There is also in these early poems a vagueness in the description of the phenomenal world. Perhaps that generality, that vagueness, could be explained as the result of the Yeatsian influence, but it is also a tendency of Larkin’s later work. One often has the impression that a scene, particularly a human scene, is typical rather than specific. 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. Lines 42-44: “Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique, / Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff / Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?”

In this course, Professor Seamus Perry (University of Oxford) explores Philip Larkin's 1955 collection of poetry, The Less Deceived. After an introduction to the collection as a whole (including a discussion of the origins of the title 'The Less Deceived' itself), each module discusses two or three poems in the collection that are linked by a common theme. In the second module, for example, we think about the influence of Thomas Hardy on the collection, looking in particular at the poems 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album' and 'Next, Please'. Other themes discussed include: time, youth and memory (looking at the poems 'Skin', 'Triple Time' and 'Maiden Name'), negativity and nothingness ('I Remember, I Remember', 'Absences'), the ordinary and the commonplace ('Born Yesterday', 'Toads', 'Poetry of Departures'), escape, solitude, and oblivion ('Age', 'Wants', 'Coming'), the artist and aestheticism ('Reasons for Attendance'), religion and the church ('Church Going'), and animals ('Myxomatosis', 'Wires', 'At Grass'). In the tenth and final module, we think about the arrangement of the collection as a whole, which (as we shall see) was carefully considered by Larkin. 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—” Lines 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?” 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.

Comments from the archive

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.)

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.”)Edited texts: New Poems, 1958 (with Louis MacNeice and Bonamy Dobrée); The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, 1973.

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 Windows 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. In stanzas 3 through 7, Larkin reflects on the fate of churches when people stop going altogether—whether they will become places that people will avoid or seek out because of superstition, or become museums, or be turned to some profane use—and wonders, as well, who will be the last person to come to the church and what his reasons will be. Larkin has a sense, conveyed in a number of poems, that he and his generation of skeptics will be the end of religion in England, and in this poem he wonders about the results of that doubting. The final stanza contains yet another shift, this one rather more subtle.As if the “serious house on serious earth” were forcing the poet to be more serious, he shifts away from his musings about its fate, which are after all only another kind of dismissal, and recognizes instead the importance of the place. He suggests, finally, that the shallowness and disbelief of modern people cannot eradicate the impulse to think seriously and seek wisdom that the Church, however outmoded its rituals, represents. The Whitsun Weddings 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. 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.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.