'For a Dream's Sake'

Interviewer: “Do you feel you could have had a much happier life?” 

Philip Larkin: “Not without being someone else. I think it is very much easier to imagine happiness than to experience it. Which is a pity because what you imagine makes you dissatisfied with what you experience, and may even lead you to neglect it. ‘Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed / For a dream’s sake,’ to quote Christina Rossetti.”

 

Larkin playing “Larkin,” that carefully crafted persona of a philistine depressive who thought “books are a load of crap” and asked “Who is Jorge Luis Borges?” Though the mention of Rossetti sounds sincere. The poem he quotes is “Mirage” (Goblin Market and Other Poems, 1862):

 

“The hope I dreamed of was a dream,

Was but a dream; and now I wake,

Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old,

For a dream’s sake.

 

“I hang my harp upon a tree,

A weeping willow in a lake;

I hang my silent harp there, wrung and snapped

For a dream’s sake.

 

“Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;

My silent heart, lie still and break:

Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed

For a dream’s sake.”

 

Self-pity is redeemed, in part, by plainness of diction. Rossetti’s troubles are well-known – her father’s mental illness, a broken engagement, rejected suitors, unrequited love, Graves’ disease, cancer. Hers was not an enviable life. Born into an artistic family, she was overshadowed by her brother, the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1962, in his review of a Rosetti biography, Larkin quotes without comment the fourteenth sonnet in “Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets”:

 

“Youth gone, and beauty gone if ever there

Dwelt beauty in so poor a face as this;

Youth gone and beauty, what remains of bliss?

I will not bind fresh roses in my hair,

To shame a cheek at best but little fair, –

Leave youth his roses, who can bear a thorn, –

I will not seek for blossoms anywhere,

Except such common flowers as blow with corn.

Youth gone and beauty gone, what doth remain?

The longing of a heart pent up forlorn,

A silent heart which sang its songs

While youth and beauty made a summer morn,

Silence of love that cannot sing again.”

 

Larkin once characterized Rossetti and the other poets (Hardy, Owen, Auden, Barnes) he most enjoyed reading as “on the whole, people to whom technique seems to matter less than content.” Easy to say, of course, when, like Larkin, you are a master of poetic technique. Much of Rosetti’s “content” was her life of sadness. She was born on this date, December 5, in 1830 and died in 1894 at age sixty-three.