'Turn Out Your Pockets on the Tablecloth'

“We are born each morning, shelled upon

A sheet of light that paves

The palaces of sight, and brings again

The river shining through the field of graves.”

Auden, you say?  No, Larkin, though Auden haunts the poem. Larkin had mostly shrugged off Yeats but Auden’s influence persisted. “Many Famous Feet Have Trod” was completed on this date, Oct. 15, in 1946, and (wisely) not published during Larkin’s lifetime. Read out of context, the passage above from the second of the poem’s thirteen eight-line stanzas sounds almost ecstatic – psychedelic? visionary? -- by Larkin’s customary standards. In Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (2014), James Booth likens the poem to the rhetoric in Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

And that’s the problem with much of Larkin’s early work (he was twenty-four) and the work of many young poets, even great ones. They assemble rhetoric. They write not poems but poetic gestures. Individual lines and phrases may be memorable but the whole does not cohere. Larkin’s poem is uncharacteristically long, suggesting that he had difficulty keeping it in focus. The best of his mature work is tight, without flab or filler. Nothing can be added or removed without hobbling the whole. The fourth stanza begins memorably: “Turn out your pockets on the tablecloth; / Consider what we know.” The rest turns overly schematic, as though Larkin didn’t trust his own material. In his notes to the Complete Poems (2012), Archie Burnett quotes a letter Larkin wrote to his friend James Ballard Sutton one day after completing the poem:

“The attitude is that sorrow is personal & temporal, joy impersonal & eternal; but I have mainly wasted my time in arguing in verse that the whole of knowledge can be divided so . . . . What I feel is that death can ballock life. It does. But life can ballock death by means of sex (creating new life) or (less certainly) art. BUT it has no consolation (I imagine when the Reaper is knocking on your door).”

Stated so baldly, Larkin makes his poem and commentary sound adolescent. In “Many Famous Feet Have Trod,” he hasn’t yet learned how to suggest rather than intone emphatically. Within a few years he would give us “Church Going,” “I Remember, I Remember” and “Mr Bleaney.”