'An Old Man in the Dark'

Philip Larkin shares with us the mundane complaints of the middle class, the lusts and anxieties of people unburdened with wealth and pull. He grows deaf, loses hair, juggles girlfriends, gains weight and drinks too much. As a librarian he works hard. He will never be hip except by Eddie Condon standards. He fears death and idolizes Thomas Hardy and Louis Armstrong. The virtuous loathe Larkin. Posthumously, scolds banish him. A puffed-up mediocrity dismisses Larkin as “the sewer under the national monument,” and we go on reading his poems, novels and reviews of books and jazz. 

David Middleton’s “4 a.m.” is written “in memory of Philip Larkin” and answers the English poet’s last great poem and perhaps the last great poem written by anyone, “Aubade”:

 

“That was the time you’d claim

And make your own

When dreaming fails and leaves

Us each alone,

 

“No star-crossed lovers lost

In sex and sweat

Or Hector braced for dawn

With archers set

 

“Or Lear upon the heath

Raging but this:

An old man in the dark

Groping toward a piss.”

 

Larkin in “Aubade” is precise in describing his dread: “Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.” The same hour, 4 a.m., shows up in an earlier poem, “Sad Steps”:

“Groping back to bed after a piss

I part thick curtains, and am startled by  

The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

 

“Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie  

Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.”

 

We read Larkin for his technical virtuosity, of course, and for a quality his critics will never recognize: his compassion for humdrum human suffering. Sadness, yes, but Larkin’s poems are never depressing. He ends “Sad Steps,” after the seemingly romantic indulgence of contemplating the moon, with these lines:

 

“One shivers slightly, looking up there.

The hardness and the brightness and the plain  

Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

 

“Is a reminder of the strength and pain  

Of being young; that it can’t come again,  

But is for others undiminished somewhere.”

 

In his review of James Booth’s Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (2014), Joseph Epstein, after acknowledging that we inhabit “a distinctly unbardic age,” tallies up the good poets recently at work, all now dead: Elizabeth Bishop, L.E. Sissman, Donald Justice, Richard Wilbur,  Howard Nemerov, Anthony Hecht and Larkin (I would add J.V. Cunningham, Edgar Bowers, Henri Coulette and perhaps a few others). Then he adds: “Of this group, only Philip Larkin passes the ultimate test of having written poetry that is memorable.”

 

Larkin was born on this date, August 9, in 1922 and died in 1985 at age sixty-three.