Word: larkins
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...turning point seems to have been reached in 1948, in the never-before- publi shed "An April Sunday brings the snow." Larkin remembers his father, recently dead, and the plum jam preserves he had put up: "Which now you will not sit and eat./ Behind the glass, under the cellophane,/ Remains your final summer -- sweet/ And meaningless, and not to come again...
...fatalism of that last line strikes Larkin's most distinctive note. He is not a poet to seek out for soothing assurances. Mortality haunted him. At age 24 he writes, "Death is a cloud alone in the sky with the sun./ Our hearts, turning like fish in the green wave,/ Grow quiet in its shadow." Some 31 years later, this confession...
Rubbing noses in such gloom is only one of the demands Larkin makes on his readers. He also boasts (and sometimes complains) about his exclusion from * everyday life, his marginal role as a bachelor librarian, living alone and not growing mellow with age. In fact, Larkin makes of his infirmities a caricature, given to grim, plain speech: "Man hands on misery to man./ It deepens like a coastal shelf./ Get out as early as you can,/ And don't have any kids yourself." This apparition even mocks literature. Admitting that his youthful joy in reading has paled, he advises...
Such directives do not seem calculated to make a poet beloved, which Larkin was and is. What rescues his work from the slough of depression is the fun he makes of being alive, between parenthetical darknesses, and of himself...
These are his five most famous lines; all Larkinites have them by heart. In the expanded context of the Collected Poems, though, this stanza seems not only funny but also perfectly serious. Every generation imagines that the next one will have things easier. In "High Windows" Larkin wonders if his elders, thinking of him, expected that "He/ And his lot will all go down the long slide/ Like free bloody birds." It has not worked out that way, the poet suggests, even as he ironically envies the children of the swinging '60s their tantalizing, illusory liberties...