinion. We are always torn: between the seasonal inclination to hibernate, lying fallow and snug in bed, and the societal need to be New And Better, to exceed and evolve and produce, to make this year ‘Our Year’ – even though there’s currently hardly any daylight with which to see it.
There is just enough light, though, to read – and I would recommend reading the poetry of Philip Larkin above anything else right now.
For one thing, his poems are all pretty short, plain-speaking, and easy to find online. For another – despite the lack of any factual links between Larkin and January (who was born in August 1922, and died in December 1985) – his work still exhibits a kind of compelling January contrariness.
His poetic voice is curmudgeonly, death-obsessed and at times downright people-hating; yet, it is also woven through with a resounding truth and begrudging joy. Through his happy-sad, mundane-resplendent style, he embodies the dichotomy of this season: our mourning for years passed, conflicted with inevitable optimism at the prospect of new, unblemished months.
The oft-quoted poem “An Arundel Tomb” – from his 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings – is a perfect crystallisation of this. It describes the effigies of a man and wife on top of their shared tomb in Chichester Cathedral – specifically the ‘sharp tender shock’ of finding the two statues holding each other’s hands. It goes on to lovingly detail this carved relationship that prevailed through time and successive winters, as ‘snow fell, undated’. Their ‘stone fidelity’ proves that ‘What will survive of us is love’ – touching stuff!
It then strikes us as a deflating shock – a blow, almost – when a quick Wikipedia browse reveals that the two lovers holding hands was not an original feature, just a late Victorian addition. And so the fabled long-time love of the two stone figures was always just artistic dishonesty, carved bluster; there is no such thing as true romance, etc etc; back to January gloom.
Happily, we can reach a middle ground. All art, poetry included, can be seen as bluster, a form of pretense – as life presented in a selective way. It isn’t less powerful or true for not always being empirically “correct”; and sometimes, we have to ignore harsh specific facts in favour of this holistic truth.
Carved in stone or not, love DOES survive us: any park bench or newborn named after a grandmother can attest to this. And if I ever visit Chichester Cathedral, even knowing the story, I will probably still be moved by a vision of stony companionship – and also the fact that somebody cared enough to add to the statues many centuries after they were first carved.
And I suppose this is what I mean by equating Larkin with January. His poems are perverse, self-mocking – suggesting sincere visions of loveliness and then wryly quashing them – but suspended somewhere amongst them is the ultimate realisation that things can be both at the same time. January is new and shiny and also old and tired, full of last year’s dead leaves.
There are so many other glorious poems that continue this theme.
“Aubade”, for example, means a ‘song sung at dawn’, and is his most death-heavy poem. It charts the passage of a sleepless night worrying about mortality and is frank and unadorned: death stands ‘as plain as a wardrobe’. The poem holds doubly sad status as it was also Larkin’s last major published poem in his lifetime, appearing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1977; objectively then, it is depressing.
But even staring plainly at the ending of life, dawn can’t help but come, a new day unrelentingly begins and ‘postmen like doctors go from house to house’. It is more about life than death – which can’t deny sunrise or the unceasing passage of letters and parcels, of material stuff – and it finds comfort in the power of the utterly mundane to protect against the morbid.
Larkin can do genuinely ‘lovely’, as well. “Bridge for the Living”, first performed in August 1981 to commemorate the opening of the Humber Bridge near Hull, is one of his most sincere works. It is a personal favourite of mine – as a proud resident of East Yorkshire and also just a reader – it sees Larkin almost enter the guise of a public-service-poet-of-the-people-laureate. Almost: even in this whole-hearted celebration, there is no easy wooing, and a duality of moods is still evoked.
The whole poem is about the power of connection afforded by bridges, claiming ‘It is by bridges that we live’ – as the Humber Bridge literally joins the counties of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. But, this is only facilitated by the bridge’s contrasting loneliness, its singularity, and Larkin doesn’t let us forget it; she is a ‘lonely northern daughter/ Holding through centuries her separate place’. There is sorrow in the joy, an acknowledgement of lives that ‘fall short where they began’ – and, as in most of his work, like January itself, dark and light bleed helplessly together.
To a certain extent, Larkin the man can be seen as an extension of this January complex. He lived much of his life away from the public eye, revolutionising Hull University’s library, turning down an OBE, and refusing Margaret Thatcher’s offer to be Poet Laureate in 1984. He was also a serial adulterer, at one point maintaining a relationship with three different women simultaneously. Letters have been released since his death that reveal the depth of his prejudices against just about everybody.
This article does not seek to defend him or his views, but the fact remains that his poetry – despite the man – can’t help but be redeeming. It grapples so faithfully with the sad, happy, and embarrassing that it becomes tender, purely by dint of loving and careful observation. Or, as Alan Bennett has put it so well, even once you’ve read Larkin’s biography, his poetry still emerges ‘unscathed’.
And whilst they might not necessarily be the most comforting works, Larkin’s poems still deserve a place in our collective poetic consciousness. They are both armour against and a window into the small blows and smiles of the everyday, and the Januariness of life.
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
“Days”, by Philip Larkin
