'All Is Not Dead'

Sadness nicely coexists with happiness this time of year. Christmas is over. Memories abound. We underestimate ourselves when it comes to emotional capacity. Only the insane know one emotion at a time, which is why bliss and clinical depression are rare states and why Joseph Campbell’s advice to “follow your bliss” is among the more vapid legacies of the nineteen-eighties. Philip Larkin is the poet of middle-states. Often he’s libeled as “gloomy,” a judgment that ignores the wit, craft and subtlety of his poems. Take “January,” written in 1962 and unpublished until after his death: 

“A slight relax of air where cold was

And water trickles; dark ruinous light,

Scratched like an old film, above wet slate withdraws.

Shrinkage of snow shows cleaner than the net

Stiffened like ectoplasm in front windows.

 

“Shielded, what sorts of life are stirring yet:

Legs, lagged like drains, slippers soft as fungus,

The gas and grate, the old cold sour grey bed.

Some ajar face, corpse-stubbled, bends around

To see the sky over aerials --

Sky, absent paleness across which the gulls

Wing to the Corporation rubbish ground.

A slight relax of air. All is not dead.”

 

That’s as close to cheerleading as you’ll get from Larkin. This is gorgeous: “dark ruinous light, / Scratched like an old film.” He describes a phenomenon I looked forward to every year in the North, though usually in February: a one-day thaw, a pat on the head that said “All is not dead.” March, we knew, can turn into a monster. In the woods you could smell the earth again and skunk cabbage burned through the snow. Not in Houston, where the seasonal spectrum is narrow. The sun is still low, little higher than at the solstice, but the temperature hit 76°F on Friday. I watched a monarch butterfly in the front garden, which is still green and blooming.