'New Eyes Each Year'

From 1955 until his death in 1985, Philip Larkin worked as a librarian at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, eventually becoming its director. Although Larkin complained about the time-consuming nature of the job, taking him away from poetry and other writing, some of the cavilling sounds less than dire and more like a parody of job discontent. By all accounts, Larkin was hard-working and conscientious as a librarian. When told a keepsake marking the library’s fiftieth anniversary would be published, Larkin volunteered to contribute a poem, which he wrote in one day, on March 8, 1979. It is the definition of an “occasional poem,” without a title: 

“New eyes each year

Find old books here,

And new books, too,

Old eyes renew;

So youth and age

Like ink and page

In this house join,

Minting new coin.”

 

Library patrons renew themselves, with a fresh crop of future readers born every day. Old eyes “renew” books in the mundane sense of extending the borrowing period of an already checked-out book, but also by reacquainting themselves with previously read volumes, thus experiencing the paradox that every reading is a new reading. Books don’t evolve but readers do.

 

I was stunned as a freshman in September 1970 when I entered a university library for the first time. Finding the books I wanted while in high school had always been a scramble among public libraries, bookstores and publishers’ catalogs. Suddenly I had entered wish-fulfilment paradise, a Borgesian dream. I could indulge nearly any bookish whim. John Dos Passos died on September 27 of that year, and in less than a day the librarians assembled an exhibit of books and bookish ephemera devoted to the author of U.S.A., much of it taken from the non-circulating rare books collection. Just that summer I had read the trilogy and Manhattan Transfer, and the exhibit in a glass case seemed like a devotional act, an appropriate way to honor a newly dead writer. The library -- six floors! -- felt like homecoming. I think of “Samuel Johnson,” a poem by Wiley Clements, and its closing line: "What vast supply in that Bodleian mind!”