`The Dead Go on Before Us'

“The Explosion,” dated “5 January 1970” by Philip Larkin and published in High Windows (1974), has always seemed like an anomalously public poem to be written by so private a poet. It contains no conventional “I.” The narrator is transparent. The poem concerns the dead, not we who await death. In 25 lines it tells a story that resolves with muted promise. There is no suggestion of the despairing resignation of “Aubade” or wistful unbelief of “Church Going.” Its clipped, condensed lines attain a modest grandeur rooted in respect for miners and their families, and all mortals. In the Wall Street Journal, in this weekend’s regular “Masterpiece: Anatomy of a Classic” feature, William Amelia reminds us that Larkin was moved to write the poem after watching a television documentary on the dangers of the mining industry. In other hands, especially in those years, such material might have been turned into apitprop, grist for the political mill. On its seemingly unlikely inspiration (for Larkin) from television, Amelia writes:

“It is an artful and telling connection because it validates Larkin's own thoughts on the process of poetry, how poetry happens. Briefly explained, it is a process in which a poet, so impressed with an experience or image, is compelled to construct a verbal device, a poem, that will reproduce his emotional concept, recurrently, in anyone who cares to read it anywhere, anytime.”

The “emotional concept” rendered in the poem is a mingling of respect, sadness, commemoration, a sense of communion in death. The poem’s only italicized lines might be spoken by an unnamed minister or other eulogist:

“The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God’s house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face –”

Here the common destiny of men is stated plainly, by the famously agnostic Larkin. Death, regardless of faith or its absence, is inevitable. The next lines, “Plain as lettering in the chapels/It was said…” recall Larkin’s frequent visits to churches and hallowed ground, especially the final stanza of “Church Going”:

“A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.”

The nest of lark’s eggs found by a miner early in “The Explosion” remains intact after disaster: “One showing the eggs unbroken.” Larkin’s language is elegantly plain, as the occasion deserves. My brother has been reading Larkin’s poems for the first time. At first exposure, we read him with a sense of kinship and relief. He writes what we have sometimes furtively felt. Then the language elicits awe and trust. Clive James said of Larkin: “He found ways of saying things and the ways led to poems.”
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