THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS

Published on 28 Feb. 1964. L to CM, 17 Jan. 1962 (SL, 338): ‘I should really rather wait until I can offer a solider collection than would be the case now […] What I should like to do is write three or four stronger poems to give the whole thing some weight.’ L to BP, 8 Apr. 1963 (SL, 351): ‘Since writing last I have agreed to provide Fabers with another collection of poems.’ To Norman Iles, 12 June 1963 (SL, 354): ‘I have also just sent off a new collection of poems, very thin stuff. I believe they will not be published until the Spring. At present it is called THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS.’ To MJ, 13 June 1963 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7426/97): ‘I sent off my collection to Faber’s on Tuesday. Provisionally called The Whitsun Weddings (TWW) it comprised 33 poems. Some are very thin, in fact I might knock out 2 even now. It’s a poor harvest for 9 years, in fact I think it’s definitely worse than the L.D. It has nothing like If, My Darling or Maiden name, poems that give the impression of having plenty in hand. The poetic quality is diluted. Too many depend on mere sentiment. It’s all very depressing. But then, what isn’t? I wonder if you think the title will do. I feel I’m getting a bit old for The Way Things Go or – well, what? I want to put that poem in the shop window, as it were.’ To MJ, 4 Feb. 1964 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7427/80): ‘Today I marked The LD & The WW to see w^ch I thought best – The LD won – more 1^st & upper 2^nd poems than The W.W. All I feel is TWW itself is a better poem than anythin [sic] in the L.D.’

L asked AT to comment on a t.s. of TWW before it went to Faber & Faber. Thwaite proposed alterations. To AT, 5 Oct. 1963 (SL, 358): ‘I adopted only those I felt really sure of: the rest I can consider at my leisure, and if I find myself agreeing with you put them in at the proof stage.’

Here

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 6 (1/6/9) contains ten pages of drafts of the whole poem between ‘6. 9. 61’ and the completion date ‘8 / 10 / 61’. Bemoaning his lack of progress with it, L decribes it as ‘a pointless shapeless thing about Hull’ in a letter to MJ dated 11 Sept. 1961 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7423/102). To MJ, in a letter begun on 8 Oct. 1961 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7423/117): ‘Monday Last night […] I finished a dull poem called Here about ye Eastern Thridding’ (Hull is in the former East Riding of Yorkshire). To MJ, 27 Oct. 1961 (Bodl. MS. Eng. c. 7424/10): ‘I’ve sent my Hull poem to the NS, under the poor title of Withdrawing Room’. L must have changed the title at proof stage. Published in New Statesman, 62. 1602 (24 Nov. 1961), 788.

VARIANTS (from New Statesman, 1961)
15 suits] suites [This may be a misprint.]
19 terminate] terminal
29 And] Then,

L to RC, 9 Dec. 1961 (SL, 335): ‘Thanks for the kind words about Here. No one much seems to have noticed it, though it is to my mind in direct linear succession to The North Ship – I mean just pushing on into a bloodier and bloodier area.’ L in 1981, asked whether he intended the poem as a brief for retirement, the simpler life (FR, 59): ‘Oh no, not at all … well, it all depends what you mean by retirement. If you mean not living in London, I suppose it might be interpreted along those lines. I meant it just as a celebration of here, Hull. It’s a fascinating area, not quite like anywhere else. So busy, yet so lonely. The poem is frightful to read aloud: the first sentence goes on for twenty-four-and-a-half lines, which is three-quarters of the poem, and the rest is full of consonants.’ L described it as being ‘plain description’ in a letter to RC, 21 Sept. 1962 (SL, 346). His prose account of Hull in ‘A Place to Write’ (1982), Hartley (1988), 74, contains several echoes of the poem: ‘a city that is in the world, yet sufficiently on the edge of it to have a different resonance. Behind Hull is the plain of Holderness, lonelier and lonelier, and after that the birds and the lights of Spurn Head, and then the sea […] giving Hull the air of having its face half-turned towards distance and silence, and what lies beyond them.’ Note ‘edges’, ‘Loneliness’, ‘silence’, ‘distance’, ‘beyond’, ‘Facing’ (ll. 22, 25, 29, 30, 32). This account earlier formed the foreword to A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull, ed. Douglas Dunn (1982).

Title Booth (1992), 164, notes the poem’s trajectory through Hull and out into the Holderness peninsula towards the North Sea. 2 L to Professor Laurence Perrine, 11 Feb. 1980: ‘I was thinking of a journey I took many times, catching the Yorkshire Pullman from King’s Cross (London) at 5-20 p.m., changing at Doncaster, as you so rightly say at 8 p.m., and getting into a smaller train that arrived in Hull about 9 p.m. All these trains have been changed now, but on a summer evening it was a very pleasant journey. The “traffic all night north” one would catch sight of from the train on the M1 (motorway), mostly lorries that I imagined would carry on all night until they reached Edinburgh or Carlisle or somewhere like that’: Hull DPL (2) 2/21/24. Cooper (2004), 158, compares MacNeice, Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard, 43–4: ‘Traffic … | Always on the move’ (from Letters from Iceland). 4 halt: L refers Prof. Perrine to the Concise Oxford Dictionary: ‘railway stopping-place used for local services only and without regular station buildings’. 8 piled gold clouds: L to MJ, 28 Sept. 1961 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7423/111): ‘I wonder if you’ve been out again up the 1 in 10 hill and watched the piled clouds moving. That was lovely, wasn’t it?’ the shining gull-marked mud: A photograph of this taken by L is reproduced in AL, 20 (Autumn 2005), 16. 10 Cf. Wordsworth, ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’, 6: ‘Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples’. Noted by Raphaël Ingelbien in ‘“England and Nowhere”: Contestations of Englishness in Philip Larkin and Graham Swift’, English, 48 (Spring 1999), 37. There are other points of similarity: W’s ‘fields’ (7; cf. L’s 2, 23); W’s ‘sky’ (7; cf. L’s ‘skies’, 6); W’s ‘silent’ (5; cf. L’s ‘silence’, 25); W’s ‘the river’ (12; cf. L’s 7). 13 trolleys: trolley-buses, trackless vehicles powered from an overhead electric cable by means of a pole and trolley. They continued to operate in Hull until Oct. 1964: Regan (1992), 104. 19–20 The St Andrew’s Fish Dock in Hull was opened in 1883 and closed in 1975. L to MJ, 3 May 1955 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7410/120): ‘It’s in the depth of fishy Hull. When the wind is in the south, the smell of fish reaches as far as the university.’ To MJ, 11 Sept. 1961 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7423/104): ‘Very fishy wind tonight!’ 20 the slave museum: Wilberforce House in Hull. 25 Loneliness: reinforced by ‘solitude’, ‘Isolate’, ‘removed’, ‘out of reach’, ll. 5, 24, 32. L in Hull to Michael Hamburger, 10 Mar. 1966: ‘It was delightful to see you here, at the end of this line into loneliness’: Michael Hamburger, Philip Larkin: A Retrospect (2002), 27. L to MJ, 15 Oct. 1966 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7434/35–6): ‘To live beyond Hull! Where removed lives loneliness clarifies. Yes, it does attract me.’ L talking about Hull on The South Bank Show, 30 May 1982, London Weekend Television: ‘The lonely place is always to me the exciting place.’ 28 Luminously-peopled air: Cf. Gray, Ode on the Spring, 23: ‘the peopled air’. Noted in Osborne (2008), 54–5, with an acknowledgement of Ted Tarling.

Mr Bleaney

DATE AND TEXT
L stated in ‘New Comment’, broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 12 July 1961 (BBC T/29443), that he wrote the poem ‘in one evening out of pure exasperation’. Wkbk 4 (1/4/12) contains: after ‘10 October 1954’ (fourteen pages before), just over three pages of drafts of the whole poem, dated ‘13 / 5 / 55’ at the end; and a second draft of stanza 5 dated ‘19 / 5 / 55’ at the end. At the outset, the title was ‘Lodgers’ and ‘Mr Bleaney’ was ‘Mr Gridley’, but both were soon changed. Published in The Listener, 54. 1384 (8 Sept. 1955), 373, and in New World Writing: A New Adventure in Modern Writing, 10th Mentor Selection (Nov. 1956), 148.

L to MJ, 17 Apr. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7413/69): ‘You know, I’ve come to think M^r Bleaney an extraordinarily good poem: it says oceans, everything I feel on that topic. “Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook behind the door, no room for books or bags” – every word a bullseye. And I love the dark recommencement “But if he stood and watched the frigid wind –” coiling itself up for the final clawing spring in “one hired box” – O a splendid poem.’

The poem was prompted by L’s bleak lodgings at 11 Outlands Road in Cottingham, just outside Hull, which he took shortly after taking up his post as University Librarian: Motion (1993), 247; Brennan (2002), 25. In a letter to MJ dated 9 Oct. 1957 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7417/4) L refers to ‘that ghastly house in Outlands Road, the Mr Bleaney house’. In Nov. 1974 he confirmed that the poem was ‘about a real lodging-house, digs that weren’t very satisfactory’: Watt (1989), 174. L to RC, 5 Oct. 1956: ‘I am taking a new flat […] and look forward to banishing the shade of Mr Bleaney for good in a few weeks’: SL, 267. He refers to the time ‘when I was living the life of Bleaney’ (as distinct from ‘the life of Reilly’, i.e. in luxury) in a letter to MJ dated 23 Nov. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7415/6). L in 1981: ‘The first two-thirds of the poem, down to “But if”, are concerned with my uneasy feeling that I’m becoming Mr Bleaney, yes. The last third is reassuring myself that I’m not, because he was clearly quite content with his sauce instead of gravy, and digging the garden and so on, and yet there’s doubt lingering too, perhaps he hated it as much as I did’: FR, 589. Asked whether he wasn’t being presumptuous in judging Mr Bleaney by what he sensed himself, L in 1981 replied: ‘I don’t think so. Unless you think it’s presumptuous to judge anyone’: FR, 58–9. Asked further whether the poem had been given a false emphasis in his work, L commented: ‘Well, no, not a false one. Excessive, perhaps. I’ve never understood why it’s so popular: I thought the subject was peculiar to me, and yet everybody seems to understand it and like it. When you’re an only lodger, your relation with your landlady is very delicate: she’s constantly urging you to do what she wants – dig the garden, or sit with her in the evenings, instead of sloping off to your own room’: FR, 59.

Title As Nicholas Jenkins notes in Leader (2009), 48, the unusual name may be traced to Brebis Bleaney (1915–2007), who was Scholar (1934–7), D.Phil. student, member of the College’s first soccer eleven and of the Debating Society, and first Fellow and Tutor in Physics (1947–57) at L’s Oxford college, St John’s. He was in Oxford during the time L was there (1940–3). There is a minor character, a schoolboy, also called Bleaney in Jill, 73, as noted in Cooper (2004), 32, and John Goodby, ‘Mr Larkin’s Two Bleaneys’, N&Q, NS 51. 2 (June 2004), 182–3.

Nothing To Be Said

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 6 (1/6/11) contains three pages of drafts of the whole poem between ‘18 / 10 [1961]’ and ‘25. x. 61’. Published in London Magazine, NS 1. 11 (Feb. 1962), 5–6. L to MJ, 8 Feb. 1962 (SL, 340): ‘Dig the mugs in Lond. Mag. – they didn’t correct my mispunctuation.’ There was an extra comma after ‘mornings’ (l. 5).

L to MJ, 8 Feb. 1962 (SL, 340): ‘I quite like the poem – “it doesn’t rhyme, but it’s true”.’

11 Stan Smith notes the pig hunt in Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), which L had read by 16 Jan. 1956 (SL, 255–6): ‘Something for Nothing: Late Larkins and Early’, English, 49 (Autumn 2000), 263.

Love Songs in Age

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 3 (1/3/6) contains fourteen pages of drafts of the whole poem (but with many versions not represented in the final poem) between ‘2-2-53’ (five pages earlier) and ‘?3 Aug. 1953.’ (The Hull cataloguer fails to identify the poem correctly.) Wkbk 4 (1/4/33) contains: after ‘17 Oct [1956]’, nine and a half pages of drafts of the whole poem, dated ‘26. xii. 56’ at the end; a page of further drafts of stanzas 2 and 3 dated ‘1 Jan 57’ at the end; immediately followed by a further draft of stanza 3 before ‘14 / 5 / 57’ (seven pages later). Hull DPL 2/3/19, t.s. with holograph corrections = Hull t.s. 1. L writes ‘(unfinished)’ below the text. Hull DPL 2/3/5, t.s. with holograph corrections = Hull t.s. 2. In l. 23 L has inserted a caret and suggested ‘lamely?’ in the margin as the word to be added. L to RC, 21 Sept. 1962 (SL, 345): ‘If you are printing LOVE SONGS IN AGE, would you mind substituting “Love” for “It” in the last line?’ In TWW, however, the reading was ‘It’.

VARIANTS
Title [No title] Hull t.s. 1.
    1 She] She’d Hull t.s. 1
    7 they had] there they Hull t.s. 2
7–8 To happen on them like this Picking To pick them up one evening at the last | Drifted her senses round until they faced the past Hull t.s. 1
9–16
The Their tunes, of course: each frank submissive chord,
        Ushering plainly
        Word after sprawling hyphenated word
        To that arpeggio fingering at the close,
        Flew to the warehouse of her memory
        (Darker the basement grows)
        And brought back heavy rooms, a broken set
        Of lustre-jugs, french windows dribbling in the wet. Hull t.s. 1
12 unfailing] familiar Hull t.s. 2
13 spring-woken] Spring-laden Hull t.s. 2
14 That] A Hull t.s. 2
15 That] A Hull t.s. 2
17–24
                     But, after all, that cold much-mentioned fume
                     The songs called love,
                     Which innocence had forced her to assume
                     Was love, and would come later; would be wrung lit
           With From news of casualty or sudden move,
                     From a subdued tongue, would Settling her to sit
                       Persuading her to sit
Long From On country evenings, hearing the wind rise,
                      Sending to long-due letters immediate replies, Hull t.s. 1
19 sailing] regrouped reformed Hull t.s. 2
22 pile] put Hull t.s. 2
23 Was hard, to do without ^ admitting how        ^lamely? Hull t.s. 2
Additional lines
          Until, with footstep or undated note,

Hat thrown aside,

          Love, bursting in, stoops to the naked throat,
          Then all her grief flares up and vanishes,
          Then from the glare of joy she cannot hide,
          Watching her farthest wishes

In brilliant bitter semblance of a gown
Woven for her sole shoulders coming stiffly down.

[Commas after ‘wishes’ and ‘shoulders’ cancelled.] Hull t.s. 1

The poem was inspired by ‘the pile of sheet music on his mother’s piano’: Brennan (2002), 52. ‘The conclusion of the poem, like the opening, had been prompted by a Christmas visit to his mother’: Motion (1993), 279. Cf. L himself, however, in 1964 (FR, 81–2): ‘From time to time […] one writes something that seems to have no bearing on one’s character or environment at all. I can’t for the life of me think why I should have wanted to write about Victorian drawing-room ballads: probably I must have heard one on the wireless, and thought how terrible it must be for an old lady to hear one of these songs she had learned as a girl and reflect how different life had turned out to be. Here is “Love Songs in Age”.’

21 set unchangeably in order: John Whitehead, Hardy to Larkin: Seven English Poets (1995), 228, notes an echo of the thirteenth-century Franciscan, Jacopone da Todi, ‘Ordina questo amore, O tu che m’ami’, translated in E. M. Forster’s essay in I Believe (1939) as ‘O Thou who lovest me set this love in order’. Forster remarks that the prayer was not granted and that he himself believes it never will be. Cf. Auden, New Year Letter, 1. 52, 56, 60–1: ‘For art had set in order sense’, ‘To set in order – that’s the task’, ‘That order which must be the end | That all self-loving things attend’.

Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 6 (1/6/1) contains two pages of drafts of ll. 1–12 on pages headed ‘14. 11. 60’ and ‘15 / 11 / 60’ (with ‘27. 11. 60’ at the top of the next page), and a single page (1/6/5) with ‘22. 1. 61’ at the top bearing a complete draft with the title ‘From London Far’, dated ‘23 / 1 / 61’ at the end. L to MJ, 11 Feb.1961: ‘Here is Naturally. […] It “came to me,” I think, when washing up after listening to the Cenotaph service last November & thinking how much sooner I’d be there than going to India – in fact the two situations presented themselves so strongly in opposition that I was greatly stricken, and dyd Seek to Compose vpon Itt.’: Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7422/89. Published in Twentieth Century, 170. 1010 (July 1961), 54, and in Partisan Review, 31. 3 (Summer 1964), [381].

See ‘A Lecturer in drip-dry shirt arrayed’, an earlier treatment of the same subject. L to RC, 11 July 1961 (SL, 330): ‘I thought the poem worth printing if only for the title, but I hope it annoys all the continent-hopping craps.’ L in 1964: ‘rather a curious poem. It came from having been to London and having heard that A had gone to India and that B had just come back from India; then when I got back home, happening unexpectedly across the memorial service at the Cenotaph on the wireless, on what used to be called Armistice Day, and the two things seemed to get mixed up together. Almost immediately afterwards Twentieth Century wrote saying that they were having a Humour number and would I send them something funny, so I sent that. Actually, it’s as serious as anything I have written […] I’ve never written a poem that has been less understood; one editor refused it on the grounds, and I quote, that it was “rather hard on the Queen”; several people have asked what it was like in Bombay! There is nothing like writing poems for realizing how low the level of critical understanding is’: FR, 25. The editor who refused it was C. B. Cox, as is made clear in L’s letter of 11 Feb. 1961 to MJ. L in 1981: ‘It’s both funny and serious. The speaker’s a shit. That’s always serious’: FR, 58.

Title Osborne (2008), 79: ‘a standard formulation from the realm of arts fellowships and academic foundations’. L in 1967 (FR, 28): ‘You can earn your money talking about poetry in universities or hopping from one foundation to another or one conference to another […] I’m a librarian […] It depends on your temperament.’ 1 Comet: jet aircraft pioneered by Sir Geoffrey de Havilland. Its first commercial flight took off in May 1952. Several crashes gave it a reputation for disaster, and as Osborne (2008), 204, recalls, two with no survivors were at Karachi and Calcutta. Osborne: ‘Bombay next?’ 5 Berkeley: the University of California at Berkeley. L reading the poem gives the British pronunciation ‘Barclay’ (rhyming perfectly with ‘darkly’). 7–8 L in 1964 (FR, 25): ‘Certainly it was a dig at the middleman who gives a lot of talks to America and then brushes them up and does them on the Third and then brushes them up again and puts them out as a book with Chatto.’ Perceiving … darkly … mirror: ‘For now we see as through a glass, darkly; but then face to face’: 1 Cor. 13: 12. Noted in Petch (1981), 7, 63. Chatto: Chatto & Windus, publishers. the Third: BBC radio network largely devoted to high culture; introduced in 1946 and renamed ‘Radio 3’ in 1967. 12 the date: 11 Nov., designated Armistice Day since 1918, and involving the laying of wreaths at the Cenotaph in Whitehall in commemoration of British citizens who died in war. Noting that Tom Driberg had written a letter to the New Statesman ‘heartily agreeing with Larkin about his supposed attack on ceremonies for the war dead’, RC comments that the poem ‘is in fact a very hostile caricature of this smug anti-patriotism’: Thwaite (1982), 36. R. L. Brett in Hartley (1988), 110, notes that the description of Armistice Day ‘would have offended his [L’s] own deeply held patriotism’. L to MJ, 13 Nov. 1960 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7422/45): ‘Today I stumbled on the Cenotaph service at 10. 45 – I seem to do this every year, just as the Guards Massed Bands are playing Nimrod [from Elgar’s Enigma Variations, and see the note on Broadcast, 5, below], & it harrows me to my foundations. These things seem to grow in power as one gets older.’ In letters to MJ dated 5 Nov. 1970 and 14 Nov. 1971 (Bodl. MSS Eng. c. 7442/24, 7443/120), L tells her he has been watching the Remembrance Day service on television. To AT, 11 Nov. 1984 (SL, 723): ‘Watched the Cenotaph ceremony as usual, that day when Queen and minister etc. Very moving.’ 15–18 L, inconsistently, in 1964 (FR, 25): ‘Why he should be blamed for not sympathizing with the crowds on Armistice Day, I don’t quite know.’ 21 Auster: the south wind; hence, the south. 22 L to CM after the publication of TWW in 1963: ‘An awful thing – a Professor Lal has written to me from Calcutta highly delighted at my mentioning him […] Am I fated to be his contact and his pal?’: Thwaite (1982), 42. 23 Morgan Forster: the novelist E[dward] M[organ] Forster (1879–1970), known as ‘Morgan’ only to family and friends.

Broadcast

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 6 (1/6/3) contains three pages of drafts of the complete poem except for the title between ‘5 xi 61’ and ‘6. xi. 61’. Published in The Listener, 67. 1713 (25 Jan. 1962), 157.

Brennan (2002), 57: ‘I had been present at a live concert [by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the City Hall in Hull] on 5 November 1961 which was simultaneously broadcast on the radio. Philip, who knew I was in the audience, listened at home. The inscription in my copy of the Listener […] where the poem first appeared, reads: “To Maeve, who wd. sooner listen to music than listen to me”, accompanied by a caricature of himself, enveloped in gloom beside his radio, while I sit nearby, lost in my own musical world, one of my gloves unnoticed on the floor.’ L to MJ, 8 Feb. 1962: ‘I don’t know that it’s worth saying anything except that my delight in you isn’t pretended: you blot out anyone else. This was the first “love” poem I’ve written since Maiden name in about 1954, & I sh^d think both are pretty tenuous, pretty remote, as far as general approach goes. In fact I think this one just a shade ludicrous!’: SL, 340. When MJ came to see that the poem was not about her, L commented: ‘I didn’t hesitate a moment about including it, because I didn’t think it w^d bother you, and it seemed good enough’: 10 Feb. 1964 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7427/89); ‘I’m sorry about Broadcast, and I’m sure my distress was real. I suppose I don’t really equate poems with real-life as most people do – I mean they are true in a way, but very much dolled up & censored’: 18 Feb. 1964, SL, 366.

4 ‘The Queen’: (familiarly) the National Anthem (‘God save our gracious Queen’). 5 ‘We also shared a love of Elgar, whom Philip found nostalgic and intensely moving […] Perhaps it was not without significance that the first item on the programme which inspired “Broadcast” was this composer’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings: “A snivel on the violins”’: Brennan (2002), 53. L to MJ, 12 May 1957 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7416/11), on Elgar: ‘he is a composer I feel drawn to, in my parochial way’; to MJ, 10 Aug. 1957 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7416/95): ‘I do think Elgar a good composer at times.’ 10 Brennan (2002), 57: ‘a private joke, whose formulation, if not the specific adjective, was mine. They were an unusual colour of pearlised bronze, very smart, with stiletto heels and long, pointed toes […] Philip raved about the shoes. He used to take them off my feet, hold them up, stroke them, put them down on the sofa and continue to admire them; not just once, but every time I wore them. He thought they were the last word in fashion, until one day, slightly exasperated, I teased: “I don’t know why you go on so about these shoes. They’re almost out of fashion now […] He laughed and said: “Well. I still adore them even if they are slightly outmoded!”’

Faith Healing

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 5 (1/5/31) contains ten pages of drafts of the whole poem except for the title after ‘19. 3 [1960]’, dated ‘10 / 5 / 60’ at the end. Published in The Listener, 64. 1634 (21 July 1960), 115, and in Shenandoah, 13. 2 (Winter [i.e. Jan.] 1962), 33.

L in 1964: ‘I believe that art which takes its origin in other art is less likely to be successful than art founded in unsorted experience. I am ashamed, therefore, to have to admit that […] “Faith Healing” […] was written after seeing a film in which such a scene occurs. Still, it was a documentary film – the actors were real people who did not know that they were being photographed. This I hope mitigates the offence somewhat’: FR, 86. L in 1981: ‘Well, people want to be loved, don’t they. The sort of unconditional love parents give if you’re lucky, and that gets mixed up with the love of God – “dear child”, and so on’: FR, 58.

15 idiot child: Housman notoriously said of Robinson Ellis that he had the intellect of an ‘idiot child’: A. E. Housman: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Christopher Ricks (1988), 387. L applies the phrase to his colleague Arthur Wood in a letter to MJ dated 20 Oct. 1960 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7422/24). 19 blort: L to AT, 20 May 1960: ‘blort is intended: it is I think a variation of blore which is a dialect word meaning to bellow (like an animal). I am rather alarmed not to find blort in the dictionary, but D. H. Lawrence uses it somewhere, and I certainly don’t mean blurt, which has a quite different meaning to my mind’: SL, 313. (L is advising AT as producer of ‘New Poems’ on the BBC Third Programme on how the actor Hugh Dickson should read the poem in the broadcast on 24 July 1960.) To Judie Johnson, 16 Mar. 1965 (Hull DPL 5/6): ‘It means a thick heifer-like bellowing. I don’t know where I found it – one of Lawrence’s dialect poems I believe.’ Lawrence uses it in his poem Tortoise Shout, 62: ‘I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible’. L uses the word in Round Another Point (1951): ‘If someone came to you blorting that he’d just seen a baby born’ (TAWG, 494). ‘Blort’ is not in the OED, though ‘blurt’ and ‘blirt’ are. 19–20 Tim Trengove-Jones, ‘Larkin’s Stammer’, EIC, 40. 4 (1990), 331, relates the specific form of the distress to the stammer L had till about the age of thirty (on which, see notes on Next, Please). 22 all’s wrong: Cf. Housman, More Poems XXX 3: ‘All’s wrong that ever I’ve done and said’. 27–30 L to AT, 20 May 1960 (SL, 313): ‘As regards the last line, what spreads slowly through them is (a) an immense slackening ache, (b) the voice above, (c) all the things (like love and happiness and success and kindness) that the passage of time has proved to them do not really exist and which they have therefore got into the habit of forgetting.’ L told MB in a letter of 28 Mar. 1964 that he thought the ending ‘one of the best things in the book’: Brennan (2002), 169.

For Sidney Bechet

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 3 contains: two drafts of ll. 1–5 between ‘6. xii. 53’ and ‘28 xii 53’ (1/3/27); after ‘8 / 1 / 54’, four pages of drafts of all but stanza 6, dated ‘15. 1. 54’ at the end, immediately followed by a draft of the first four stanzas before ‘17 / 1 / 54’ (1/3/34); a page of drafts of stanza 5 and additional lines between ‘23 Jan 1954’ and ‘27. 1. 54’ (1/3/38); just over a page of drafts of stanza 5 and additional lines between ‘27. 1. 54’ and ‘9 iii 54’ (1/3/40); and drafts of ll. 13–14 and 1–2 after ‘26 5 54’ (1/3/51). Published in Ark, 18 (Nov. 1956), 58, and in Listen, 4. 1 (Autumn 1962), 8, with ‘Sydney’ for ‘Sidney’ and ‘Storeyvilles’ for ‘Storyvilles’ (l. 7) each time.

Title Sidney Bechet: Jazz musician (1897–1959), clarinet and soprano-saxophone player. L regarded him as ‘one of the half-dozen leading figures in jazz’: AWJ, 139, and thought that though there were not many perfect things in jazz ‘Bechet playing the blues could be one of them’: RB, 45. He invariably spoke of Bechet with admiration and approval (AWJ, 19–20, 60, 77, 149, 181, 216, for instance). 1 narrowing and rising: Bechet was famous for deviations in pitch (‘note-bending’) and for a wide, fast vibrato. John Lucas, ‘Appropriate Falsehoods: English Poets and American Jazz’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 17 (1987), 57–8, notes that L expressed admiration for Bechet’s ‘Blue Horizon’: ‘six choruses of slow blues in which Bechet climbs without interruption or hurry from lower to upper register, his clarinet tone at first thick and throbbing, then soaring like Melba in an extraordinary blend of lyricism and power that constituted the unique Bechet voice, commanding attention the instant it sounded’: AWJ, 41. shakes: V. Penelope Pelizzon, AL, 5 (Apr. 1998), 17: ‘suggests the tremolo characteristic of Bechet’s playing’. 1–2 John Whitehead, AL, 5 (Apr. 1998), 29, notes E. M. Forster’s comparison of a Hindu raga performed by a singer and a drummer to ‘Western music reflected in trembling water’ in The Hill of Devi (1954), letter of 9 May 1921 (Abinger edn., xiv. 46). 2 Early in his career, Bechet played in New Orleans with jazz greats Clarence Williams (1893–1965) and Joe ‘King’ Oliver (1885–1938). 5 quadrilles: square dances for couples. 6 In 1962 L described the music of the great New Orleans players as ‘a particularly buoyant kind of jazz that seems to grow from a spontaneous enjoyment of living’: AWJ, 54. 7 Oh, play that thing!: The celebrated shout supplied on the first version of Oliver’s Dippermouth Blues (1923) by double-bass player Bill Johnson (1872/4–1932), who played the banjo on the recording. John Osborne, ‘Larkin, Modernism and Jazz’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 9. 2 (2003), 15, 16, cites other, derivative sources: the opening (‘Play that thing’) of ‘Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret’ by African American jazz-poet Langston Hughes; the exhortation ‘Play it, man, play it’ in Bechet’s 1932 recording of Maple Leaf Rag; the echoing in parodic falsetto of ‘Oh, play that thing!’ in the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra’s reworking of Oliver’s Dippermouth Blues as Sugar Foot Stomp (1925); and Louis Armstrong introducing a member of the Hot Five on the recording of Gut Bucket Blues (1925) by saying ‘Oh, play that thing, Mr St Cyr’. Mute glorious: Cf. Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, 59: ‘Some mute inglorious Milton’. Noted in Petch (1981), 7. Storyville was a thirty-eight-block red-light district in New Orleans famous for its jazz. Mute: Osborne, ‘Larkin, Modernism and Jazz’, 13, notes that Storyville was partially closed in 1917, and this contributed to the diaspora of New Orleans jazz players like Bechet. Leggett (1999), 72 and n.: ‘Storyville is also the name of a record label that issued or reissued (licensed) traditional New Orleans jazz and the blues’, including ‘the “Sidney Bechet Sessions,” reissued from sessions of 1946 and 1947 […] it was most active in 1953–1955.’ 9 Sporting-house: brothel. L uses the term in a 1964 review (AWJ, 106). priced: because they are prostitutes. Cf. Proverbs 31: 10: ‘Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.’ 11 scholars: Leggett (1999), 71: ‘the sporting-house pianists, who were called “professors,” perhaps because many of them gave piano lessons’. L mentions the ‘professors’ in reviews (AWJ, 106, 176). manqués: unfulfilled, unsuccessful. French, in acknowledgement of the French Quarter of New Orleans. 12 personnels: band members (OED, 1.b.). Leggett (1999), 71, quotes Jelly Roll Morton on ‘using different personnels in the Red Hot Peppers band’. Osborne, ‘Larkin, Modernism and Jazz’, 13, notes that ‘personnels were fluid in New Orleans bands of all sizes’. 14 an enormous yes: Cf. Carlyle’s ‘The Everlasting Yea’ (‘wherein all contradiction is solved’): Sartor Resartus, book 2, ch. 9. L to MJ, Easter Sunday 1964 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7427/121): ‘I do feel defensive about that Bechet line: have they never heard the Beatles singing “She loves you – yeah, yeah, yeah –”? Or read the end of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy? Why is it so bad? I thought when I wrote it that it just “got” love & Bechet & everything. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with it!’ Crescent City: New Orleans, located on a curve of the Mississippi River. 17 long-haired: OED, long-hair, n. 2. a.: ‘a devotee of classical (as opposed to popular) music. (Freq. used contemptuously.)’ Earliest example with this sense, 1936. Leggett (1999), 71, notes that Roy Bird, a New Orleans pianist, singer and songwriter, called himself ‘Professor Longhair’. L to KA, 19 Sept. 1978: ‘I switched on for your Kaleidoscope thing and got ten minutes of […] longhair crap’: SL, 589. scored: Bechet was a celebrated improviser.

Home is so Sad

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 5 (1/5/13) contains two complete drafts after ‘29. xii [1958]’, dated respectively ‘30 xii 58’ and ‘31 xii 58’ at the end, followed by a further draft of the first two and a half lines. Hull DPL 2/3/2 is a t.s. with holograph corrections. Published in Oxford Magazine, 77. 24 (18 June 1959), 473, and in The Listener, 71. 1817 (23 Jan. 1964), 149.

VARIANTS (from Hull DPL 2/3/2)
Title [No title]
2 Shaped to] Suiting Shaped to
3 win] bring win

L to MJ, 30 Jan. 1964 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7427/74): ‘It goes awfully slack in the middle.’

Title ‘lightly contradicting a familiar cliché (that home is sweet)’: James Booth, ‘The Turf-Cutter and the Nine-to-Five Man: Heaney, Larkin, and “The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”’, Twentieth Century Literature, 43. 4 (Winter 1997), 379. 1 Home: ‘I am actually writing this at my “home”, which is what one always calls where one’s surviving parent lives’: L to BP, 7 Dec. 1963 (SL, 362). To MB, 13 Sept. 1972 (Brennan [2002], 55): ‘I am going “home” (as I still call it) this weekend as of course I must & want to, but it is saddening to face the sad situation again.’ To MJ, 9 Apr. 1957 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7415/123): ‘Home was rather sad in its way.’ To MJ, 12 Aug. 1962 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7425/41): ‘Home is a sad place, anyway’. 10 That vase: Patrick Swinden, ‘Larkin and the Exemplary Owen’, EIC, 44. 4 (1994), 326, compares Wilfred Owen, Conscious, 7: ‘What’s inside that jug?’ Cf. Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album, 27: ‘Those flowers, that gate’. L pronounces ‘vase’ as /va:z/ in his recording.

Toads Revisited

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 6 (1/6/23) contains a draft of the last two lines between ‘21. ix. 62’ and ‘27. 9. 62’, and the latter date is followed by six and a half pages of drafts of the whole poem with the date ‘10. 10. 62’ at the end. Published in The Spectator, 209. 7013 (23 Nov. 1962), 828.

L to MJ, 9 Nov. 1972 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7444/123): ‘a nice poem, I think’. To MJ, 22 Nov. 1962 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7425/107): ‘“The toad work” is a nice personification. It’s in a different metre from Toads, slightly – AA|BB’ instead of ABA|B’ – I use the “|” sign to indicate dissonance, or half-assonance as Peter de Vries calls it.’ To JE, 22 Dec. 1962 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7453/118): ‘it was sincere, I thought, but failed to grip’.

David Chandler, ‘Larkin’s Toad Revisited’, N&Q, NS 50. 3 (Sept. 2003), 339, notes a comparable double attitude to the toad in As You Like It, 2. 1. 12–13: ‘adversity, | Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, | Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.’

30 Betty Mackereth. On 12 Aug. 1962 L remarked to MJ on ‘an astounding hair-do, like a half-loaf or a leg of mutton’ that Betty had tried in Aug. 1961: Motion (1993), 327. L refers to her as ‘Loaf hair’ in a letter to MJ dated 12 Feb. 1963 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7426/29), as ‘my loaf-haired sec.’ in a letter to RC, 9 Jan. 1975 (SL, 519), and as ‘my loaf-haired secretary’ and ‘the l-h secretary’ in letters to BP, 5 Aug. 1977 and 19 Mar. 1978 (Bodl. MS Pym 152/14, 26). A photograph is printed in Motion (1993), between pages 412 and 413. 35 Osborne (2008), 55, cites Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (ch. 11): ‘“Here’s old Toad!” cried the Mole … Mole drew his arm through Toad’s’. 35–6 In Nov. 1974, L ‘stressed that “Toads Revisited”, in its coming to terms with work, represented his present views: he had now come to feel that “if he didn’t work he’d just brood over the reviews and get pissed by lunchtime”’: Watt (1989), 174. L to BP, 21 Aug. 1978 (Bodl. MS Pym 152/33): ‘Found the perfect epigraph for “Toads Revisited” in Oscar Wilde’s Letters: “Work never seems to me a reality, but a way of getting rid of reality.” Oh yes!’ L to JE, 9 June 1983: ‘Life is depressing on all sorts of counts – work; well, that one-time refuge, I can see, is coming to a close […] I positively dread retirement’: SL, 696.

Water

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 3 (1/3/46) contains one and a half pages bearing a complete draft after ‘5 / 4 / 54’, dated ‘6 / 4 / 54’ at the end. Published in Listen, 2. 3 (Summer–Autumn 1957), [1], and in Poetry and Drama Magazine, 10. 2 (1958), 24. L to CM, 19 Mar. 1964 (SL, 367): ‘A kind friend has pointed out to me that where I say “litany” […] I mean “liturgy”. I don’t think this will sound as well, but sense must come first: is there any chance of getting it into the American edition, and could we make a note of it for any subsequent resetting here?’ (The kind friend was MJ.) In CP (1988), 93: ‘litany’; in CP (2003), ‘liturgy’. In a letter to MJ dated 18 Apr. 1971 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7442/110), he favoured ‘litany’ again: ‘Oh, in the paperb. TWW “litany” has been replaced by “liturgy”. I rather wish I hadn’t listened to you on this: it seems to wreck the whole verse, it’s so heavy, as opposed to the dancingness of “litany” – “liturgy” anticipates images in the next line, too, the g sound. I don’t think the meaning is sufficient gain, as no one knows what either word means anyway.’ The present edition prints ‘liturgy’: it is the correct term, as L realised (a litany would not employ ‘Images of sousing, | A furious devout drench’); and, despite his reservations, he did not ask his publisher for ‘liturgy’ to be changed back to ‘litany’.

VARIANTS
7 My] The Listen (1957)
liturgy] litany TWW, 1964

2 Cf. Eliot, ‘Lancelot Andrewes’ (1926): ‘No religion can survive the judgment of history unless the best minds of its time have collaborated in its construction’: Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (1975), 180. 10 the east: Associated with Jerusalem and Mecca, as John Osborne, Booth (2000), 162, notes.

The Whitsun Weddings

DATE AND TEXT
‘I was looking at “The Whitsun Weddings” [the poem] just the other day, and found that I began it sometime in the summer of 1957. After three pages, I dropped it for another poem that in fact was finished but never published. I picked it up again, in March 1958, and worked on it till October, when it was finished. But when I look at the diary I was keeping at the time, I see that the kind of incident it describes happened in July 1955! So in all, it took over three years’: L in 1982 (RW, 75, where the square brackets round ‘the poem’ are L’s). (The incident took place in Aug. 1955: see below.) Wkbk 4 contains two and a half pages of drafts of stanza 1 between ‘14 / 5 / 57’ and ‘16 / x / 57’ (1/4/36), and twenty-three pages of drafts of all but the last stanza between ‘16 / 3 / 58’ and a final page headed ‘6 / 9 / 58’ (1/4/38). Wkbk 5 (1/5/8) contains seven pages of drafts of the last two stanzas between the date ‘19. 9. 58’ and the completion date ‘18. 10. 58’. L’s struggle with the poem is documented in letters to MJ dated 12 May, 16 June, 29 July, 22 Sept. and 16 and 18 Oct. 1958: Bodl. MSS Eng. c. 7418/35, 38 (posted 16 May), 52, 70, 106, 120, 122. In the last of these, he remarks: ‘I’ve never known anything resist me so! Not even Church G. w^ch I find I abandoned once […] I have just hammered it to an end, but really out of sheer desperation to see this fiendish 8^th verse in some kind of order’. Hull DPL 2/3/4 = Hull t.s. 1. At l. 49, at ‘Just what’, L has written ‘All that?’ in the margin; at l. 68, at ‘would all’, he writes ‘reverse?’ in the margin: Hull DPL 2/3/39 = Hull t.s. 2; signed in t.s. ‘Philip Larkin’. In l. 16 ‘unique’ may be a typing error rather than a variant. Published in Encounter, 12. 6 (June 1959), 47–8, but read by Gary Watson on 3 Apr. 1959 on the BBC’s Third Programme in AT’s production ‘New Poetry’.

VARIANTS
16 uniquely] unique Hull t.s. 2
26 took for] thought were Hull t.s. 1
37 loud and] more than Hull t.s. 1; Hull t.s. 2
49 Just what] Just what All that? Hull t.s. 1
53 The] Some Hull t.s. 1
68 would all] would all all would? Hull t.s. 1
80 becoming] turning to Hull t.s. 1; Hull t.s. 2

L to AT, 17 Mar. 1959, before the BBC broadcast (SL, 301): ‘I might just add a note about its reading: it is pitched if anything in an even lower key than usual, and the reader’s task is to graduate from just talking – the first verse or two – to interested close description (at least, one hopes the listener will be interested). It is of course humorous, here and there, but any supercilious note should be rigorously excluded. Success or failure of the poem depends on whether it gets off the ground on the last two lines. It is asking a lot of a reader, I know, to achieve a climax in so small a compass, but unless this image succeeds with the listener I am afraid the poem will seem no more than pedestrian.’ AT confirms that L said that the poem should be read on a ‘level, even a plodding, descriptive note’ and that the ‘mysterious last lines should suddenly “lift off the ground”’: Phoenix, 11/12 (Autumn and Winter 1973–4), 51.

L in 1964 (FR, 87): ‘Every now and then you will see some happening or situation that prompts you to think that if only you could get that down, in a kind of verbal photography, you would have a poem ready-made. This was what I felt some years ago when I happened to see a series of wedding parties at a succession of stations on the way to London one hot Saturday afternoon. Their cumulative effect produced an emotion so strong that I despaired of ever getting it under control; in the end, however, it produced “The Whitsun Weddings”.’ L in 1981 (FR, 57): ‘You can’t say “The Whitsun Weddings”, which is central to the book, is a sad poem. It was just the transcription of a very happy afternoon. I didn’t change a thing, it was just there to be written down […] You couldn’t be on that train without feeling the young lives all starting off, and that just for a moment you were touching them. Doncaster, Retford, Grantham, Newark, Peterborough, and at every station more wedding parties. It was wonderful, a marvellous afternoon. It only needed writing down. Anybody could have done it […] There’s nothing to suggest that their lives won’t be happy, surely? I defy you to find it.’ L again in 1981: ‘There’s hardly anything of me in it at all. It’s just life as it happened’: Motion (1993), 287.

Motion, 287–8, provides the text of an interview L gave with Melvyn Bragg for the South Bank Show, 16 Apr. 1981: ‘I hadn’t realized that, of course, this was the train that all the wedding couples would get on and go to London for their honeymoon[;] it was an eye-opener to me. Every part was different but the same somehow. They all looked different but they were all doing the same things and sort of feeling the same things. I suppose the train stopped at about four, five, six stations between Hull and London and there was a sense of gathering emotional momentum. Every time you stopped fresh emotion climbed aboard. And finally between Peterborough and London when you hurtle on, you felt the whole thing was being aimed like a bullet – at the heart of things, you know. All this fresh, open life. Incredible experience. I’ve never forgotten it.’

In fact, L did not travel at Whitsun, and did not go all the way to London: the accounts in Motion (1993), 287, and Bradford (2005), 157, are inaccurate. L to MJ, 3 Aug. 1955 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7411/122): ‘I went home on Saturday afternoon, 1.30 to Grantham – a lovely run, the scorched land misty with heat, like a kind of bloom of heat – and at every station, Goole, Doncaster, Retford, Newark, importunate wedding parties, gawky & vociferous, seeing off couples to London. My literary pleasure in this was damped by missing the 4.8 connection at Grantham.’ (He tells MJ that he got a lift from a farmer to Melton Mowbray, and then caught a bus to Loughborough, arriving at 6.46.) To JE, 5 May 1959 (SL, 301): ‘I hope it conveys something of the impressiveness of the occasion: it really was an unforgettable experience. In fact it took place on August Saturday 1955 [sic] – during that very fine weather, remember.’ To Doreen Preston, 11 Apr. 1985 (Hull DPL (2) 2/25/188): ‘when I came to look up the genesis of “The Whitsun Weddings” I found that not only did it not take place at Whitsun, but that I actually got out of the train at Grantham and took a motorbus to the Midlands to see my family, or what was left of them. Twenty years or so had made me believe the poem rather than what actually happened!’

The train journey at the beginning of Jill is similar in that it too ‘conflates urban and pastoral in a momentary synthesis of random detail’: Cooper (2004), 34.

Ian Milligan, ‘Philip Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings” and Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”’, N&Q, NS 23. 1 (Jan. 1976), 23, notes parallels with a passage in Virginia Woolf’s novel (the section begins ‘“How fair, how strange,” said Bernard’: Harcourt edn., 111–12): both contain ‘the idea of a shared community of experience … In each the journey suggests the brevity of life, and its conclusion carries intimations of death, but in each there are reminders of continuity.’ More specific parallels are noted below. Thomas Gibbons and David Ormerod, ‘“The Whitsun Weddings” and The Waves’, N&Q, NS 40. 1 (Mar. 1993), 69–70, duplicate much of what Milligan notes whilst elaborating further: ‘There is a train journey from the north of England to London. There is a shared preoccupation with marriage – other people’s weddings, on Larkin’s part, his own impending marriage on the part of Woolf’s narrator. There is a joint preoccupation with the itemized enumeration of the landscape details […] Both writers associate London with generation […] The sense of participating in an important rite, where the hitherto unappreciated beauty of the lives of undistinguished strangers is grasped in an emotional epiphany, is common to both. This appreciation is common to the observers, but not to the participants.’

John Osborne, Booth (2000), 148–9, makes an extended comparison with Eliot, The Waste Land: ‘both poems begin with a journey south […] Both travel from heat and drought, with much play on the way shadows lengthen or contract in accord with the angle of the sun, to hints of regenerative rain. Both poems describe major rivers, Eliot’s “Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song” […] being a quotation from Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamium”, a poem written, like “The Whitsun Weddings”, to celebrate a multiple marriage. Both poems complicate these wholesome riverine images with descriptions of industrial waterways, Eliot’s seedy urban pastoral (“I was fishing in the dull canal / On a winter evening round behind the gashouse”) being closely paralleled in Larkin’s description of “Canals with floatings of industrial froth”. Both poems move towards a close with references to towers, London and polluted walls (The Waste Land describes “a blackened wall”, “The Whitsun Weddings” has “walls of blackened moss” […] Both end with the prospect of sexual regeneration – the restoration to potency of the Fisher King in The Waste Land, the consummation of the marriages in “The Whitsun Weddings” – alike symbolized by the yoking of the word “rain” to a present participle (Eliot’s “bringing rain”, Larkin’s “becoming rain”). Add the parallelings of word and phrase (Larkin’s “girls” marked off “unreally from the rest” invoking the […] “unreal” of The Waste Land; or Eliot’s “She … nearly died of young George” becoming “I nearly died” in “The Whitsun Weddings”’. This account may also be found in Osborne (2008), 60.

John Reibetanz notes that L has chosen ‘the stanzaic form that Keats evolved for his great odes’ (specifically, the rhyme scheme ababcdecde), but has ‘revised the romantic outlook’: ‘“The Whitsun Weddings”: Larkin’s Reinterpretation of Time and Form in Keats’, Contemporary Literature, 17. 4 (Autumn 1976), 530, 537.

Title Whitsun: Christian festival beginning the seventh Sunday after Easter. Osborne (2008), 63, notes the fiscal reason for marriages occurring at this time: the British tax laws of the 1950s granted a married man’s tax allowance for the previous year to couples who got married by the Whit deadline, and ‘the rush to meet the tax deadline was most conspicuous in lower-income groups for whom every penny counts (and who go off on honeymoon by public transport)’. 1 getting away: From Hull, on the train to King’s Cross, London. 8 smelt the fish-dock: See the note on Here, 19. 9–10 Osborne (2008), 61, compares Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott, 1–3: ‘On either side the river lie | Long fields of barley and of rye, | That clothe the wold and meet the sky’. He notes the aptness of the train entering Tennyson’s county of Lincolnshire. 11–12 See L’s comments on the heat in his letter to MJ (above). John Osborne, Booth (2000), 149: ‘distantly invokes the heat and lethargy of Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters”’. More particularly, cf. Tennyson, ll. 3–5, 15, 21: ‘afternoon’, ‘afternoon’, ‘All round’, ‘the inner land’, ‘far inland’. 16 flashed: John Gross in Thwaite (1982), 83, notes ‘an Odeon flashes fire’ in Betjeman’s The Metropolitan Railway, 32, and the ‘melancholy kinship’ (‘Cancer has killed him. Heart is killing her’) it establishes between the couples in the two poems. Cf. also Betjeman’s North Coast Recollections, 53: ‘The windows of Trenain are flashing fire’. 26 Peter Sheldon, who was Sub-librarian to L at Hull, recounts how L told him on at least two occasions that the line contained a punning reference to a student, Miss Porter, whom he professed to lust after: AL, 20 (Autumn 2005), 75. 28 pomaded: wearing scented hair-dressing. 40 Timms (1973), 95, notes ‘the colour-names used by department stores to glamorize their products’, as in The Large Cool Store, 11, and, in each case, an association with unreality. 54 Milligan, 23, notes a parallel in The Waves (Harcourt edn., 111): ‘Men clutch their newspapers a little tighter’. 55 Free at last: John Osborne, ‘Larkin, Modernism and Jazz’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 9. 2 (2003), 27 (2008), 66, catches the echo of the African-American spiritual ‘I Thank God I’m Free At Last’. Also Osborne (2008), 66. 58–9 Stephen Derry, ‘Tennyson’s “Mariana” and Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings”’, N&Q, NS 42. 4 (December 1996), 448, notes Mariana, 55–6: ‘The shadow of the poplar fell | Upon her bed, across her brow’. 62 Osborne (2008), 61, notes that in addition to The Waste Land (see above) L may be echoing ‘“Laugh! I thought I should ’ave died”’ from Albert Chevalier’s music-hall song Wot’ Cher! or Knock’d ’em in the Old Kent Road, 8, 21. 65 Odeon: one of a chain of grand 1930s cinemas. See the note on l. 16. In a letter to MJ dated 22 Sept. 1951 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7406/29), L cited ‘Odeons and Coca Cola’ as examples of England’s ‘half borrowed vitality’. 70 L in 1982 (RW, 74): the line ‘doesn’t seem “diminutional” to me, rather the reverse, if anything. It’s meant to make the postal districts seem rich and fruitful.’ On London Weekend Television’s South Bank Show, 30 May 1982, he stated that he was aiming at conveying ‘overcrowdedness … but also fruitfulness’. John Whitehead, Hardy to Larkin: Seven English Poets (1995), 231, compares Auden, ‘As I walked out one evening’, 3–4: ‘The crowds … | Were fields of harvest wheat’. 71 aimed: Milligan, 23, notes the description of a train bound for London in Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Harcourt edn., 111): ‘But we are aimed at her’. See also ‘aimed’ in L’s interview with Melvyn Bragg (above). 73 Pullmans: luxurious railway carriages, usually with sleeping compartments (after US industrialist George M. Pullman, 1831–97). blackened moss: Stephen Derry (see 58–9 n., above), 448, notes Mariana, 1: ‘blackest moss’. 77–9 Asked in 1981 ‘Did you intend to give an unqualified assent to hopefulness at the end of the poem, where you seem to be flirting with a romantic visionary quality?’, L replied ‘Yes’ (FR, 57). 78–9 L told Jean Hartley that he got the idea from the arrows fired by the English bowmen in Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V: Jean Hartley (1989), 119. L to MJ, 3 Aug. 1955 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7411/125): ‘did you see Henry V is to be shown at the Academy, Oxford St.? I want to go.’ 79 an arrow shower: Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 5. 4. 38. 4: ‘a sharpe showre of arrowes’; Milton, Paradise Regained, 3. 324: ‘sharp sleet of arrowy showers’. Motion (1982), 78, invokes Blake’s ‘arrows of desire’ and Cupid’s arrows. 80 Sent out of sight, somewhere: John Osborne, Booth (2000), 150, and Osborne (2008), 62, parallels Longfellow’s The Arrow and the Song, 1–2: ‘I shot an arrow in the air, | It fell to earth, I knew not where’.

Self’s the Man

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 5 (1/5/10) contains two pages of drafts of the whole poem except for the title dated ‘5. xi. 58’ at the beginning and ‘5 Nov 58’ at the end. Hull DPL 2/3/3 (t.s.). Hull DPL 2/3/41 (t.s.), signed in t.s. ‘Philip Larkin’. Not published till TWW.

VARIANTS (from Hull DPL 2/3/3)
Title [No title]
2 Arnold] Arthur
5 wasting] fouling
on] with
20 Arnold] Arthur

2 Arnold: Based on Arthur Wood (d. 1971), deputy librarian at the Brynmor Jones Library, Hull, ‘a bookman, a plump, agreeable, ex-naval Glaswegian’ who ‘liked a proper lunch, soup, meat and two veg, and sticky pudding, eaten at a solid table with serious cutlery’: Douglas Dunn in Thwaite (1982), 57. For photographs, see illustration 15 in SL; Motion (1993), opposite p. 412; AL, 1 (Apr. 1996), back cover. L invariably spoke of him with virulent loathing bordering on the absurd. For instance: to Ansell Egerton and JE, 26 July 1955: Wood ‘has been successively taking the beginning of July, the end of July, & the beginning of August, as well as part of September that will cut across the part I want: I shd like to feed him into a hay chopper, popeyed little Scotch dad’: SL, 246; to MJ, 11 Jan. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7412/124): ‘I want to boot Wood round the university today, tomorrow, & all days to come till he comes apart’; to MJ, 14 Jan. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7412/133): ‘God I’d like to see him sprayed with molten rubber or something’; to MJ, 29 Jan. 1957 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7415/69): ‘I’d like to hire an eagle to come down & carry him off’; to MJ, 17 Mar. 1957 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7415/113): ‘I’m sure I hate him much more than I hate anybody […] Filthy little bread-buying swine […] Why won’t he die? He’s never ill, you know. Much too selfish. Horrible little grey creeping clot of self-interest.’ To MJ, 3 Nov. 1958 (SL, 294): ‘Funnily enough, [tonight] I settled to write a short “comic” poem à la Toads – not very good, wanting a last line. It’s based to some extent on Wood, horrible cadging little varmint.’ 4 Cf. L’s Round Another Point (1951): ‘A wife can be with him twenty-three and a half hours a day’: TAWG, 496. 7 To pay for the kiddies’ clobber: Cf. Round Another Point: ‘But what isn’t a law of Nature is the idea that you should be happy […] when you’re having to cut down on fags because the kid wants a scooter’: TAWG, 490. 9–16 L consistently represents Wood as henpecked. For instance, to MJ, 6 Feb. 1957: ‘His wife won’t let him go to Leeds on Saturday to a Library do because he won’t be back in time to bath the baby – the elder’: Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7415/77. 13 L to MJ, 19 Aug. 1955: ‘Saw that stupid little sod Wood pushing the pram this afternoon – he makes me want to set dogs on him, the pop-eyed little ass. And buying a house is sort of binding me to Wood & all he represents. Oh hell! hell! hell!’: Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7412/24. 15–16 Cf. Round Another Point: ‘But what isn’t a law of Nature is the idea that you should be happy […] when you’re writing a letter asking your mother-in-law to come and stay the summer’: TAWG, 490.

Take One Home for the Kiddies

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 3 (1/3/47) contains two pages of drafts after ‘6 / 4 / 54’, including a complete draft (entitled ‘Pets’) dated ‘18. 4. 54’. Wkbk 5 (1/5/34) contains another complete draft (entitled ‘Take Home a Pet for the Kiddies’), after ‘6. 8. 60’, dated ‘13. 8. 60’ at the end. Published in The Listener, 70. 1810 (5 Dec. 1963), 955.

Title Osborne (2008), 79: ‘a shop-window slogan’.

Days

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 2 (1/2/38) contains a draft of two stanzas of six lines each, untitled, after ‘6 Feb [1951]’ (stanza 2 was different at this stage) and a further draft of four lines just before ‘19. iii. 51’. In Wkbk 3 (1/3/7) there is a complete draft on a single page dated ‘? 3 August 1953’ at the foot. L to MJ, 5 Aug. 1953 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7408/53): ‘I’ve written a tiny little poem since returning, hardly a poem at all.’ Published in Listen, 2. 3 (Summer–Autumn 1957), [1], and reprinted in Poetry and Drama Magazine, 10. 2 (1958), 24.

VARIANTS (from the 1953 letter)
Title [No title]
7 And to seek where they join

L to MJ, 5 Aug. 1953: ‘Don’t take it seriously, but it’s a change from the old style […] Wednesday I shouldn’t think there’s much danger of y^r taking it seriously, having just re-read it, but I can’t rub it out.’

7–10 From Ted Tarling’s copy of CP (1988), Osborne (2008), 55–6, records a reversal of section 40 of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself: ‘To any one dying, thither I speed … Let the physician and the priest go home’ (ll. 22–4). L to MJ, 21 Nov. 1971 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7443/128): ‘Did I tell you about my discovery in Larkin Studies? I was rereading The Wind in the Willows, & found within a few pages of each other “long coats” and “running” and “over the fields”. Isn’t that odd? It’s where Toad crashes the car & is chased. I’m sure I got the words from there – hiding places thirty years deep, at least.’ L is referring to ch. 10, where the last of the phrases he refers to is ‘across fields’.

MCMXIV

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 4 (1/4/32) contains: just over a page of drafts of ll. 1–6 between ‘17 Oct [1956]’ and ‘26. xii. 56’ (ten pages later); a version of l. 1 between 1 Jan. and 14 May 1957. Wkbk 5 contains: five pages of drafts of stanzas 1 and 2, additional lines, and ll. 25–6 and 32 between ‘7 xi [1958]’ and ‘21 xi 58’; a further two and a half pages of drafts of stanza 1 and additional lines (including 12–13) after ‘2 xii 58’, with the last page headed ‘7. xii. 58’ (1/5/11); a one-page draft of stanzas 3 and 4 after ‘2. 2 [1959]’ dated ‘2 /3 / 59’ at the end (1/5/15); a one-page draft of stanzas 3 and 4 after ‘15 / 2 [1960]’ dated ‘16. 2. 60’ (1/5/28) at the end; further drafts of stanza 3 between ‘17. 2. 60’ and ‘22. 2 [1960]’ (1/5/30); a further draft of ll. 17–20 on a page dated ‘16 3 [1960]’ at the top (1/5/30); further drafts of stanzas 3 and 4 on a page dated ‘17. 5. 60’ at the top, with the next page dated ‘11. 6 [1960]’ (1/5/32). Published in Saturday Book, 20 ([10 Oct.] 1960), 153–4, and in Poetry Review, 52. 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1961), 201.

L to MJ, 6 Nov. 1954 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7409/97): ‘1914–1918: that drab patch on our century, grey-green, green-brown, the colour of churned mud, how really it is trembling with emotion if you look closely! A silly sentence, but you know what I mean. 1939–45 will never stir me as much: I don’t think the reason’s entirely in me, either.’ L in 1964 stated that the poem ‘is about the First World War, or the Great War as I still call it; or rather about the irreplaceable world that came to an end on 4 August 1914’: FR, 85. Discussing Betjeman’s poem I.M. Walter Ramsden in 1971, L refers to ‘the “long-dead generations” going back beyond Ypres and the Somme to golden summers of Edward and Victoria’: RW, 212. L in 1975: ‘It takes an effort today to realize how completely unprepared, imaginatively, the men of 1914 and 1915 were for the horrors that awaited them’: RW, 236.

L to BP, 20 Feb. 1964 (SL, 367): ‘I’m rather fond of MCMXIV – it’s a “trick” poem, all one sentence & no main verb!’ He claimed, however, that this was ‘entirely accidental, not a piece of daring experimentalism’: FR, 85.

Title L in 1964: ‘It is called “1914”, but written in roman numerals, as you might see it on a monument. It would be beyond me to write a poem called “1914” in arabic numerals’: FR, 85. Similarly, L on his recording of TWW: ‘I should really announce the next poem, 1914, as m-c-m-x-one-v because that is the way the title is printed, in roman numerals.’ He explained ‘beyond me’ more fully: ‘the emotional impact of 1914 was too great for anything I could possibly write myself’ (‘Philip Larkin reads The Whitsun Weddings’, Marvell Press LPV6). In Nov. 1974 L said he felt on writing the poem ‘that “1914” was too harsh a title, and that he preferred the decent obscurity of the title he chose’: Watt (1989), 174. (‘Decent obscurity’ is often taken as Edward Gibbon’s phrase, but it comes from a parody of him in the Anti-Jacobin.) Christopher Ricks in Thwaite (1982), 125: ‘When a poetry-speaker on the BBC ushers in a poem by saying “1914”, you sympathize, since some title has to be given and he couldn’t say “MCMXIV”. Yet how much of the sense of loss is lost. How long the continuity was with ancient wars and with immemorial commemoration; how sharp is the passing of an era.’ Charles Mundye notes that the date ‘MCMXIV’ is engraved on the northern face of the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London: AL, 19 (Spring 2005), 24.

1 lines: Of men volunteering for military service. 4 the Oval: Kennington Oval, London, where cricket matches have been played since 1846. Villa Park: the home of Aston Villa football club in Birmingham. 8 August Bank Holiday: a public holiday, during 1871–1965 celebrated on the first Monday in August, when banks closed and other businesses were obliged to close also. 12–13 Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse, I. 4, III. I: ‘He called them privately after the Kings and Queens of England’, ‘the six children whom they used to call after the Kings and Queens of England’. 14–15 Barbara Everett, Salwak (1989), 135–6, notes ‘tin advertisements of cocoa’ in Vivian de Sola Pinto’s poem In The Train, 6, published in England, an English Association anthology (1946). 15 twist: tobacco shaped into a thick cord. 15–16 Business hours of public houses were to be restricted by law in 1915. 20 Domesday lines: visible boundaries of landed properties in the record of the Great Inquisition or Survey of the lands of England (from the eleventh century onwards). 25, 26, 32 John Osborne, Booth (2000), 147–8, compares the refrain in Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 4. 20, 23, 24: ‘Daring as never before, wastage as never before’, ‘fortitude as never before’, ‘frankness as never before’.

Talking in Bed

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 5 contains: two pages of drafts of stanza 1 and single lines between ‘5 / 6’ and ‘30 / 8’ [1959] (1/5/20); stanza 1 in fair copy between ‘14. 9’ and ‘4. 10 [1959]’ (1/5/23); four and a half pages of drafts of the whole poem except for the title between ‘17. 2. 60’ and ‘16 3 [1960]’ (1/5/29); and a final complete draft after ‘9. 8. 60’, dated ‘10 / 8 / 60’ at the end (1/5/35). Published in Texas Quarterly, 3. 4 (Winter 1960), 193.

VARIANTS
6 disperses] disposes Texas Quarterly, 1960

MJ to L, 7 Feb. 1964 (quoted in LTM, 375 n. 4): ‘I’m naturally not happy abt Talking in Bed because it will cause so much talking here, in & out of beds, & indeed elsewhere – what do you think yr Mother & relatives will make of it?’

5 incomplete unrest: Christopher Ricks in Thwaite (1982), 129: ‘alludes to the easy restfulness of the phrase “a complete rest” – a phrase newly completed unrestfully’. 11–12 Edna Longley, ‘Larkin, Edward Thomas and the tradition’, Phoenix: A Poetry Magazine, ed. Harry Chambers, 11/12 (autumn and winter 1973/4), Philip Larkin issue, 81–2, notes a similar undercut climax (likewise the last lines of the poem) with the same rhyme in Edward Thomas, And You Helen, 21–2: ‘And myself, too, if I could find | Where it lay hidden and it proved kind’.

The Large Cool Store

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 6 (1/6/7) contains five and a half pages of drafts of the whole poem after ‘16. 5. 61’, dated ‘18. 6. 61’ at the end. L to MJ, 18 June 1961 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7423/58): ‘Busy Sunday as usual – have been crashing my M & S poem to a finish for the TLS. Dull stuff it is too.’ Published in TLS, 3098 (14 July 1961), supplement i.

VARIANTS (from the TLS)
7 and] or

L to RC, 11 July 1961 (SL, 330): ‘My shorties one is really pure Holbrook: it was finished in a terrific hurry, else I might have taken pains to iron out accidental resemblances to our David from it.’ L seems to be joking: Holbrook’s collection Imaginings (1960) sometimes describes everyday things and events, but there is no specific influence.

Hugh Underhill, ‘Poetry of Departures: Larkin and the Power of Choosing’, Critical Survey, 1. 2 (1989), 189, cites a precedent in MacNeice’s Belfast, 9–12, for the ‘democratic urban sensibility’ listing items in shops: ‘And in the marble stores rubber gloves like polyps | Cluster; celluloid, painted ware, glaring | Metal patents, parchment lampshades, harsh | Attempts at buyable beauty.’

Title Marks and Spencer’s in Hull, where MB had bought some items that she showed to library staff, prompting L to visit the store for the frst time: Brennan (2002), 56–7. The store opened in Hull on 15 Aug. 1931, some thirty years before. 11–19 Cf. The Whitsun Weddings, 40–2. Timms (1973), 95, notes ‘the colour-names used by department stores to glamorize their products’. 12 Bri-Nylon: brand name introduced by British Nylon Spinners in 1958. Baby-Dolls: women’s pyjamas consisting of a loose-fitting top worn over shorts. Osborne (2008), 209, notes that the term was popularised by the 1956 film Baby Doll, scripted by Tennessee Williams. Shorties: Originally American slang, from 1942 (OED, shorty, 5).

A Study of Reading Habits

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 5 (1/5/37) contains a page and a half bearing a draft of the whole poem except for the title after ‘19. 8. 60’, dated ‘20. 8. 60’ at the end. Published in Critical Quarterly, ed. C. B. Cox, 2. 4 (Winter 1960), 351.

L to MJ, 22 Aug. 1960 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7421/125): ‘On Friday I wrote a disrespectful little jeu d’esprit called A Study of Reading Habits […] It needs a little polishing […] the poem I have in mind remains obdurate.’ To MJ, 10 Nov. 1960 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7422/43): ‘I have given my “Books are a load of crap” poem to Cox for 5 gns. I hope it will upset people like John Wain (“I wish you wouldn’t copy Kingsley”).’ L in 1964 (FR, 85): ‘I have always tried to keep literature out of my poems as a subject, but I did once amuse myself by trying to describe the normal man’s gradual abandonment of reading as a source of pleasure. When we are young, we identify ourselves with the hero; during adolescence, with the villain; but when we are grown up we see that our true likeness is to some minor and even contemptible figure, and this puts us off the whole business.’ To Dr P. D. Pumfrey, 22 Feb. 1985: ‘The poem describes how people who embrace reading as a form of escape through self-dramatisation ultimately are led to see themselves as they really are, and turn from reading to some quicker and more reliable form of escape (drink). So many people seem to think that the poem’s last line is a serious expression of opinion by me. It is, in fact, highly ironic’: Hull DPL (2) 2/25/167.

1–12 Philip Gardner notes ‘shades of Biggles, Westerns, Jack the Ripper, and Count Dracula’: Dalhousie Review, 48. 1 (Sept. 1968), 93. 1–2 L, ‘Not the Place’s Fault’ (FR, 10): ‘for quite long periods I suppose I must have read a book a day, even despite the tiresome interruptions of morning and afternoon school’. 7 Cf. ‘When we broke up, I walked alone’, 71–2: ‘For I read eleven hours a day | And my specs are getting thicker’. 13 Don’t read much now: Only late in life might this apply to L himself, and even then he seems to have read a fair amount. In 1972: ‘Within reach of my working chair I have reference books on the right, and twelve poets on the left: Hardy, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Barnes, Praed, Betjeman, Whitman, Frost and Owen […] All in all, therefore, I should miss my books’: RW, 86. In 1979: ‘I virtually read only novels, or something pretty undemanding in the non-fiction line, which might be a biography. I read almost no poetry […] I tend to go back to novelists, like Dick Francis, for instance; I’ve just been through his early novels again which I think are outstandingly good for what they are. And Barbara Pym, of course, whom I’ve written about. Dickens, Trollope – sometimes you go back to them for about three novels running. And detective stories: Michael Innes […] Anthony Powell, Rex Stout, Kingsley Amis, Peter de Vries […] I read Betjeman, Kingsley again, Gavin Ewart (who I think is extraordinarily funny). Among the illustrious dead, Hardy and Christina Rossetti. Shakespeare, of course’: RW, 53. In 1982: ‘I don’t read much. Books I’m sent to review. Otherwise novels I’ve read before. Detective stories: Gladys Mitchell, Michael Innes, Dick Francis. I’m reading Framley Parsonage at the moment. Nothing difficult’: RW, 70. 13–17 The language is coloured by usage that is American or originally American: dude (dandy), yellow (cowardly), store (shop), stewed (drunk).

As Bad as a Mile

DATE AND TEXT
There are two drafts one below the other, complete except for the title, in Wkbk 5 (1/5/27), dated ‘4 / 2 / 60’ and ‘9. 2. 60’ respectively. Published in Audit (University of Buffalo), 1. 2 (28 Mar. 1960), 2, and in The Listener, 70. 1811 (12 Dec. 1963), 985.

VARIANTS
Title Bad] Good Audit, 1960

The poem is consistent with the view expressed in A New World Symphony (1948–54): ‘The process of failure only needs starting, it will continue almost of its own accord’: TAWG, 428.

Title. Cf. the proverb ‘A miss is as good as a mile’. 6 In Genesis ch. 3, the eating of the forbidden fruit, long supposed to have been an apple, brought death and the knowledge of good and evil. unbitten: Cf. Housman, Additional Poems III 1–4: ‘When Adam walked in Eden young | Happy, ’tis writ, was he, | While high the fruit of knowledge hung | Unbitten on the tree.’

Ambulances

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 6 (1/6/2) contains eighteen pages of drafts of the whole poem between ‘29. 11. 60’ and the date ‘14 / 1 / 61’ at the end. The next page, dated ‘10. 1. 61’ at the top, bears a version of l. 19: ‘For in this deadened air takes place’. L to JE, 28 Nov. 1960 (SL, 322): ‘Ought to have been doing my poem, such as it is […] Now I must get back to my poem – I’ve decided I can half rhyme to absorb, so that’s okay.’ L to AT, 1 Feb. 1961 (SL, 323): ‘The snag about the enclosed, apart from its being not much good, is that I have given it to Alan Ross for the April no. of the LM.’ Read by Hugh Dickson on the BBC Third Programme on 19 Apr. 1961, and published in London Magazine, NS 1. 1 (April 1961), [23], and in Atlantic, 208. 6 (Dec. 1961), 62.

1 Cf. ‘Come then to prayers’, 12. 2 Loud noons of cities: Cf. ‘I should be glad to be in at the death’, 2: ‘loud cities’. 13–14 Cf. Auden, New Year Letter, 2. 476–8: ‘the abyss | That always lies just underneath | Our jolly picnic’.

The Importance of Elsewhere

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 4 (1/4/15) contains three pages of drafts of the whole poem except for the title after ‘27 May ’55’, dated ‘13 / 6 / 55’ at the end. Published in The Listener, 54. 1384 (8 Sept. 1955), 373. Repr. in Humberside, the magazine of the Hull Literary Club, 12. 2 (Autumn 1956), 31, and in Listen, 2. 4 (Spring 1958), 2.

L to JBS, 5 Nov. 1950 (SL, 167–8): ‘As a matter of fact, the mad Irish aren’t so mad: they can be very nice indeed. Their voices are incomprehensible most of the time – a Glaswegian, after a short stay in the USA, whining for mercy, but as my business is mainly connected with the educated ones I am not always quite at a loss. As a rule they are kind & even polite, but one gets a bit sick of feeling a foreigner all the time, & of the really-quite-excusable local patriotism that continually recurs, even in Queen’s itself.’ (L inadvertently wrote ‘They voices’, corrected by AT in SL.)

Raphaël Ingelbien, ‘Seamus Heaney and the Importance of Larkin’, Journal of Modern Literature, 24. 1 (Summer 2000), 474, notes a similarity between the attitude expressed in the poem and Cyril Connolly’s in ‘England, not my England’ in The Condemned Playground: Essays 1927–1944: ‘Abroad, I was at least interesting to myself – in London I can’t be even that’; ‘It is better to be depaysé in someone else’s country than in one’s own’ (1985 edn., with an introduction by L, pp. 205, 206). Connolly was a notable influence on L in his student days: Motion (1993), 202.

2–4 Contrast L to MJ, 5 Nov. 1951 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7406/70): ‘My head buzzes with Irish voices […] Ulster phrases pop off my lips like bubbles […] I have almost given up the battle, and floating down the social tide feel my nationality & individuality & character submerging like empty cake-boxes.’

Sunny Prestatyn

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 6 (1/6/24) contains two and a half pages of drafts of the whole poem except for the title after ‘16. 10. 62’, dated ‘20. 10. 62’ at the end. Published in London Magazine, NS 2. 10 (Jan. 1963), 13.

VARIANTS
11 boss] black London Magazine, 1963

L in 1964 (FR, 89) stated that Sunny Prestatyn ‘is rather difficult to describe […] the scene is a railway station, only this time I am looking at one of those cheerful posters okayed by some seaside town’s publicity manager, showing the most convenient shorthand for happiness, a beautiful girl. Unfortunately, some travellers have been at work and the result is funny or terrifying, whichever way you look at it. If you are like me, it is both […] Some people think it was intended to be funny, some people think it was intended to be horrific. I think it was intended to be both’: L on ‘Philip Larkin reads The Whitsun Weddings’, Marvell Press LPV6. See L’s comments on pictorial billboards in the notes on Essential Beauty. When MB objected to the coarse language in the poem, L replied: ‘That’s exactly the reaction I want to provoke, shock, outrage at the defacement of the poster and what the girl stood for’: Brennan (2002), 60.

Noting ‘tits’, ‘crotch’, ‘cock’, and ‘balls’ (ll. 12, 16), Osborne (2008), 162, points out that this vocabulary is being used only two years after the end of the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover (and before the Beatles’ first LP: see Annus Mirabilis and notes).

Title Prestatyn is a seaside resort in N. Wales. 2 the poster: Cooper (2004), 190, reproduces a discussion from Today magazine (17 Aug. 1963) of a series of British Railways’ advertisements for holiday destinations, illustrated by posters of women in swimsuits. L refers to ‘the poster we saw at Tweedmouth’ when he mentions the poem in a letter to MJ dated 23 Oct. 1962 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7425/81). Don Lee, AL, 25 (Apr. 2008), 25, reproduces a rail poster for Prestatyn depicting in profile a smiling blonde woman in a swimsuit with the sea behind her. James Orwin reproduces another Prestatyn poster depicting in profile a blonde woman in a white swimsuit with breasts uplifted and arms spread, and with a coastline and what looks like an hotel behind her: AL, 27 (Apr. 2009), 13. As is duly noted, she is not kneeling on the sand. 10–20 Cf. ‘great gouts of clay … flung against posters’ (Jill, 215), and A New World Symphony (1948–54): ‘On the pavement opposite a little boy began defacing a house-agent’s advertisement’: TAWG, 432. 17 Titch Thomas: the name of the proprietor of the pub ‘The Lord Jersey’ in Dylan Thomas’s story ‘Old Garbo’, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940). ‘John Thomas’ is slang for penis, and ‘Titch’ jokingly implies small size.

First Sight

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 4 (1/4/25) contains, after ‘20. 2. 56’, two and a half pages of drafts of the whole poem except for the title, dated ‘26 / 2/ 56’ at the end; a further draft on a single page, complete except for the title and less like the final version in the second verse, dated ‘3 March 1956’ at the end. L to MJ, 26 Feb. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7413/19): ‘Last night I wrote a few lines about lambs: wish I could finish them off as a companion-piece to the Pigeons I still haven’t sent you […] It was written dangerously quickly.’ On fo. 20 of the letter he decides to ‘reconsider the end’, and on fo. 23 he provides a t.s., corrected in pencil and ink, of the whole poem, with Pigeons, under the heading ‘Two Winter Pieces’. Published in the Times Educational Supplement, 2147 (13 July 1956), 933.

VARIANTS
Title Lambs Bodl. MS; At First TES.
2–4 When the lanes are blocked, and air | Clouds upon their bleating, know | Nothing but a whiteness where Bodl. MS 6–7 They can find outside beyond the fold, | Only wretchedness and cold. Bodl. MS
12–14 [They could not grasp it] [alt. Could they grasp it] if they knew, | How their joy will What will shortly wake and grow | Wider than the vanished [alts. forgotten? the absent?] snow. [?] Bodl. MS [The question marks, including the final one in brackets, are L’s.]

L to MJ, 2 Mar. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7413/26): ‘the point is that here they are, being interested & patient & accepting it all, not knowing how temporary all the misery is & how, in a week or so, everything will suddenly “melt & change” like a miracle’. To MJ, 12 June 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7413/116–17): ‘I’ve sent off the lambs poem: it will look a funny poem for this great glossy marrow-headed fellow to have written, in his big shell goggles and creaseless suit.’ To MJ, 12 May 1958 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7418/37): ‘Guinness poetry book [The Guinness Book of Poetry 1958] came today, absolutely rotten I think, even including my Lambs w^ch looks v. 1910-ish and conventional.’

Title ‘In the end I called it At first. I didn’t want to mention lambs in the title, since they aren’t the real point, and if you call a thing Lambs people say O yes! about lambs – & off goes their attention, skating away, missing the whole point. Maybe At first isn’t very good, though’: to MJ, 12 May 1958. Osborne (2008), 79 notes the abbreviation of the cliché ‘love at first sight’. 3 unwelcome: ‘cold reception. rare’: OED, citing only D. H. Lawrence, Trespasses (1912), 1. 2: ‘A stranger was assured of his unwelcome’.

Dockery and Son

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 6 contains: a draft of ll. 1–2 on a page dated ‘13. 5. 62’ at the top (1/6/30); nine pages of drafts of everything but the last stanza (6) between ‘4. 2. 63’ and ‘3. 3. 63’ (1/6/28); and four pages of drafts of stanzas 5 and 6 after ‘4. 3. 63’, with the final page dated ‘28. 3. 63’ at the top. Published in The Listener, 59. 1776 (11 Apr. 1963), 633.

L in July 1964 (FR, 90): Dockery and Son ‘brings me back full circle to the character and environment business. A year or two ago I was visiting my college, and in conversation the don who had been Dean in my day remarked that a man who had been some years behind me now had a son at the place. This led me to reflect how very different our lives must have been, so different as to suggest different concepts of life behind them, and I wondered where these concepts came from. This is what “Dockery and Son” is about. It is the last poem [in TWW] I wrote, and so I have a particular affection for it. There is always the chance, after all, that one’s last poem may turn out to be just that.’ L to MJ, 7 Aug. 1966 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7433/103): ‘I don’t think I shall ever get past “Dockery & Son” – even after 3 years it seems the last word on life, my own tiny unimportant last word.’ To MJ, 30 Oct. 1966: ‘inside I’ve been the same, trying to hold everything off in order to “write”. Anyone w^d think I was Tolstoy, the value I put on it. It hasn’t amounted to much. I mean, I know I’ve been successful in that I’ve made a name & got a medal [The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, 1965], & so on, but it’s a very small achievement to set against all the rest. This is Dockery & Son again – I shall spend the rest of my life trying to get away from that poem’: SL, 387.

See L’s statement in the notes on Essential Beauty on a poem being either ‘true’ or ‘beautiful’.

Title As in business names, especially Dickens’s Dombey and Son. In ‘Dockery’ Roger Day detects ‘the hint of the nursery rhyme “Hickory, Dickory, Dock”, with the suggestion of time recorded mechanically by a clock’: Day (1987), 56. 1–2 ‘Junior to you am I? But you’ve got a boy or a grandson at the place now. I haven’t got anybody’: Julian Hall’s novel The Senior Commoner (1933), 119. In letters to JBS, L defends the novel, and admits to ‘rereading it with great pleasure’: 1 Apr. and 24 Sept. 1941 (Hull DP 174/2/ 20, 28). In another letter to JBS, 16 Aug. 1943 (DP 174/2/74), he reports: ‘Incidentally, I still read Julian Hall (“The Senior Commoner”) – some of it is masterly.’ He acknowledges the specific debt to Hall in Tracks, 1 (Summer 1967), 5–10, and in a 1982 review states that he first read the novel ‘over forty years ago’, and quotes the passage (RW, 274, 277). 3 Death-suited: L had in fact attended a funeral. ‘In March 1962 Philip went to the funeral, in Oxford, of Miss Agnes Cuming, Hull’s former librarian, and when he returned I remember how he recalled the incidents described in “Dockery and Son” with vivid clarity as we met by chance at the foot of the main staircase in the Library’: Brennan (2002), 58. 4–7 KA describes this as a ‘tiny but exact glimpse’ of L ‘being fined by the Dean’ during his undergraduate days: Thwaite (1982), 26. The Dean and Senior Tutor during L’s time at St John’s College, Oxford (1940–3) was W. G. Moore (1905–78), University Lecturer in French (1931–72), Fellow and Tutor in Modern Languages at St John’s (1934–78). L to Norman Iles, 13 Dec. 1942 (SL, 49): ‘Moore called me into his room for a little straight talk on the evils of drinking. Until now he’s just regarded me as a drunk sot, but my persistently good reports are beginning to shake him.’ For a different view of Moore, see the reminiscence by his grandson Nicholas Jenkins in Leader (2009), 47–9. 17 Cf. the description of an Oxford student in Jill, 53: ‘Jackson, who wore a curious stiff collar’. public: (in Britain) private. 18 killed: In the Second World War (1939–45). 20–2 Sheffield was a regular changing point for L on train journeys. He mentions this in letters to MJ dated 29 Dec. 1957 and 20 Oct. 1959 (Bodl. MSS Eng. c. 7417/74, 7420/69). Paul Walker, AL, 28 (2009), 39, notes that L is literally accurate in that in 1963 he would have travelled from Oxford to Sheffield on the now closed Great Central Railway, which approached the city from the east (where the steelworks are), and would have changed for Hull at the now closed Sheffield Victoria Station. Walker also notes that the station had a buffet where L could have bought a pie. 25 Unhindered moon: L to JBS, between 9 Aug. and 14 Oct. 1951 (Hull DP 174/2/217, first page missing): ‘under a full moon; it was fascinating, the full unhindered flood of unreal light – no one has really defined moonlight yet; essentially it’s a mysterious light, a kind of parody of real light’. 35 dilution: A. T. Tolley notes that in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse it is said of Lily Briscoe, the artist who did not marry, ‘she need not marry … she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution’: Tolley (1997), 106, referring to p. 154 of the Harcourt, Brace edn. (1927). 43–4 Raphaël Ingelbien, ‘From Hardy to Yeats? Larkin’s Poetry of Ageing’, EIC, 53. 3 (2003), 270, compares Yeats, ‘Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain’, 21–2: ‘I have no child, I have nothing but a book, | Nothing …’ 45–8 ‘I’m very proud of those lines. They’re true. I remember when I was writing it, I thought this is how it’s got to end. There’s a break in the metre; it’s meant as a jolt’: L in 1981 (FR, 50). 45 ‘When I try to tune into my childhood, the dominant emotions I pick up are, overwhelmingly, fear and boredom. Although I have an elder sister, the ten years’ difference in our ages made me for practical purposes an only child, and I suppose those feelings are characteristic’: L in Wkbk 5 (DPL 1/5/1). first boredom: ‘There was a curious tense boredom about the house’: L in Wkbk 5 (DPL 1/5/1). In 1973: ‘At that time I was not happy at school. Admittedly it was an affair of being more frightened than hurt, but it was being hurt sometimes, and being frightened was not very pleasant. And in any case it was an affair of being more bored than either. The very words physics, geography, algebra, chemistry still conjure up in my mind a pantheon of tedium’: FR, 128. In 1981: ‘My childhood wasn’t unhappy, just boring’: FR, 47. Cf. Coming, 12–13: ‘And I, whose childhood | Is a forgotten boredom’. then fear: L’s response to Jonathan Raban, when the line was quoted to him, was: ‘Oh no no no, there’s no boredom left for me I’m afraid, it’s fear all the way’: AL, 26 (Oct. 2008), 16. 48 ‘How strange the advance towards age is, and how it frightens me’: L to BP, 23 Sept. 1974 (Bodl. MS Pym 151/86).

Ignorance

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 4 (1/4/21) contains, after ‘21. 8. 55’, three pages of drafts of the whole poem except for the title, dated ‘11/ 9 / 55’ at the end. Published in Listen, 2. 1 (Summer 1956), 4.

In a letter to MJ dated 14 Jan. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7412/131), L lists the poem among ‘dregs & throwouts’ and describes it as ‘v. poor & short’.

12–13 decisions … imprecisions: The rhyme ‘suggests a Prufrockian lineage for the persona’: Steve Clark (1988, 1994) in Regan (1997), 104, thinking of T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 32–3 (‘indecisions … revisions’), 48 (‘decisions and revisions’). Cf. Aubade, 31–3 (‘vision … indecision’).

Reference Back

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 4 contains: after ‘20 / 6 / 55’, five pages of drafts of the whole poem except for the title, dated ‘5 / 8 / 55’ at the end (1/4/18); one and a half pages of further drafts of stanza 3 dated ‘21. 8. 55’ at the end (1/4/20). Published in Listen, 1. 4 (Autumn 1955), 8, and in Paris Review, 19 (Summer 1958), 37.

VARIANTS
Title Referred Back Listen, 1955; Paris Review, 1958
L to MJ, 12 Nov. 1955 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7412/91), on Reference Back: ‘in my opinion my poem was wrong, but in this way: the subject of it was being brought into communication again with my mother by a record made when any such loss of communication w^d have been unthinkable: and the oddness thereof. But the poem w^d have come better from her! I shouldn’t regard our relationship when I was one [i.e. one year old] as “a loss” but I suppose she might. In a sense it is written from her viewpoint, or my imagination of it […] the poem is only papered over cracks too deep for me to think highly of it.’ In a letter to MJ dated 14 Jan. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7412/131), he lists the poem among ‘dregs & throwouts’.
1 pretty: ‘As applied to jazz, usually had pejorative connotations’: Leggett (1999), 80, referring to Robert S. Gold, Jazz Talk (1975), 208. you: L’s mother, Eva. ‘“Listen-with-mother”, the title of the BBC radio programme, is a tag Larkin uses in jazz reviews (AWJ, 157, 231, 242) to categorise a kind of bland, unadventurous music that wouldn’t offend one’s mother’: Leggett (1999), 80. 5 home: his mother’s house. See Home is So Sad, and notes. 7 Riverside Blues: recorded in Chicago in 1923 by American jazz cornetist Joe ‘King’ Oliver (1885–1938) and his Creole Jazz Band. L had a postcard of Oliver and his band on his mantlepiece at work: letter to B. C. Bloomfield, 26 Sept. 1982 (SL, 679). However, as Leggett (1999), 81, notes, ‘for Larkin, Oliver was dangerously close to the “listen-with-mother” category. Larkin admits that he is “something of a heretic about Oliver” (AWJ, 190), one of the giants of traditional jazz; wonders aloud if Oliver “was all he was cracked up to be” (AWJ, 145); and finally confesses, “I don’t care for Oliver,” whose trumpet solos he characterises as “full of that childish wa-wa stuff” (AWJ, 248)’. 9 those antique negroes: L in a 1957 review refers to ‘ancient, unbelievable photographs of primal figures in band uniform or tuxedo’: RB (1999), 27. Noted by Trevor Tolley in AL, 12 (Oct. 2001), 37. 11 Before 1925, when electric recording began, musicians made acoustic recordings by playing into a large horn, not a microphone. Noted by Trevor Tolley in AL, 29 (Apr. 2010), 32. 12 L was born in 1922. 13 bridge: A pun on bridge as ‘a short section of four or eight bars that links the separate strains of composition’: Leggett (1999), 81. 21 Cf. Sad Steps, 18. 21–2 Cf. L to MB, 7 Aug. 1962 (SL, 344), looking back over forty years: ‘What little happens or is so isn’t at all expected or agreeable. And I don’t feel that everything could have been different if only I’d acted differently – to have acted differently I shd have needed to have felt differently, to have been different, wch means going back years and years, out of my lifetime.’

Wild Oats

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 6 (1/6/18) contains two pages of drafts, the second of the whole poem, with the title ‘Love Life’, between ‘10. 5. 62’ and ‘12. 5. 62’. Published in The Review, 5 (Feb. 1963), 11.

VARIANTS (from The Review, 1963)
11 Gave] Bought
12 I got] That came
20 to] for

The poem relates to Ruth Bowman, whom L met in Shropshire in 1943 and to whom he was engaged from May 1948 to Sept. 1950, when she ended the relationship. There is a photograph of her opposite p. 268 in Motion (1993). L to MJ, 10 Feb. 1964 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7427/89) on the poem: ‘I wouldn’t have printed it if I hadn’t believed she was all settled & happy.’

Title To ‘sow one’s wild oats’ is ‘to commit youthful excesses or follies; to spend early life in dissipation or dissolute courses (usually implying subsequent reform)’: OED. 3 KA told AT that this was a reference to Jane Exall, a friend of L’s sometime fiancée Ruth Bowman who likewise lived in Wellington, Shropshire: SL, 126 n. KA described her as ‘rather fine looking’, and L told him that he would find her ‘hard to resist if she gave me anything to resist’, but admitted that when once he took her out ‘all I got was a damp kiss on the ear’: Motion (1993), 118. L’s other references to her suggest that he found her sexually attractive: SL, 126, 135–6. He tells JBS in a letter of 2 Jan. 1951 (Hull DP 174/2/ 208): ‘I took a friend of hers [Ruth’s] out to lunch on my way back here – good-looking girl, but heavy going.’ He describes her to MJ in a letter dated 23 Sept. 1954 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7409/50) as a girl he ‘mutely admired at the time’. 4 Ruth Bowman: ‘the only girl I have met who doesn’t instantly frighten me away’, ‘we are sort of committed to each other by our characters, at least I think we are. I can’t imagine, judging from the women I meet casually, that any other girl would come within a mile of my inner feelings. It’s odd’: L to JBS, 18 May and 18 June 1948 (SL, 147, 148). L to JBS, 10 July 1951: ‘I find it amazingly difficult to talk to girls – not through shyness, so much as ignorance & apathy. I don’t know what to talk to them about & really don’t make much of a job even of the old parlour tricks. Unless a girl is ½-way to meet me I am nowhere’: SL, 172. 11–12 Ruth Bowman returned the engagement ring L had given her: Motion (1993), 194. 15 I met beautiful twice: Suzuyo Kamitani establishes from letters from Jane Exall to L, now in the Hull archive, that L had lunch dates with her in Leicester and Shrewsbury in Feb. and Dec. 1950, and that there is no evidence of further meetings: AL, 16 (Oct. 2003), 19. 22–3 L really did have the two photographs in his wallet: MB in AL, 10 (Oct. 2000), 31; Brennan (2002), 58.

Essential Beauty

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 6 (1/6/20) contains nine and a half pages of drafts of the whole poem between ‘28. 5. 62’ and ‘26. vi. 62’. At this stage the poem had the titles ‘Hoardings’ and ‘Posters’. L in a letter to MJ begun on 23 May 1962 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7425/9–11): ‘Have added about 2 lines to my long no-good poem […] it is just dull, like a mixture of John Holloway and bad Dylan Thomas […] Thursday now, & a less agreeable evening – have crossed out all I wrote last night and more, cursing & bored and raging. I am no good, all washed up, can’t even write a bad poem, let alone a good one […] Oh, curse this poem, I think I shall chuck it – I am no booldy [sic] good.’ Published in The Spectator, 209. 7006 (5 Oct. 1962), 530, when L asked RC in a letter dated 21 Sept. 1962 to make three corrections to the galley proof at ll. 21, 22 and 31, which bring these lines to the state of TWW printing (SL, 345). It was reprinted from The Spectator in The Balkite, Perry Jackson Grammar School Magazine, Doncaster, Special Issue (Nov. 1962), [25].

VARIANTS (from The Spectator, 1962)
12 the] two
26 A halfpenny] Three-halfpence
27 taste] drink

L to RC, 21 Sept. 1962 (SL, 345): ‘Delighted to hear you can use Ess. Beaut. – it is pretty crappy, really. I should like to dedicate it to Richard Hoggart, but there.’ (On Hoggart, see the note on High Windows, 2.) To MJ, 7 Oct. 1962 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7425/71): ‘On reflection I find it gets into a long skid towards the end, but the last line seems to me to “stand”, as Vernon Watkins would say.’ (L refers to Welsh poet Vernon Watkins, 1906–67, who was an early influence on him. See L’s 1966 introduction to TNS, and a 1959 review of Watkins’s Cypress and Acacia in FR, 226–7.) To Harry Chambers, 15 Jan. 1963 (Hull DPL (2) 2/4/58): ‘it is not meant to be a satire on advertisements: to me they appear as something like the platonic forms, infinitely vulgarised, but none the less “essential” to our view of the world’. L in 1964 (FR, 80–1): ‘Most people would agree that we don’t, nowadays, believe in poetic diction or poetic subject-matter. All the same, I think there are certain received opinions still very much operative which the poet flouts at his peril. Take advertisements, for instance – like most people, I have always lived in towns, and am constantly seeing enormous pictorial billboards. When I was young, I condemned them as ugly and corrupting – that is the “poetic” attitude. Later I learned to ignore them. Recently I’ve grown quite fond of them: they seem to me beautiful and in an odd way sad, like infinitely-debased Platonic essences. Now this is quite the wrong attitude: unfortunately, it was the only one that produced a poem. I called it, obviously enough, “Essential Beauty”.’ L in 1981 (FR, 49): ‘A more important thing I said was that every poem starts out as either true or beautiful. Then you try to make the true ones seem beautiful, and the beautiful ones true. I could go through my poems marking them as one or the other. “Send No Money” is true. “Essential Beauty” is beautiful. When I say beautiful, I mean the original idea seemed beautiful. When I say true, I mean something was grinding its knuckles in my neck and I thought: God, I’ve got to say this somehow, I have to find words and I’ll make them as beautiful as possible. “Dockery and Son”: that’s a true one. It’s never reprinted in anthologies, but it’s as true as anything I’ve ever written – for me anyway.’

Title Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 Nov. 1817: ‘What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.’ Asked by Ms Diana Basham whether the phrase was an allusion to Keats, L replied on 26 July 1979: ‘The short answer to your question is “Not consciously”. However, I have read Keats’s letter, many years ago, and it may well be that the phrase stuck in my mind’, the poem ‘sees advertisements as super-versions of parts of our lives, with all the nasty bits left out’: Hull DPL (2) 2/20/9. In Nov. 1974 L stated that the title was ‘meant to have philosophical implications’: Watt (1989), 1974. The Keats source is noted by Roger Craik, AL, 12 (Oct. 2001), 11. 18–19 Steve Clark and James Booth in Booth (2000), 168, 201, note the parallel repetition of ‘pure’ in March Past, 14. 29 As if on water: Miraculously, like Jesus: Matt. 14: 25, Mark 6: 48, John 6: 19. 30 drag: inhalation of cigarette smoke (slang).

Send No Money

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 5 (1/5/39) contains twelve pages of drafts of the complete poem with the title ‘What Goes On’ between ‘27-9. 60’ and ‘31. x. 60’; a page bearing a complete draft after ‘3. 11. 60’ dated ‘4. 11. 60’ at the end, and a further draft of stanzas 2 and 3 after ‘7. 11. 60’ dated ‘7 Nov’ at the end; and immediately after, another version of l. 9. Wkbk 6 (1/6/21) contains two drafts of the whole poem on two pages between ‘10. 8. 62’ and ‘21. 8. 62’. The first draft is entitled ‘Without Prejudice’; the second is untitled. Published in The Observer, 8942 (18 Nov. 1962), 24.

See L’s statement in the notes on Essential Beauty on a poem being ‘true’ or ‘beautiful’.

Title ‘Refers obliquely to those discreet advertisements headed “Send No Money”, familiar in newspapers of the 1950s and 60s, in which catalogues of embarrassing items such as hernia trusses would be offered on credit’: Booth (1992), 151. L quotes one such advert in a letter to JE dated 5 May 1959 (SL, 302): ‘SEND NO MONEY except a P.O. for 6^d and s.a.e. for first FREE lesson’. 1 fobbed: cheated, ‘taken in’. 3 Cf. Débats, Round the Point (1950): ‘M. No, trying to find out the truth about life, and express it. G. But that’s just what a writer does! M. Don’t you believe it … remember the great law of literature is: No one will enjoy reading what you did not enjoy writing. Now when did “the truth about life” ever give anyone a thrill?’: TAWG, 478. Cf. the refrain in W. H. Auden’s ‘Some say that love’s a little boy’, 16, 32, 48, 56: ‘O tell me the truth about love’. 10 A green eye betokens jealousy or envy. In Othello, 3. 3. 170, jealousy is ‘the green-eyed monster’. L to MJ, 16 Aug. 1954 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7409/9): ‘Ain’t no green in my eye, now, look you.’ 21–4 ‘Truth is so unattractive that I no longer wish to establish it’: L to MJ, 4 May 1957 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7416/5). Raphaël Ingelbien, ‘From Hardy to Yeats? Larkin’s Poetry of Ageing’, EIC, 53. 3 (2003), 272, compares Yeats, The Coming of Wisdom with Time, 3–5: ‘Through all the lying days of my youth … Now I may wither into the truth.’

Afternoons

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 5 (1/5/21) contains three pages of drafts after ‘30 / 8 [1959]’ dated ‘14. 9. 59’ at the end. After ‘unripe acorns’ (l. 20), the draft ends: ‘The sun is going down. | They are clothed in patience.’ Hull DPL 2/3/42 is a t.s. with one holograph correction. Published in Listen, 3. 3–4 (Spring 1960), 5.

VARIANTS
Title [No title] Hull DPL 2/3/42; Before Tea Listen, 1960
22 has thickened] is thicker has thickened Hull DPL 2/3/42
24 the] one Hull DPL 2/3/42

1–8 See the notes on Letter to a Friend About Girls, 15–16. 1 Cf. Winter Nocturne, 11: ‘faded summers’.

An Arundel Tomb

DATE AND TEXT
Wkbk 4 (1/4/24) contains, after ‘11 / 9 / 55’, twenty pages of drafts of the whole poem, dated ‘15 / 2 / 56’ at the end, and a further draft of the last stanza dated ‘20. 2. 56’. L tells MJ in a letter dated 7 Feb. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7413/1) that he has been ‘hacking at the Tombs poem’. There follow three letters and a postcard dated 12 Feb. (fo. 7), 21 Feb. (fo. 10, p.c.), 22 Feb. (fo. 11), and 26 Feb. (fo. 19) in which he reflects on the problems of composition and quotes lines 37–42, 21–4, 34–6, and another version of 37–42. Finally, he includes the entire poem in t.s. with holograph corrections and additions in pencil (fo. 22).
Published in London Magazine, 3. 5 (May 1956), 33–4, in Torch, University of Hull, 7. 4 (Easter 1957), 25–6, and in New Poems, 1957, ed. Kathleen Nott, C. Day-Lewis, and Thomas Blackburn (1957), 84–5. L made handwritten corrections in his copy of New Poems, 1957, now at Hull.

VARIANTS
9 left] right Bodl. MS
11 sharp] faint sharp Bodl. MS
21 would change], changing Bodl. MS (1st version);, turning Bodl.
MS (2nd version)
22 Turn] Turns Bodl. MS (1st version)
Turn the old] Ushers their Bodl. MS (2nd version)
23–4 succeeding eyes begin | To look, not read] civilities begin | A new allegiance Bodl. MS
35 Above new wars, new subtlety Bodl. MS
scrap] scrap shell L’s copy of New Poems, 1957
36 an] their Bodl. MS (1st and 2nd versions), London Magazine, 1956; their the L’s copy of New Poems, 1957
39 come] grown [alt. come] Bodl. MS (1st version)
has come to be] is all that we has come to be Bodl. MS (3rd version)
40 and] fit Bodl. MS (2nd version)
Their single sign? as if to prove Bodl. MS (3rd version)
41 Our nearest instinct nearly true: Bodl. MS (2nd version); Our early [ ] instinct true: Bodl. MS (3rd version)
42 What will survive] All that [alt. That what] survives Bodl. MS (1st version); All that survives Bodl. MS (2nd and 3rd versions)

L to MJ, 12 Feb. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7413/7): ‘It’s complete except for the last verse, which I can’t seem to finish […] It starts nicely enough, but I think I’ve failed to put over my chief idea, of their lasting so long, & in the end being remarkable only for something they hadn’t perhaps meant very seriously.’ In the middle of the Wkbk drafts, L writes: ‘Love isn’t stronger than death just because two statues hold hands for six hundred years.’ L in a letter to RC dated 21 Sept. 1962 (SL, 346): ‘But I do think A. T. is a bit timey.’ L in 1981, discussing the view that he has tended to moderate hopefulness (FR, 57): An Arundel Tomb ‘is rather a romantic poem; there’s even less reservation in that. I don’t like it much, partly because of this; technically it’s a bit muddy in the middle – the fourth and fifth stanzas seem trudging somehow, with awful rhymes like voyage / damage.’ Asked in 1981 whether he felt sceptical about the faithfulness preserved for us in stone, L replied: ‘No. I was very moved by it. Of course it was years ago. I think what survives of us is love, whether in the simple biological sense or just in terms of responding to life, making it happier, even if it’s only making a joke’: FR, 58.

Title See the note on l. 18. L and MJ visited Chichester during a holiday on the south coast before returning to work in Jan. 1956: Motion (1993), 274. 1 Side by side: As they were originally: the two figures had been split up until the restoration of the tomb was begun in 1843 by sculptor Edward Richardson (1812–68). Until then ‘the knight lacked both arms from below the shoulders […] Her right hand was missing from the wrist […] Richardson obviously did some historical research on other monuments of the period, and there are a number of couples who lie hand in hand which he could readily have studied.’ However, Richardson’s ‘only invention was to place the knight’s right-hand gauntlet in his left hand’: An Arundel Tomb, Otter Memorial Paper no. 1, by Paul Foster, Trevor Brighton and Patrick Garland (1987; repr. 1988), 16–19, 32, with an illustration on p. 20. their faces blurred: ‘Today the tomb is in a decayed state again’: ibid., 21. 6 In reality, a reclining lion is under the earl’s feet and a little dog is under the countess’s: Foster, Brighton and Garland, 15, 17. 9–10 ‘I wrote it before I learned about the restoration’: L’s reply to a question from Muriel Crane about this detail, quoted in AL, 3 (Apr. 1997). L to AT, 25 Mar. 1975: ‘in fact I’ve got the hands the wrong way round, and it should be “right-hand gauntlet”, not left-hand. A schoolmaster sent me a number of illustrations of other tombs having the same feature, so clearly it is in no way unique’: SL, 522–3. L, again, in 1981: ‘Everything went wrong with that poem: I got the hands wrong – it’s right-hand gauntlet really – and anyway the hands were a nineteenth-century addition, not pre-Baroque at all’: FR, 58. 10–12 Cf. Betjeman, Sunday Morning, King’s Cambridge, 13–14: ‘In far East Anglian churches, the clasped hands lying long | Recumbent on sepulchral slabs’. Noted by Bill Ruddick, ‘“Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique”: Philip Larkin’s Response to John Betjeman’, Critical Quarterly, 28. 4 (Winter 1986), 68–9. 18 ‘There does not survive, and there has never been recorded, a contemporary inscription to identify them; nor did Richardson invent one. The inscription to which Larkin refers was probably that on the piece of card placed beside the monument by the cathedral authorities. This identified the figures as Richard FitzAlan III, 14th Earl of Arundel and Surrey (1346–1397) and his countess’: Foster, Brighton and Garland, 19–20. Foster, Brighton and Garland (21) suggest, on the evidence of the earl’s biography and the type of armour he is shown wearing, that the effigy is of Richard FitzAlan II, 13th Earl of Arundel (c.1307–76). 20–1 L to MJ, 2 Mar. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7413/26): ‘Lehmann is taking Tomb: he doesn’t like “voyage-damage”, that’s all. It occurs to me that I pronounce it “voij”, not “voi. edj”, w^ch makes it more acceptable, I think.’ (‘Lehmann’ is English poet and man of letters John Lehmann, 1907–87, founder of London Magazine, 1954, and editor till 1961.) 31–6 L to MJ, 16 Mar. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7413/41): ‘Proofs of the Tomb have come – the penult. verse (stanza) is really shocking: still, no time now.’ 31 ‘I think by “washing at their identity” I was trying to suggest that succeeding generations of visitors (or worshippers) in the cathedral (it is Chichester, you know) slowly detracted from the individual personalities of the earl and countess simply by being so different from them and knowing so little about them’: L to P. E. G. Marshall, 11 Feb. 1980, Hull DPL (2) 1/21/15. 35 To MJ, 22 Feb. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7413/11): ‘The other revisions we agreed are harder to do – I doubt if I can substitute the concept of the unaltered atmosphere around them for “new wars, new subtlety”.’ 37 Cf. Yeats, The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner, 6, 11–12 (repeated in 17–18): ‘Ere Time transfigured me’, ‘Time | That has transfigured me’. 40 blazon: (from heraldry) description, record of virtues or excellencies. It was suggested by MJ when L asked her for a word of two syllables meaning a sign: Motion (1993), 275. To MJ, 22 Feb. 1956: ‘I think myself “their final blazon” fairly satisfactory, carrying just the right overtones of heraldry & medievalism, so for the moment I’ll keep your suggestion in reserve.’ (She had obviously made a further suggestion.) 40, 42 prove | love: John Saunders compares the rhyme of ‘proved’ and ‘loved’ in the concluding couplet of Shakespeare, sonnet 116 (which deals with the power of love to transcend time): ‘Beauty and Truth in Three Poems from The Whitsun Weddings’, Critical Essays on Philip Larkin: The Poems, ed. Linda Cookson and Brian Loughrey (1989), 46. The rhyme occurs nine times in Shakespeare’s sonnets, however, and cf. also Housman, The Carpenter’s Son, 19–20: ‘All the same’s the luck we prove, | Though the midmost hangs for love’, and Edward Thomas, Words, 40–1: ‘As the earth which you prove | That we love.’ 41–2 L to MJ, 26 Feb. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7413/19–20), when the last two lines were ‘Our nearest instinct nearly true: | All that survives of us is love’: ‘The “almost” line wouldn’t do if the last line was to start with All: I didn’t think it pretty, but it was more accurate than this one, & I felt an ugly penultimate line would strengthen the last line. Or rather, a “subtle” penult. line w^d strengthen a “simple” last line. Sea-water mean?’ To MJ, 2 Mar. 1956 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7413/26): ‘Shall ponder the last two lines. I quite like the “almost” set up, but don’t like that “That what” construction it entails.’ 42 ‘Larkin is consciously refuting The Song of Solomon 8: 6: “for love is strong as death”’: Craig Raine, ‘Counter-Intuitive Larkin’ (2007), repr. in Leader (2009), 72. Osborne (2008), 80, notes ‘the language of popular song’, citing the Billy Wells album Love Survives, ‘Our Love Will Survive’ by Eddie Rabbitt, and the Donna Summer song ‘True Love Survives’ (‘Only love will last forever, true love will survive’).