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THE PHILIP LARKIN SOCIETY

August 2012 Nomination: The Whitsun Weddings [18 October 1958. From The Whitsun Weddings] There are so many Larkin poems I could nominate but ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is very special to me. It depicts a train journey (a travelling coincidence) between Hull and Kings Cross that I’ve made many times. I never fail to think of the poem as the train passes the place “where sky and Licolnshire and water meet.” Or to get a sense of what a train journey was like on a hot day in the late 1950s when I read the lines “All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense of being in a hurry gone. It’s a beautiful poem about relationships and destiny, it epitomises Larkin’s peculiarily English genius. Alan Johnson

June 2006 Nomination: Posterity [17 June 1968. From High Windows] There are so many of Philip Larkin’s poems I could select as my poem of the month, but one I must mention is ‘Posterity’. Several people who knew Larkin speak of his sense of humour amid the Stygian gloom that others have wrapped around him. I recall reading the poem in my early twenties after High Windows came out in 1974. I was at university and recognized the sort of academic that the poem ostensibly satirized because I had worked in what was then the British Museum Library Reading Room, which has since become the British Library in Euston Road. I remembered the overenthusiastic and desperately ambitious type very well. I recalled one specimen giving me chapter and verse on his chosen subject’s upbringing thereby ‘proving’ his thesis about the man and his work. It was only much later on the publication of Motion’s biography,

July 2001 Nomination: Mr Bleaney [May 1955. From The Whitsun Weddings] I am currently studying Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings as part of my A-Level English Literature course, I have become rather attached to “Mr. Bleaney”, the mystery and ambience which surrounds this character fascinates me, how such a grey and apathetic life can have such an affect on a household, and possess an almost immortal quality as his presence is still felt by the next tenant. Lydia Williams

July 2011 Nomination: Days [3 August 1953. From The Whitsun Weddings] As Director of the Philip Larkin Centre I am always pleased to discover new writing that spins out from an appreciation of a Larkin poem, some call and response from across the decades. I was struck to find David Nicholls’ moving and best-selling novel One Day has the entire ‘Days’ as its epigraph. For me it is a wilfully cheerful poem. It sings of a simple take on life we all can share, and then takes a rueful look at the professionals, our lawyers and doctors sweeping on to the scene in their long coats to add complexity and so confuse us. The ‘Ah’ is such a touching note, a sigh from a poet looking out from that simplicity of the first verse and smiling as he gives us an image of professionals in the fields. The poem is raised above the sentimental, the

August 2014 Nomination: Born Yesterday [20 January 1954. From The Less Deceived] Tightly-folded bud this poem is, with its riveting three-beat line recalling Robert Graves’ “Counting the Beats.” With a daughter of my own, I was happy to wish this kind of ordinariness on her (although she must now wait for age to temper her beauty). It is fellow to Yeats’ more expansive “Prayer for My Daughter” in which he makes the extraordinary observation that beautiful women often “choose a crazy salad with their meat.” As a teacher, I watched too many lovely and intelligent innocents fall for lunkheads who offered only certain ruin. On one occasion in an outdoor restaurant in Mexico, I gave voice to these lines from what I thought to be a safe distance from a couple who typified Yeats’ insight. You would think after such a near-death experience, I would have learned to be less loud. Larkin is

December 2008 Nomination: Money [19 February 1973. From High Windows] ‘Money’ has never been chosen so far. Perhaps it takes an age of inflation to fully appreciate a poem written in the aftermath of the oil shock in 1973. Now that governments are frantically trying to ‘boost consumer spending’ and that the wisdom of ‘banking your screw’ (i.e. salary) has been questioned by the credit crunch, some of Larkin’s lines are once again eerily topical. Beyond those circumstances, however, ‘Money’ remains to me a quintessential Larkin poem. The first three stanzas accumulate disenchanted commonplaces and crass colloquialisms in the same way that a miser might hoard up increasingly worthless banknotes. The final stanza, then, exchanges the end-stopped trivialities of the preceding stanzas for an almost visionary mode. The full stop after ‘singing’ forces us to stop in mid-line and ponder the comparison of money to tempting sirens. The enjambments then take us through

February 2001 Nomination: The Spirit Wooed [1950? From Collected Poems (1988)] My favourite poem by Larkin is ‘The Spirit Wooed’, thought to be written in 1950. It reminds me of a time in my life when I too was caught loving somebody who had a horrendous hold over me every single day. I can see that is what Philip was reproducing in the poem, those feelings of intense frustration and sad misunderstanding, coupled with despair and confusion. Every time I read that poem I realise what a fool I was. Natalie Taylor

June 2005 Nomination: Cut Grass [3 June 1971. From High Windows] This is sometimes thought as in some ways a companion piece to ‘The Trees’, Poem of the Month for May 2005 and another tying Larkin elegiacally to an England somewhere in the middle of the last century. But ‘The Trees’ is a discussion and a reflection on mortality, the possibility for change, the impermananence of life, and the possibility of renewal, another use of the image of a tree as a life force (as in ‘Love Songs in Age’). A bundle of tightly compressed metaphors. ‘Cut Grass’, on the other hand is almost pure imagery. The poet is completely invisible. There is no sense of an ‘I’ – there is a sense of an eye – the image falling as instant, like the image on a camera (with which Larkin was expert) preserving one moment, then and in England, now and in

March 2011 Nomination: The Mower [12 June 1979. From Collected Poems 1988] p>I would like to nominate ‘The Mower’, partly because I have an unaccountable interest in old mowers, partly because of the very precise date of its inspiration (10/06/79), but mostly (98%) because of ‘Next morning I got up and it did not’, and the killer final lines. Doubtless it’s a minority view, but ‘The Mower’ marks the summit of Larkin’s work for me. Combined with the references to the poem’s genesis in various letters, and Monica Jones’s testimony that ‘he came in howling…’, it indicates to me the hidden heart of the man. ‘What will survive’ of him is that ‘we should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.’ John Whitbourn

September 2006 Nomination: Neurotics [March–April 1949. From Collected Poems (1988)] What surprises me most about ‘Neurotics’ is that fact that its author doesn’t seem to have valued it very highly, since the poem was only published after Larkin’s death (and nearly forty years after it was written) in the superior, original version of the Collected Poems. For me it was one of the most impressive additions to the Larkin canon that came to us when that volume appeared and reading the poem today I’m still mystified as to why, given that it was completed in 1949, he deemed it of insufficient quality to find a place in The Less Deceived. To me it seems as strong as (or even stronger than) many of the poems that did make the grade. The title is a little problematic perhaps, as the now defunct psychiatric term “neurotic” was surely inappropriate, even in 1949, when applied to the far more

March 2002 Nomination: Continuing to Live [24 April 1954. From A Keepsake for the New Library] I extracted this poem from Philip under duress for the Keepsake published at the opening of the new library at the School of Oriental & African Studies, where I was then Librarian. I also managed to persuade W H Auden, Edward Brathwaite, Omar Pound, Nathaniel Tarn and Thom Blackburn to contribute original poems for this pamphlet which was designed by Frances Duncan and published for me by John Duncan, then Managing Director of Mansell. So Philip was in good company, and the poem itself I always think is as good as anything else he wrote at the time of The Less Deceived. Barry Cambray Bloomfield

February 2010 Nomination: Absences [28 November 1950. From The Less Deceived] Larkin thought of the last line as sounding ‘like a slightly unconvincing translation from a French symbolist’ – and surprisingly went on to say that he wished he could write like this more often. Coming from a background of research into French poetry, I have naturally been intrigued by this confessional analysis. And all the more so since Larkin’s wish wasn’t a casual comment – there is plenty of evidence that, of all his poems, ‘Absences’ held a special place in his eyes. When asked to choose a poem that represented his work, he submitted ‘Absences’ to an anthology called Poet’s Choice in 1962. Elsewhere in his selected letters, he writes ‘I have…special affection for ABSENCES’ and in his famous interview with John Haffenden he again mentions ‘Absences’ as a candidate for his most typical poem. So I could hazard a guess

January 2004 Nomination: Aubade [29 November 1977. The Times Literary Supplement 23 December 1977] A sulky fifty-six (Auden) means intimations of mortality are rather more frequent visitors to my mind than I’d like. The oblivion of death is what we all fear I think, and Larkin grabs it by the scruff of its neck and hangs it in front of you in a shivering way. Barry Rutter

November 2011 Nomination: Street Lamps [September 1939. From Collected Poems (1988)] With so many superb mature works available, why have I chosen a poem written when Larkin was a sixth-former? Because I teach sixth-formers, and although Larkin isn’t on any of our current syllabuses (sorry, we’re to call them “specifications” these days), I have a responsibility to my students to enable them to discover the joy of the work of their own city’s bard. Reading from early work onwards also gives us a way into Auden, Yeats and, above all, Hardy, as we follow the development of this extraordinary and – in his early days – prolific poet. Reading work which was written when Larkin was the same age as they are gives them a real wake-up call: this early stuff is crafted. It is not an unmediated outpouring of (perfectly valid) teenage angst, but it is demonstrably worked on. Lineation, rhyme, rhythm and

May 2001 Nomination: An Arundel Tomb [20 February 1956] One of the lasting bequests left perhaps unwittingly by Philip Larkin can be described as a ‘paper chase.’ Not the usual kind: but scattered all over the country are places where Larkin trod, objects which moved him and people whose lives he enriched. The Larkin reader can go to these places and experience for himself what inspired the poet. Some seven years ago I was intrigued by ‘An Arundel Tomb.’ I had, alongside the poem, the Longman Critical Essays in which John Saunders takes a look at beauty and truth in three poems from The Whitsun Weddings. There was a footnote referring the reader to an Otter Memorial Paper entitled ‘An Arundel Tomb’, by Dr. Paul Foster of West Sussex Institute of Higher Education. Thus began an interesting (for me) correspondence with Dr. Foster. I asked whether the final line of the poem, ‘What

February 2013 Nomination: Love, we must part now [1943-44. From The North Ship] If I look for unlikely favourites I suppose I’d go for The North Ship simply because they are so memorable as I discussed each one with him. Of course they’re not very good, often derivative etc. etc. but for me they have something which has nothing to do with their intrinsic literary value or with any perceptive appreciation on my part. I’d choose ‘Love, we must part now’. Ruth Siverns

July 2012 Nomination: Wires [4 November 1950. From The Less Deceived] I think this was the very first poem I ever read by Larkin. It was published in The Spectator in the issue of 2 October 1953. I was an undergraduate at Oxford at the time Within the next few months I read more Larkin poems, in The Spectator and in early issues of the Hartleys’ magazine Listen; and through all these I realised how very good Larkin was. Anthony Thwaite [April 2001]

May 2005 Nomination: The Trees [2 June 1967. From High Windows] I would like to nominate ‘The Trees’ for its mastery of versification and the nicely judged lingusitic modulation – from the mainly monosyyllabic simplicity of the first two quatrains to the splendid richness of the final stanza – with that inspired repetition of ‘afresh’. Vernon Scannell

March 2003 Nomination: Talking in Bed [10 August 1960. From The Whitsun Weddings] I chose ‘Talking in Bed’ because it is at once so simple and so profoundly philosophical, obviously situated in the context of two humans, fighting against their own alienation and against a hostile environment, but extending to some eternal human dilemmas. The projection of how difficult it can be to tell the truth and keep your friends too is one of the finest achievements of the poem. Bahaa-Eddin Mazid

July 2004 Nomination: Born Yesterday [20 January 1954. From The Less Deceived] I am a member of the Larkin Society. I included ‘Born Yesterday’ in the episode of Coronation Street for 19th March 2004. It was the christening of Tracy Barlow’s baby, and ‘Born Yesterday’ is the reading. Unfortunately the obligatory soap fracas curtailed its beautiful ending, but I scripted it so we heard the lion’s share. I was delighted to be able to plug my favourite Larkin poem – and it was perfectly suited to the storyline. If you missed the episode, there was an omnibus the following Sunday. You may of course prefer to stick pins in your eyes, but I’m proud to write for Corrie and honoured to honour Philip Larkin. ‘Born Yesterday’ has been my co-favourite (alongside ‘The Whitsun Weddings’) for many years. Congratulations on the web-site – it’s great. What would the great man have made of email and the