Larkin about

The title of this post rather incorrectly implies that this week's poem will be light-hearted. I am afraid/pleased to say that no, it is actually rather dark. To me it reads with the thought of Yeats and the structure of Hardy or even Hughes. This makes sense as all these poets were probably influences on his works; he was writing in the mid 1900s. I know that Hardy was a favourite of his at least.

So, an aubade is a poem written for the dawn or morning. This is the worst time of day for an alcoholic, as set out in the beginning of the poem. It seems the poet was in fact prone to alcoholism himself, and eventually it sadly killed him. Both the themes of drink and death are present in the poem, foreshadowing his own demise, and I think knowingly.

Aubade

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

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

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

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

To me, the narrator is a little unreliable. He claims to be only 'half-drunk' but then wakes at the hour of 'four' and thinks such dark thoughts that he must have had more than a few drinks. Perhaps by the end of the poem the narrator has realised this, with his simile about 'doctors' signifying an acceptance in the need for help after the reference to 'anaesthetic'.

Larkin touches on the near-taboo topic of death. I suppose after so much war in that century, people no longer wanted to accept the fact that natural death was an option. Loss of the self was not to be considered either. When pondering it, though, within yourself, you feel both the extent of 'never' and 'ever', as juxtaposed and rhymed on two subsequent lines. Human nature means we are sure of what happens to everyone else, but we cannot 'accept' it for ourselves.

His cynical attitude to 'religion' either offends the Christian reader (whilst making them think about their own belief) or pleases the atheist reader, which is ironic because the certainty of death is now being thought about and even welcomed in order to disprove something.

The constant comparisons and parallelisms, aided by rhymes like 'brave' and 'grave', remind the reader that death is always there and cannot be overcome, even by the virtues men struggle to achieve in life.

The final paragraph returns him to reality, demonstrating how easily we wish to forget the topic and focus on living another day. The final three lines are blunt sentences, removing all emotion from the voice and displaying how this narrator's life hardly seems worth the 'work'. He is actually most passionate about death, not life, which is sad but terribly beautiful.

It seems I have not yet studied Hardy, so it will probably be his poetry that you will find here next week. Have a good one!