'The Apparently Prosaic Work Is Intensely Poetic'

One of Larkin’s most memorable lines: “‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’” Among young people there is often a corollary: “But something is always happening somewhere else” – that is, anywhere other than where they already are. For me that was Ireland. Eighteen, almost broke, no marketable skills, I dreamed of living in Dublin and made some tentative plans. Another literature-hatched fantasy, fueled by my infatuation with Yeats, Joyce and Co. A few years earlier, the scheme had been to float a raft down the Ohio River to the Mississippi and out-Huck Huck by riding the Big Muddy to the Gulf of Mexico. The closest I got was swooning over U.S. Geological Survey maps. 

Larkin completed “I Remember, I Remember” on this date, January 8, in 1954. The idea came when the train he was riding stopped unexpectedly at Coventry, his birthplace, where he had lived until age eighteen: “‘Was that,’ my friend smiled, where you ‘have your roots’? / No, only where my childhood was unspent, / I wanted to retort, just where I started.” Larkin being Larkin, he resists the cliched urge to romanticize his “roots.” People are forever carrying on about the place that “made me who I am.” Usually rubbish, of course. In the well-remembered family garden, he says, “I did not invent / Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits.” Cynicism or maturity?

 

In his biography of Larkin, James Booth notes that the speaker’s “passionate denials become comic.” About the poem’s final, well-known line, quoted at the top, Booth writes: “At first the words seem merely a glum verdict on the poet’s childhood. But they transcend their context, and haunt the reader like a Wittgensteinian puzzle. The impact of the apparently prosaic work is intensely poetic.” Larkin condemns not Coventry but its sentimentalization.