About Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin, poet, and librarian, was born in Coventry in 1922. He was powerfully
influenced by his father, Sydney Larkin, a man of strong views on many things: literature,
politics, religion, women, and efficiency. Sydney Larkin admired much about Germany's
recovery under the Nazi regime and took his son on two visits to Germany in 1936 and 1937.
Philip despised these experiences, mostly because of language barriers. But in literature, he
was always true to his father's shaping spirit. Larkin's childhood was impeded by a disability
that lasted until his early thirties: he was a stammerer. But to some extent he compensated for
this by becoming a fluent writer. 1He led an uneventful life. He never married, never went
abroad, and he didn't like appearing in public: almost alone among post-war British poets, he
gave no readings of his work, and when he had to talk in public, it filled him with preparatory
nervousness. His studiously ordinary and ordered life was shot through with a persistent
melancholy. He had the reputation of a surly recluse (bad-tempered, unfriendly, person who
lives a solitary life), and did much to cultivate this, occasionally confessing that it was as
much of a pose as making public appearances – only much pleasanter. Yet he had many
friends, and most people who knew him found him thoughtful, gracious, and, on occasion,
very funny. This depressive, worried, self-mocking personality is of interest to us because it
belonged to the finest English poet of his time. (Laurence, 2005)2

The poetry of Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin has come to be considered by many people as the best British poet writing
today. As Martin Scofield (1976) wrote in his work „The Poetry of Philip Larkin“, he is
surely one of the most widely read, not just by professional literary people and English
literature students, but also by that necessary figure who people are often told no longer
exists, the general reader.3 Larkin has published four books of poetry, The North Ship, The
Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows, as well as two novels and a book
of jazz criticism. ([Link]) . He affected people's lives by writing about the everyday world
they knew in a language that they understood, while somehow managing to transform the
mundane (dull, lacking interest) into something magnificent. Larkin wrote about ordinary
reality, because he did not only lived it, he loved it: "I love the commonplace, I lead a very
commonplace life. Everyday things are lovely to me.", he said to his friend in 1981. This
appreciation of the commonplace turned out to be Larkin's greatest gift and achievement. For
the first time in the twentieth century, he brought the reader and the poet close together. He
placed his poems in the recognizably authentic time and place - twentieth-century England.
4
The poems are full of emotion and feeling yet Larkin made himself almost unlovable.

1
[Link]
31333
2
Lerner, L. (2005). The Life. In Philip Larkin (pp. 1-5). Liverpool University Press. Retrieved December 22, 2020,
from [Link]
3
Scofield, M. (1976). The Poetry of Philip Larkin. The Massachusetts Review, 17(2), 370-389. Retrieved
December 22, 2020, from [Link]
What people thought of Larkin
Philip Larkin was described as a grumpy bachelor and professional pessimist and his verse is
often preoccupied with sorrow and death - subjects that not only inspired him but colored his
entire life. He was insistent that there is no God, no future, life nor hope for the planet. (Philip
Larkin: Love and Death in Hull) 5. In March 1993, in the documentary Without Walls:
J'accuse Philip Larkin, Terry Eagleton took on the late Philip Larkin and found him to be a
"death-obsessed, emotionally-retarded misanthropist who had the impudence to generalize his
own fears and failings to the way things are". Eagleton challenged Larkin's reputation as a
poet, stating that he was sexist, racist, put an end to the modernist experiment, and set poetry
back decades. 6

Now, I'm going to analyze three of his poems. The first one is:

Talking In Bed
Talking In Bed was written in 1960 and published in The Whitsun Weddings in 1964. It is
one of Larkin's most recognizable pieces, following the particular style he is known for.

It is not uncommon for Larkin to see the negative aspects of love and he wasn’t particularly
interested in having any long-term relationships, let alone marriage. One of his non-committal
lovers once said of him that: „When Philip was younger… [he had] the even stronger desire
of wanting to be alone.“ Larkin’s view of marriage may partly have been influenced by his
mother’s warnings of its disadvantages. In one of the letters Larkin and his mother exchanged,
she says: “Marriage would be no certain guarantee as to socks being always mended, or meals
ready when they are wanted. Neither would it be wise to marry just for those comforts. There
are other things just as important.”7

The poem's subject matter is straightforward, but his exploration of it takes the reader deeper
than one might normally go. He explores the relationship between two people and the larger
world as they lay in bed together.8 It examines the seemingly ordinary experiences of a
couple's silence, and wanting to relive the past through the lens of isolation. He uses
simplistic language to reveal themes of isolation, specifically in the evolution of romantic
relationships. Larkin begins with the speaker lying in bed, with his partner, reflecting on the
expectations of their relationship. He ponders how their physical closeness should yield to an
emotional connection, or “talking”, which it doesn't. “Talking in bed ought to be easiest, / Lying
together there goes back so far, / An emblem of two people being honest.” (1-3). In his opening
4
Banerjee, A. (2008). Larkin Reconsidered. The Sewanee Review, 116(3), 428-441. Retrieved December 25,
2020, from [Link]
5
[Link]
6
[Link]
7
[Link]
mothers-
8
[Link]
stanza, Larkin establishes a feeling of isolation from the speaker and the person with whom he
is sharing a bed. By establishing this separation between the two, Larkin calls into question their
level of intimacy and the type of relationship, this couple is engaged in. The couple’s physical
sharing of the bed indicates physical intimacy while their inability to communicate orally
suggests a lack of emotions and understanding. 9The seven women with whom Larkin shared an
intimacy inspired very different poems. The number of poems is small, but once they are
separated, each group can be seen to distill a particular relationship, with its own verbal texture
and its own development through time: sometimes brief, sometimes decades-long. It is said that
this poem was dedicated to Monica Jones -- Larkin’s muse and mistress. When her parents died,
Larkin’s difficulties in coping with her grief must have deepened the mood of ‘Talking in Bed’,
the date of which, August 1960, suggests that it is an anniversary poem, marking ten years since
the couple first slept together. By this time Monica Jones had been the only person with whom
Larkin had talked in bed since the end of his brief affair with Patsy Strang. For two decades,
between the ages of 31 and 52 Larkin was, in sexual if not emotional terms, a monogamist. The
poem’s text, however, rises free of any specific occasion or relationship, reviving Larkin’s early
style. The protagonists are indicated only by the impersonal ‘two people’ in line three, reducing
starkly in line eight to ‘us’. The poem’s subject is the plight of marriage; the shared physical
proximity of domestic routine, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, with all its
dissimulations (trying to hide your real feelings, character, or intentions), boredom, and
tolerances. It is both a personal and detached poem. Larkin uses images of nature, and its most
powerful elements together with descriptions of unrest to represent the pressures of living in the
modern world. The stillness of two people “talking in bed” is contrasted against the constant
movement of time and the “wind’s incomplete unrest.” It builds and releases and travels
through the “dark towns” of the world. The rhyme scheme of the poem is aba, cac, dcd in the
first three stanzas, while the last stanza contains words ending with the same diphthong
find/kind/unkind’ which is known as rime riche (reesh). This pattern emphasizes confused
dissatisfaction with the emotions it describes. (Booth, 2005) 10 The use of enjambment,
particularly in the transition between the third and fourth stanzas, helps to show the alienation
felt by both people in the relationship. By interrupting the flow after "distance from isolation,"
Larkin adds physical separation between words, in addition to a degree of confusion for the
reader, with the need to continue the poem across a stanza break. This helps the reader to
empathize with the situation, to develop compassion and sadness.11

Ambulances

9
[Link]
10
Booth, J. (2005). Philip Larkin: The Poet's Plight (pp. 82-83). New York: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN. Retrieved
December 22, 2020, from
[Link]
mes_Booth)_1051041_([Link]).pdf
11
[Link]
Since many of Larkin’s poems leaned towards death and the miserable, it is no surprise to
discover that death is a prevalent topic in “Ambulances”. Larkin was fascinated by the human
condition and death is part of it, and its randomness and inevitability are interesting to Larkin
for the analysis. “Ambulances” was written for the collection “The Whitsun Weddings”.

In his opening stanza, Larkin describes ambulances as something sacred, comparing them to
confessionals. Those are the vehicles, but for Larkin, they are something mysterious. Larkin's
similes are notable for their startling accuracy; they are not far-fetched yet always seem just and
inevitable even if they are more expressive than they first appear. Ambulances are put apart
from everything else, they ‘thread / loud noons of cities, giving back / none of the glances they
absorb’, and they are not in touch with people in the surrounding. Disaster in the poem happens
during those “loud noons of cities”, attended by “children on steps or road” and women
rushing “past smell of different dinners”. In the book “The Whitsun Weddings and The Less
Deceived by Philip Larkin” Swarbrick (1986) notices that the atmosphere and urban life in the
poem are characterized by “impersonality, tedium, drabness and occasionally fear”. 12
Onlookers find themselves randomly caught up in somebody else's loss and tragedy, spectators
of 'A wild white face' which interrupts their mundane routine. The focus in the second stanza is
on the stretcher, not on the actual corpse. It seems that Larkin ignores the issue of death, never
approaching it head-on. This immediate presence of death brings to the surface this “emptiness/
that lies just under all we do”. For a moment, people became aware of their mortality and the
infinite emptiness of death that will strike them one day. They whisper “Poor soul” and feel
pity for themselves, not for this dead person, as they are suddenly conscious of the inevitability
of their death. The fourth stanza is about extinction. As the ambulance drives off in “deadened
air, the constituent elements of someone’s life as “'the unique random blend/ Of families and
fashions' begin to come apart. Everything that composed an individual’s life unravels as death
comes to the person carried away in the ambulance. In the last stanza, the “white face” lies
“unreachable” and remote. Watching the ambulance, people are closer to the void of their death.
It 'dulls to distance all we are' in confronting us with the inescapable reality of death. As
Swarbrick describes it: “The living identity we feel ourselves to have and which is given
substance by our daily habits and behavior suddenly perishes in the face of death's continuous
presence. Ambulances confront us with 'what is left to come': our own death.” (p- 67) Larkin
uses familiar incident to clarify our common response. This ambulance simply attends the final
accident in the series of accidents that make up the 'unique random blend' we call life. In the
final two stanzas, Larkin merges abstract and concrete language (the abstraction of 'unique
random blend' is given a tangible concreteness by the metaphor of ‘cohered ... .loosen'), and he
did it masterly.

The poem has a simple a/b/c/b/c/a rhyme scheme which gives the poem solidity and the tone
represents stately gravity and urgent seriousness. Alliteration is also present in the poem, as in
they/thread, glossy/grey, different/dinners, wild/white, families/fashion, dull/distance. In the
third stanza, there is a repetition of the word “And” -- "And sense the solving emptiness/That
lies just under all we do, And for a second get it whole/So permanent and blank and true; used
12

[Link]
Weddings_by_Phil_2670517_([Link]).pdf
to deliver the idea of death as a bitter truth. 13 Also, I have to mention enjambment in the fourth
and fifth stanza; the idea of the fourth stanza runs over to the fifth.

The first thought that came to my mind while reading “Ambulances” was CoVid-19 and this
entire situation. The visible face of this virus, for many people, is the ambulances. Everything
else we see – empty streets, face masks, social distancing is on one level, but ambulances tell of
the virus itself. We are faced with the death, of people we know and do not know, and it affects
us mentally- we begin to question our life and future. This poem of Larkin doesn't tell about the
specific moment in time, it can be applied to any time and any person. Many of us often think
about death and the briefness of everything, but given the virus, in my opinion, that thought is
more common. The difference is that in Larkin’s poem, people on the street witness death as
they do their daily chores, watching the “white face” of a dead person as they carry him/her on
the stretchers. Maybe at that point, they start thinking about death and how they will end up like
that, but then they continue with their boring routine. Today, 56 years after the poem's
publishing, we find ourselves in difficult and challenging times. As I said, thinking about death
is probably more common nowadays, because people are trapped in homes and cannot fully
perform their mundane routine. We often hear about death in the media, and it affects us
psychologically. So, what else is left for us to do within four walls, but to re-examine life and
the future after every news item. In my opinion, the attitude towards death has not changed, but
I certainly think the feeling of the inevitability of death is of a stronger intensity today, mostly
due to isolation. When we put Larkin in this modern age, we realize that he would have more
material for his poems, given his occupation by death. Because of the topics this poem deals
with, it is relevant today and we can relate to it.

Sad Steps
Philip Larkin completed ‘Sad Steps’ in April 1968, and it was published in his final volume of
poetry, High Windows (1974). Larkin was in his mid-forties when he wrote ‘Sad Steps’, and the
poem analyses and explores the poet’s awareness of middle age, and the loss of his youth. The
poem is a conversation, a response to Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet which begins with the line
‘With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies’. The opening line of Larkin’s poem, in
turn, adds a different meaning to this title: for Sidney, the moon seemed to be taking ‘sad steps’
across the night sky, but for Larkin, his ‘sad steps’ are more everyday and down-to-earth, the
steps he takes back to bed. Larkin’s moon is not divine, it is modern and distant. It stands apart,
from contact with both human beings and other shapes in the night sky. The word “moon”
appearing at the end of the first line disabuses us of any poems about the beauty of the moon, or
the way it reflects the poet’s heartache. John Carey called this Larkin’s poetic strategy “the two
Larkins” -- the first who one tends to open the poem, is bluntly spoken, and demotic in his
language, even slightly adolescent; the second Larkin, who takes over the ‘voice’ of the poem
as it develops, is more thoughtful and philosophical.

13
[Link]
In the first stanza, something stops the speaker on his way to bed. He “parts thick curtains” and
is “startled by/ The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.” Half-awake, the speaker describes
curtains as “thick”, the moon as “clean”, and clouds as “rapid”. There is a contrast between
low, sometimes dirty places used by people, and clean places occupied by the moon and clouds.
The first rhyme, in this case, slant rhyme is “piss” and “cleanliness”. Another slant rhyme
comes in the fourth stanza “separate” and “art”, and in the last stanza “pain” and “again”.
Overall, the rhyme scheme of the poem is ababba cdcddc effee. The effect is both of division
and connection. The window in the speaker’s room separates him from the moon, the most
detached object. But through the glass, it still exerts a force on the speaker.

In the second stanza, the speaker talks about the moon’s influence on its surroundings; gardens
are shadowed in sharp streaks of light, the sky scraped as if by nails. Before the stanza ends, the
speaker interrupts it with commentary “There is something laughable about this”, observes and
then detaches himself from the scene. Then, Larkin follows up with more captivating language
about the moon, but we should not forget that the way “it dashes through clouds that
blow/loosely as cannon-smoke” is meant to be understood as “laughable”. This thought goes
further through the lines. Larkin gives us shifts in diction, metaphor and imagery, a large
number of adjectives and finally those interjections “Lozenge of love! Medallion of art! O
wolves of memory! Immensements!”. This syntax reveals the speaker’s emotional state –
although he wants to speak critically about the moon, he is distracted by its beauty, he observes
the clouds that look ominous (suggests bad things will happen soon). Jehanne Dubrow describes
this feeling in her article “Sharpened Light: On Larkin's "Sad Steps" and I quote: “The speaker
has succumbed (temporarily) to the old, lunar poetries. His only recourse can be satire, a send-
up of all the moonish poems that have come before. "Lozenge of love! Medallion of art! / O
wolves of memory! Immensements!" In these four exclamations, Larkin more or less
summarizes a whole history of the genre: the moon as love in its most concentrated form; the
moon as art-object, as howling wildness, and an embodiment of all vast objects, big ideas (ideas
so huge they seem to demand the invention of words like "immensements")” 14These lines are
humorous yet compelling; the speaker wants to mock the moon but finds himself seduced by its
beauty and size.

The poem is all about the movement. Larkin walked us from the toilet to his bedroom. He
described the moon as a metaphor and literary trope (the use of figurative language). Now, at
the end of the fourth stanza, he is back to his conversational voice. He says “No!”, rejecting the
moon as a lozenge of love, medallion of art and the wolves. Although the poem started in the
first person, now he changes it to the indefinite pronoun “one”, to maintain his detachment;
“No, One shivers slightly, looking up there.” In this last stanza, the poem reaches its climax. It
looks like the moon looks back at this man. At that moment, the grayness of the moon is a
reminder of his lost youth, but for others who are still young; those things are “undiminished”.15

14
Dubrow, J. (2014). Sharpened Light: On Larkin's "Sad Steps". New England Review (1990-), 35(1), 80-85.
Retrieved December 24, 2020, from [Link]
15
UKEssays. (November 2018). Sad Steps Pushed Into The Dark English Literature Essay. Retrieved from
[Link]
[Link]?vref=1
Sources

Lerner, L. (2005). The Life. In Philip Larkin (pp. 1-5). Liverpool University Press.
Retrieved December 22, 2020, from [Link]

Scofield, M. (1976). The Poetry of Philip Larkin. The Massachusetts Review, 17(2),

370-389. Retrieved December 22, 2020, from [Link]

 Thwaite, A. (2004). Larkin, Philip Arthur (1922–1985), poet, writer, and librarian.
Retrieved 25 December 2020, from
[Link]
9780198614128-e-31333 - Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Banerjee, A. (2008). Larkin Reconsidered. The Sewanee Review, 116(3), 428-441.

Retrieved December 25, 2020, from [Link]

Philip Larkin: Love and Death in Hull. (2013). Retrieved 25 December 2020, from
[Link]

Without Walls: J'accuse Philip Larkin. (2016). Retrieved 25 December 2020, from
[Link]

Alberge, D. (2018). Newly seen letters show Philip Larkin's close relationship with
mother. Retrieved 25 December 2020, from
[Link]
writers-and-their-mothers-

Baldwin, E. Analysis of Talking in Bed by Philip Larkin. Retrieved 25 December

2020, from [Link]

Isolation and Confronting the Cultural Norms in Philip Larkin´s Poems. (2020).
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Confronting-the-Cultural-Norms-in-310932

Booth, J. (2005). Philip Larkin: The Poet's Plight (pp. 82-83). New York:

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN. Retrieved December 22, 2020, from
[Link]
ets_Plight_by_James_Booth)_1051041_([Link]).pdf

Talking in Bed - Poem Analysis and Notes - Interpreture English Revision. Retrieved
25 December 2020, from [Link]

Swarbick, A. (1986). The Less Deceived and the Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin
(pp. 54-58). Retrieved 25 December 2020, from
[Link]
d_the_Whitsun_Weddings_by_Phil_2670517_([Link]).pdf
 Khan, M. (2016). Stylistics Analysis of the Poem "Ambulance" by Philip Larkin.
Retrieved 25 December 2020, from
[Link]
p_Larkin

Dubrow, J. (2014). Sharpened Light: On Larkin's "Sad Steps". New England Review
(1990-), 35(1), 80-85. Retrieved December 24, 2020, from
[Link]

UKEssays. (November 2018). Sad Steps Pushed Into The Dark English Literature
Essay. Retrieved from [Link]
[Link]?vref=1