'A Mystery of Language I Shall Never Solve'

Quite a marvelous season after a protracted Northern winter, spring is the hoariest of subjects for a poem. How many ways are there to be jubilant or render the sensation of “cavorting with the milkmaids,” as an old friend once put it? The effort usually comes off as hackneyed or embarrassingly neo-pagan, like the carrying-on of a dim, histrionic teenager. As close as Philip Larkin ever approaches this state is in his spring poem “Coming” (The Less Deceived, 1955):

 

“On longer evenings,

Light, chill and yellow,

Bathes the serene

Foreheads of houses.

A thrush sings,

Laurel-surrounded

In the deep bare garden,

Its fresh-peeled voice

Astonishing the brickwork.

It will be spring soon,

It will be spring soon --

And I, whose childhood

Is a forgotten boredom,

Feel like a child

Who comes on a scene

Of adult reconciling,

And can understand nothing

But the unusual laughter,

And starts to be happy.”

 

James Booth in his biography of Larkin calls it “one of his most serenely beautiful poems.” It’s a poem for adults who understand that the world is a complicated place, where happiness is fragile and precious. Typically for Larkin, the phrasing and word choice is unexpected and precise (a rare combination): “Its fresh-peeled voice / Astonishing the brickwork.” So too, “forgotten boredom,” seemingly an oxymoron. Thanks to Larkin we can learn to value flickering spots of happiness. Someone said there are no happy lifetimes, only happy moments.

 

I opened The Complete Poems (ed. Archie Burnett, 2012) again after reading Peter Hitchens’ review of it in the June 11, 2012, issue of National Review. The title is a good one, “Stark Beauties.”  I think it’s always a good idea for a reviewer, at least in passing, to address the new or first-time reader, and not make too many assumptions about what he knows. This is especially true in the case of Larkin, who since his death in 1985 has been libeled by self-righteous moralists. His Complete Poems is among the rare essential books published in recent decades, one to shelve alongside Hardy, Robinson, Yeats and Auden. Hitchens writes:

 

“What might the new reader, unprejudiced by reputation, see in this odd, ugly man’s poetry? There is first of all a great deal of gentle kindness, not very well hidden behind a grumpy and unsympathetic public persona.”

 

Hitchens devote additional attention to Larkin’s other spring poem, “The Trees” (High Windows, 1974): “I have never been able to read the lines ‘The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said’ without hot tears forming behind my eyes. I have no real idea why this happens (it just happened again) but I know that it does and that these two immensely simple lines contain a mystery of language which I shall never solve in this life.”

 

Larkin is a poet of deep feeling but never in a manner that is self-serving, like that teenager mentioned earlier. He reminds me of something Yvor Winters wrote about Gerard Manley Hopkins in The Function of Criticism (1967):

“[T]he poem is a rational statement about a human experience, made in such a way that the emotion which ought to be motivated by that rational understanding of the experience is communicated simultaneously with the rational understanding: the poem is thus a complete judgment of the experience, a judgment both rational and emotional.”