'And What Most Appals'

Tops were already passé by the time I was a kid. They seemed like something Tom Sawyer would have played with. I remember a mechanized version in which the stem was inserted into a spring-loaded triggering device, which seemed like cheating. A real top was an elegantly simple wooden spool with string wound around the vertical axis. You snapped the string, as though starting a lawn mower, and the top careened across the dirt. Most intriguing is the idea that an object might move and yet not move, like a satellite in geosynchronous orbit with the Earth. A top is a physics lesson in rotational inertia, precisely the quality that attracted Philip Larkin in “Tops”:

“Tops heel and yaw,

Sent newly spinning:

Squirm round the floor

At the beginning,

Then draw gravely up

Like candle-flames, till

They are soundless, asleep,

Moving, yet still.

So they run on,

Until, with a falter,

A flicker -- soon gone --

Their pace starts to alter:

Heeling again

As if hopelessly tired

They wobble, and then

The poise we admired

Reels, clatters and sprawls,

Pathetically over,

--And what most appals

Is that tiny first shiver,
That stumble, whereby

We know beyond doubt

They have almost run out

And are starting to die.”

Today, Kay Ryan might write such a poem. Larkin wrote it on Oct. 22 and 24 in 1953, published it in a magazine in 1957, and never reprinted it. In a 1956 letter to Monica Jones he referred to it as “an old no-good one you haven’t seen called ‘Tops.’” Archie Burnett in The Complete Poems tells us Larkin originally titled the poem “You’re the tops,” presumably in reference to Cole Porter’s clever 1934 song “You’re the Top.” The poem is a modest masterpiece. On the literal level, Larkin has closely studied the behavior of a top in action, which is the only way the metaphor could work. Readers of a certain age and temperament will experience a quaver of recognition: “--And what most appals / Is that tiny first shiver.”

[Go here to view the video of "Tops," produced by Charles and Ray Eames in 1969, mentioned by a reader in one of the comments below. The music is by Elmer  Bernstein.]