 As
Reviewed By: |
His Plain Far-Reaching Singleness Philip Larkin and his Adjectives |
As
Reviewed By: |
His Plain Far-Reaching Singleness Philip Larkin and his Adjectives |
I
have two of Philip Larkin’s poems by heart—“Sad Steps” and
“Aubade”—though I admire many more, and it was while reciting the
former poem silently to myself during a particularly boring meeting that I
noticed a number of things for the first time, most of them related in one
way or another to the poet’s use of adjectives: Groping
back to bed after a piss I
part thick curtains and am startled by The
rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness. Four
o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie Under
a cavernous, a wind-picked sky. There’s
something laughable about this . . . There’s
much here that’s typical Larkin, from the word “piss,” to the
metrical compression of the line it ends, to the off rhyme it makes with
“cleanliness.” What struck me most, though, was the adjective
“cavernous” modifying “sky” in line two of the second stanza.
I’d noted it before, noted the way it renders the space described at
once enormous and claustrophobic. What I hadn’t seen was the allusion to
Plato’s metaphor of the cave. This being Larkin, of course, there’s no
sense that there is a higher world beyond the cave to which we might
escape. How
had I missed this? And what else had I missed? Well, for one thing,
there’s the way “cavernous” and “wind-picked,” the latter a
wonderful coinage in itself, and again, an adjective, combine here to turn
the land and skyscape of the poem into the Cavern of the Winds. Earlier,
in the last line of the first stanza, there are “[t]he rapid clouds,”
the adjective “rapid” not only indicating the relative speed of the
clouds, but conjuring up an image of whitewater. It doesn’t seem too
much of a leap, when imagining whitewater flowing through a cavern, to
recall Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and its “stately pleasure dome”
here: Where
Alph the sacred river ran Through
caverns measureless to man Down
to a sunless sea. By
the time I had gotten this far in my rereading of “Sad Steps,” I was
beginning to wonder if I had misjudged, not just this particular poem, but
Larkin the poet. What was the Cavern of the Winds doing here, given
Larkin’s scorn for “the myth kitty”? And the brief but profound
allusions to Plato and Coleridge—where these really the hallmarks of the
poet who wrote “Get stewed / Books are a load of crap”? Of course, the
title “Sad Steps” is itself an allusion to sonnet 168 from Astrophil
and Stella, and of course Larkin, as a writer, reader, reviewer, and
librarian, loved literature. He was as much the average bloke at the pub
as Frost was the average New England farmer. Still . . . In
more narrowly technical terms, I was struck by how abundant adjectives are
in the poem, and by how inventive Larkin’s use of them is. I realized
that, at some level, I had accepted a false chain of logic that went
something like this: Larkin is a master of the plain style. The plain
style is characterized by a relative paucity of adjectives. Therefore,
adjectives play a relatively minor role in Larkin’s poetry. While this
didn’t prevent me from appreciating individual cases here and there in
the poetry where the use of adjectives was crucial, it did effectively
block me from seeing what those cases had in common. Once I started
looking for adjectives among my favorite Larkin moments, I realized that
they were everywhere. I thought of the speaker in “Dockery and Son,”
and his description of himself as “[d]eath-suited, visitant,” of the
“wide farms” and “short-shadowed cattle” in “The Whitsun
Weddings,” and of the “harsh-named halt” and “gull-marked mud,”
among numerous other examples, in “Here.” I
thought in particular of the first stanza of “Aubade,” and the
speaker’s meditation on “Unresting death, a whole day nearer now.”
Larkin is obviously playing off the fact that we refer to the dead as
resting in peace, yet if the adjective doesn’t quite personify death, it
certainly portrays it as a relentless, vaguely intelligent force—active,
as opposed to the utterly passive dead. The adjective really seems to
refer to at least three things simultaneously: to death, which never
rests, and presumably never will, as long as anything is left alive; to
the dead, who cannot be said to “rest in peace” because they cannot be
said to exist in any meaningful sense; and to the speaker, who is lying
awake in bed contemplating mortality. I thought, too, of the conclusion of
the poem, where “The sky is white as clay, with no sun.” There the
adjectival phrase “white as clay” has the finality of earth thudding
on a coffin lid. Then there was the last stanza of “High Windows”: Rather
than words comes the thought of high windows: Again,
it’s an adjective, “endless,” that helps to define the speaker’s
existential situation. Larkin isn’t the sort of poet who plays
ostentatiously with the physical appearance of texts, but the choice of
“endless” as the concluding word of “High Windows” certainly
encourages us to look beyond the period that marks the poem’s end to the
white space beyond it, or, if we hear the poem recited, to the silence
that follows. In addition, the brilliance, both figurative and literal, of
“sun-comprehending” is obvious: in a poem that up to now has been
relentlessly demotic, the shift to a more “poetic” diction parallels
the sense of momentary exaltation that the image of “the sun
comprehending glass” calls up in us. The allusion to, and variation on,
the opening chapter of John’s gospel—“And
the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it
not”—rings some of the same changes as the “cavernous” sky in
“Sad Steps.” There, the possibility of transcendence was invoked, only
to be snatched away; here, it is Christ’s incarnation and salvific
presence in the world that are diminished until they are only a trick of
the light. That
same instinct to simultaneously exalt and undercut is at work elsewhere in
“Sad Steps” as well. Notice how much the poem owes to the adjective
“laughable” in line six: “There’s something laughable about
this.” A reader not prejudiced by previous knowledge of Larkin’s
poetry and persona would be understandably puzzled at this point. The view
described in the prior lines doesn’t seem in the least bit
“laughable,” either in the sense of being comic or pathetic, and the
description itself is both fresh and skillful. Obviously the speaker knows
something about the landscape, or about his own reaction to it, that he
hasn’t yet shared with the reader. The third stanza does little to
clarify this point, as it contains a description as effective as any so
far, and one of its most beautiful phrases, “Stone coloured light”:
The
way the moon rushes through clouds that blow Loosely
as cannon-smoke to stand apart, (Stone-coloured
light sharpening the roofs below Then,
in the fourth stanza, the speaker turns openly sarcastic: High
and preposterous and separate Lozenge
of love! Medallion of Art! O
wolves of memory! Immensements! There’s
a lot one could say about the ways in which Larkin manages to invoke
romantic images of the moon even as he mocks them, but I’m interested
here in those three adjectives, “High and preposterous and separate.”
To take them individually: The moon is “high” both literally and in
the sense of being the object of lofty meditations throughout the ages.
Perhaps—though this may be going too far—the moon is also “high”
in the sense of resembling the host held aloft at a high Anglican mass.
Certainly it is literally separate in the sense that, although it appears
to be part of the speaker’s view, it is in fact beyond the earth’s
atmosphere, and so “not of this world.” The
middle term, “preposterous,” is the odd word out here, being the
entirely subjective judgment of the speaker, and applying more to the
traditions surrounding the moon, and to the speaker’s own emotional and
poetic investment in those traditions, than to the moon itself. The
relationship among these three terms is complex, and is made more so by
the order in which they appear. Why is “preposterous” not the first or
last adjective in the list of three? Either option would seem more
logical, and the former would have the additional advantage of preserving
the meter and rhyme. What the actual order does, however, is to reproduce
the ambivalence felt by the poem’s speaker at the level of syntax.
This
practice of playing adjectives not only off the noun they modify, but off
of each other, in fact runs throughout the poet’s work. Here is the
second stanza of MCMXIV. The scene is a small English village just before
the First World War: And
the shut shops, the bleached Established
names on the sunblinds, The
farthings and sovereigns, And
dark-clothed children at play Called
after kings and queens, The
tin advertisements For
cocoa and twist, and the pubs Wide
open all day Those
“dark-clothed children,” seem already in mourning for their elders,
don’t they? And the advertisements are literally made of tin, of course,
but the there is also a suggestion that, just as someone with a “tin
ear” will have difficulty hearing pitch and tone, so the advertisements
are slightly off, slightly inappropriate given the shortages and rationing
that are to come. Even
more subtle, however, is Larkin’s pairing, across an enjambment, of the
adjectives “bleached” and “established.” In context, of course,
there is no contradiction between the two: those names that have been
printed on the blinds the longest will also be those (barring a renovation
on the part of the owner) that are most thoroughly bleached away. To be
“established” is to be older, and thus further along the path to
oblivion. The longer one survives, the less time one has to live. And yet,
the two actions, establishing and bleaching, are in a real sense
opposites; in trying to do one, one attempts to avoid, or reverse, the
other. To put it another way, we are doomed if we do, and doomed if we
don’t, and here Larkin conveys that hard truth with marvelous economy.
But
to finish up with “Sad Steps”: There’s another allusion, I think, in
the penultimate stanza where Larkin uses enjambment to make us briefly
consider the adjective “plain” as one more in a series of nouns (the
first two of which are in turn nominalizations of adjectives): One
shivers, slightly, looking up there. The
hardness and the brightness and the plain Far-reaching
singleness of that wide stare Is
a reminder of the strength and pain Of
being young, that it can’t come again But
is, for others, undiminished elsewhere. The
poem’s subject and the location of the speaker—he is, after all,
standing at a window, looking out over a nocturnal landscape—together
with the rhyme of “plain” and “pain,” allude to “Dover Beach.”
Ah,
love, let us be true Of
course, Larkin’s take is even less optimistic: Faith is so out of the
picture it does not even warrant a mention, Western culture is in part
“laughable,” and to crown it all the speaker does not seem to have a
beloved to address. Indeed, we could read all of “Sad Steps” as a
skeptical, weary response to “Dover Beach,” itself a weary response to
all that had come before it. The last adjective in the poem, and the
penultimate word, “undiminished,” is wonderfully Larkinesque, in that
it seems to make a promise, and to undercut that promise, at the same
time. In the split second it takes the mind to register the fact that
“un” is a grammatical bulwark against diminishment, the prefix
registers simply as a negation, almost a diminishment in itself. In
terms of poetic models for Larkin’s use of adjectives, the most obvious
seem to me to be early Auden and, most surprisingly, Dylan
Thomas—surprisingly, because we’re conditioned by literary history to
think of Thomas and his fellow “Apocalyptics” as the figures that
Larkin and other poets of the Movement were reacting most strongly
against. In fact, Larkin made no secret of his early admiration for
Thomas: He mightily enjoyed the poet’s reading at Oxford, and in one of
his letters from the war years, he reports subjecting a friend to a daily
barrage of “jazz and Dylan Thomas.” Then there’s his suggestive
mention years later, in a review of a recording Thomas made, of the Welsh
poet’s “adjectival combination-punching.” Though Larkin cooled on
Thomas’s poetry, it’s still possible, I think, to see the influence of
the author of such phrases as “the lilting house,” “the windfall
light,” and “the swallow thronged loft” in the work of his younger,
soberer contemporary. And
although it’s more difficult to pin down, I suspect there is also an
influence from jazz itself, at least as understood by Larkin. In his
introduction to All What Jazz,
the poet remarks on those elements that distinguish New Orleans jazz from
the bop that followed, and in doing so describes the authentic “jazz
tone” as “distinguished from ‘straight’ practice by an almost
human vibrato.” Now, vibrato is a kind of musical trembling, and I would
argue that Larkin is after just such an effect in his more unusual
orderings and combinations of adjectives. Lest there be any doubt as to
what he meant by “human vibrato,” there is this, from a brief column
entitled “Vocals”: Some
years ago it started to be a form of approbation of a jazz singer to say
he (or she—usually she) ‘used his voice like an instrument’. I was
never very happy about it; to start with, it ran counter to the accepted
theory that the basis of jazz instrumental intonation was using your
instrument like a voice, and a Negro voice at that—wide vibrato, thick,
rasping, and so on. Larkin
didn’t apply these dicta uncritically to the writing of poetry, of
course, and certainly no one ever mistook him for the voice of Black
America. Still, the ambivalences and contradictions that Larkin cultivates
in his poetry at so many points do make his work more “human” and
“rougher.” In the sense that they seem to point to places between or
among the words on the page, those points also resemble the “bent”
notes of blues, in which the player moves from one note to another via the
microtones residing in, and in between, the notes recognized by Western
music. Finally,
there’s a way in which these lists of adjectives emerge from and
simultaneously reinforce the sense that Larkin’s is a speaking voice. We
accept these very carefully chosen, often unusual, adjectives as the
product of such a voice not because they necessarily sound like the sort
of thing one might say in everyday conversation, but because they make us
hesitate slightly and doing so convince us that the speaker himself is
hesitating in the act of expression. Larkin still, for all the
inventiveness he displays in deploying adjectives, manages to come across
as extraordinarily—almost ostentatiously—plainspoken. |
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