The title sounds like a joke told by the never-married Philip Larkin: “To My Wife.” A grim joke, perhaps based on his parents’ marriage. The husband self-pityingly regrets what he has given up. He sounds like a young man who resents no longer being able to play the field, but otherwise the poem feels like the work of a man at least middle-aged and no longer a newlywed:
“Choice of
you shuts up that peacock-fan
The future
was, in which temptingly spread
All that
elaborative nature can.
Matchless
potential! but unlimited
Only so long
as I elected nothing;
Simply to
choose stopped all ways up but one,
And sent the
tease-birds from the bushes flapping.
No future
now. I and you now, alone.
“So for your
face I have exchanged all faces,
For your few
properties bargained the brisk
Baggage, the
mask-and-magic-man's regalia.
Now you
become my boredom and my failure,
Another way
of suffering, a risk,
A
heavier-than-air hypostasis.”
Obviously
there are good biological reasons for marrying young. (Larkin never had children.)
But how many of us are sufficiently mature when young to marry? What do we know
at that age about life, about devotion and sacrifice? I’ve known prodigies of maturity,
people young only in the trivial chronological sense, but they’re rare and memorable. The rest of us too often choose and rue our choice. “The mask-and-magic-man’s regalia” sounds mockingly like
Yeats and a life dedicated to poetry. And what does our unhappy husband get
instead: “my boredom and my failure.”
Larkin
completed “To My Wife” on this date, March 19, in 1951. He chose not to include
the sonnet in XX Poems (privately
printed in 1951), and it was published only posthumously, in 1988. Larkin hadn’t
yet matured as a poet. He was twenty-eight. Soon he would be writing “Church Going,” “I Remember, I Remember,” and “Mr. Bleaney.”
3 comments:
I suppose it sounds juvenile to say it, but doesn't any choice extinguish the pantheon of other choices? Freedom of choice only has value when you act and so negate other choices. Granted, choosing badly has consequences, but a man who seeks to keep all his options open is no different from the man with no options. I chose, therefore I am.
And I do so love Philip Larkin.
Yes, it must indeed reflect something of what PL thought abt his parents and their marriage, but I wonder how much "To My Wife" equally (or more?) reflected what PL really thought abt Kingsley Amis's marriage? He and KA were intimate friends and correspondents throughout this period, with KA perhaps revealing more of himself in his letters than PL ever did--in both his letters and poetry.
Chris C
Post a Comment