'To the Side of Their Own Lives'

Philip Larkin claimed criticism of his poems was superfluous. Each was complete unto itself. Commentary added little or nothing. Each poem possessed its own bluff integrity. In interviews and letters, Larkin was a trickster. He reveled in baiting and provoking those who wished to unpack his poems or dismiss them. The literary industry and its pretensions amused him. Larkin started as a novelist and never lost the fiction writer’s instincts. His poems often tell or suggest stories. Take “Afternoons,” completed in September 1959 and collected in The Whitsun Weddings (1964). It begins:

“Summer is fading:

The leaves fall in ones and twos

From trees bordering

The new recreation ground.

In the hollows of afternoons

Young mothers assemble

At swing and sandpit

Setting free their children.”

The setting and mood are Larkinesque in their everydayness. There’s no hint of satire or condescension. Famously wifeless and childless, Larkin remains studiously neutral about families and middle-class conventions. The only metaphor is a good one, familiar to many of us: “the hollows of afternoons.” Here’s the rest of the poem:

“Behind them, at intervals,

Stand husbands in skilled trades,

An estateful of washing,

And the albums, lettered

Our Wedding, lying

Near the television:

Before them, the wind

Is ruining their courting-places

“That are still courting-places

(But the lovers are all in school),

And their children, so intent on

Finding more unripe acorns,

Expect to be taken home.

Their beauty has thickened.

Something is pushing them

To the side of their own lives.”

The puzzling line concerns the kids collecting “unripe acorns.” What are we to make of this? Is “unripe” a symbol? Unripe acorns are green and bitter with tannin, and likely to remain on the tree until ripe. Why would children collect them? Because their color is beautiful? Because they hold the promise of future life, the next generation (of oaks, of humans)? Larkin is always alert for generational differences. The beauty of the young mothers has “thickened.” Then comes the quintessential Larkin moment, the one we knew was coming but which doesn’t “solve” the poem: “Something is pushing them / To the side of their own lives.””

  

It’s a thought we’ve all entertained, a fleeting sense of self-pitying regret, of having missed something. In his notes to the poem in The Complete Poems (2012), Archie Burnett identifies no allusions. He points out that in an early draft, the last four lines in the final poem are absent, replaced with “The sun is going down. / They are clothed in patience.” Seldom does Larkin make final revisions that damage a poem. In a letter to Monica Jones, he once wrote: “I am always trying to ‘preserve’ things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.”