'Life Is Slow Dying'

One of Philip Larkin’s most technically adept poems, “Here,” is never self-consciously flashy, though the first of its three sentences is twenty-five lines long. Its earliest readers perhaps flipped past it in The Whitsun Weddings (1964) -- it’s the first poem in the collection – and moved on to “Mr. Bleaney,” or “A Study of Reading Habits,” or “Dockery and Son,” or the title poem. They may have mistaken “Here” for a desultory travelogue (of Hull). It is one of the great city poems, observed by a spectator aboard a train, not a dweller in the city. The Whitsun Weddings was that rich a volume. 

Larkin had completed “Here” on October 8, 1961. According to his biographer James Booth, Larkin reached his poetic “prime” that month. In Booth’s words, “After ‘Here’ the way is downward.” On October 25 he completed his next poem, “Nothing to Be Said”:

“For nations vague as weed,

For nomads among stones,

Small-statured cross-faced tribes

And cobble-close families

In mill-towns on dark mornings

Life is slow dying.

 

“So are their separate ways

Of building, benediction,

Measuring love and money

Ways of slowly dying.

The day spent hunting pig

Or holding a garden-party,

 

“Hours giving evidence

Or birth, advance

On death equally slowly.

And saying so to some

Means nothing; others it leaves

Nothing to be said.”

 

Booth calls it Larkin’s “coldest, most reductive work.” That’s tough to argue with: “Life is slow dying.” Larkin, I suspect, is not describing a strictly biological process; rather, a gradual spiritual ennervation. Booth in his biography says the poem “owes something” to Thomas Hardy’s “The Dead Man Walking.” Present in both is death not as a single incident but an incremental process. I’ll point out the obvious: Grim poems written with flair and terse wit don’t leave us demoralized, unlike so many self-indulgent rah-rahs.