Poem of the Week

 Long one of my favorites, and I have been recently reminded of it.  Larkin was in some respects a despicable man, in many more a remarkable one.  That description is a sort of archetype for each individual human, perhaps.

Loneliness and living alone is something that continues to absorb me.  Curiously, I don't think that Larkin was lonely in the sense of not having close persons around him.  But this poem speaks to a personality that detests what it has become, that practically longs for what horrifies, and which sees just a shallow, conventional existence in larger society.

I've been awake at four AM, and I've seen the curtain edges grow light.  I know how night brings new moods.  I have heard that most people in ER's die at night, and it makes sense to me.  Have you ever awoken in the depth of night, and felt fear and loneliness that seemed almost laughable the next day, in the light of day?

I have a recurring dream of people breaking glass and running down the street outside my home, in the depth of the night.  It wasn't until recently that I realized that it was a dream -- I thought that it was real.  But I had ear plugs in, and my closed window was far from the street.  What is it in my unconscious mind that dredged up the (very real, to me) sound of anarchy, in the dark of night?

The fear of darkness, both literal and figurative, is engrained deeply in our psyches, or so it would seem.  Of course, this poem is about much more than night, but the opening is so evocative and so familiar to anyone who has awoken and stood up, just to stare outside and feel alone and afraid.  This is a poem of fear and loneliness.  It's this kind of feeling that drives people to matches that they don't really want, or as my dead father once said, "to be with someone, anyone, because the alternative is too unbearable."

I love the last lines of this poem.  "In locked-up offices, all the uncaring intricate rented world begins to rise... Work has to be done."

Aubade†

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

--Phillip Larkin, 1922-1985


† Aubade is french for "morning serenade." Traditionally, an aubade in english is a poem about lovers separating at dawn.