I've read a lot of Miłosz but I was unaware of his attitude to this poem. Thanks for digging into it.
There aren't many poems that express this degree of hopelessness, but off the top of my head I can think of a couple: Georg Trakl's "Grodek," and the lines that Yesenin wrote with his own blood after slashing his wrists.
I knew Trakl's poem, but not Yesenin's - a very upsetting story which I feel like I'm going to be reading more about. To your list I would add want to add many other poems, but perhaps one which is particularly important to me: Leopardi's 'A se stesso', which is one of the most extraordinary instances I know of despair made beautiful
I really enjoyed this piece. And I really love Larkin—even here at what appears his most bleak—
And I think one way of thinking about what is affirming, even in the face of the manifest content of this poem, is to bear in mind something of the idea of the great poet/critic Allen Grossman about what poetry does—that it confers the dignity of personhood on its speaker through representation (by participation in the "universal" personhood of poetry).
In Aubade, even as the mortal part of Larkin is lamenting the inevitable dissolution of his being, the poem itself is lifting up his voice into such immortality as poetry may confer, with all the resources of its art disposed toward preserving and elevating--representing--the everyday inner voice of the man in its social particularity—as you point out, this is part of the exhilaration of reading Larkin—the way the colloquial and the elevated become part of the same voice. It's something of a magic trick, really how he does this here, even while lamenting his own extinction.
Poetry grants life beyond life, but not for our body or our living consciousness.
Nevertheless here “Larkin” is, still going strong.
Thank you so much for reading it - and obviously I share your love of Larkin.
I didn't know Grossman's notion of what poetry does, but I think I agree with it. The lines of Leopardi that I mentioned in the essay express the notion that poetry (or art in general) can be affirmative in some way even when vividly representing the unhappiness of life - since they restore to it the life that it had lost. Perhaps that is similar in way to what Grossman says: for us as readers, Larkin is still living (as you say), because he was able to express his personhood in poetry, notwithstanding what it did to his body or consciousness. And part of that personhood was his fear of death, which was so strong that to deny it would be not fully to participate.
I'm very glad that you liked it, William, thank you! I probably only scratched the surface of what kind of power 'Aubade' has - it's extraordinary how it can resonate with people (Alan Bennett, mentioned in the essay, is another) who disagree with it
Thank you Alexander. As it happens, I just reread Aubade 2 nights ago before bed. Lucky for me I went to sleep and did not repeat the poem's dark meditation. Also, your description of how Larkin maintains a speaking voice in formal stanzas and uses the colloquial to launch the inspired (your description was eloquent!) had a huge impact. I still know Mr. Bleany by heart. But, as to his nihilism, I don't think it right to take This Be the Verse as his souls deepest voice (look at the end of The Whitsun Weddings). He is more like the Buddha before enlightenment refusing to submit to illusion. And light breaks through for him, though not often and not for long. But this is excellent, Thank you.
Fascinating that you should say that about Larkin, especially as I find myself both probing something of Larkin's 'refusing' (good way of putting it) and looking, or trying to look, eastwards. I don't know what familiarity he had with the Buddha (if he was to be believed when he talked about foreign countries in general, none) but there are plenty of things which might be quite consonant: the end of The Whitsun Weddings is an example, and perhaps so is the deep blue endless air at the end of High Windows.
I'm probably cursed to be one of the few people in this world who takes the last two lines of This Be the Verse literally, but I agree with you that to see that poem as his deepest voice would be a mistake. As with Schopenhauer, who at one point calls the world a multicoloured marvel, Larkin in a poem as bleak as The Old Fools describes 'the million-petalled flower of being here.' Probably neither of them would have accepted that there was a contradiction there - perhaps there is, I don't know.
Thank you so much for reading and for such a thought-provoking comment!
I don’t think he saw himself as Buddhist or had an interest. I asked myself why someone would so consistently refuse to “look on the bright side of life” and not end up dead inside, and i thought of the Buddha who refused to turn away from suffering. There is much true in Larkin’s peesimism.
I am a fan of Aubade, so much so that I have committed it to memory, and I love it for some of the reasons you have outlined here. I experience the poem like a puzzle that snaps things into place with its precision. I also experience this poem as communicating something akin to the message Alan Watts shares in The Wisdom of Insecurity or Pema Chodron in Things Fall Apart. As a meditation teacher put it to me once: the bad news is, we are falling through the air without a parachute. The good news is, there is no ground. Aubade is the "there is no ground" for dour, British, middle-aged atheists.
I like this perspective a lot, and it ties well with the more Stoic attitude I mentioned in the start of the piece, i.e. how to deal with the bad news. Aubade is in my head too and I've found myself saying it and saying it to myself in all sorts of bad moments, when (in the Miłosz-Heaney view of things) it ought to help - and yet it does.
Another terrific essay from you. That poem has always bugged the hell out of me. "I work all day, and get half-drunk at night." "Half-drunk," of course, for as we are later reminded, "Work has to be done." "Death" here is domesticated, tame, mild, passive ("The anaesthetic from which none come round."). One gets the impression that death wouldn't be so frightening ("furnace-fear"!) if one could die and still make it to work on time the next morning. Death as dissolution of body, of matter, is not to be found here. Death is merely a disruption ("no different whined at than withstood"). There will be no choking to death on phlegm in this marvelously constructed poem. 'Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil, says Lady MacBeth. Larkin himself paints the devil, so his fear is particularly unconvincing. I'm astonished when this poem (or Larkin's poetry in general) is described as bleak, dour, pessimistic, etc. To me, he seems perfectly comfortable.
Thanks for reading - I'm glad you enjoyed the essay!
I think I remember reading that somebody said of Kafka that he was happy in his unhappiness, and I can think of a few examples of people who said that similar things about Larkin. I don't (personally) agree on balance, but it's definitely something that could be argued, as you do very well, and even more definitely there's clearly a sense in which the man settled into a kind of grim attitude to life and death ('deprivation is to me what daffodils were for Wordsworth') - at the very least he got used to living and thinking as he did. Perhaps that's the side of him seen at the end of Toads Revisited: 'give me your arm, old toad / help me down Cemetery Road.'
I’m familiar with Larkin’s famous “deprivation” quip, but it seems to me, reading him, that his idea of deprivation has much in common with that rosy variety known more accurately as “nostalgia,” deprivation touched with sentiment. As far as the “Aubade” is concerned, I think of what Robert Lowell said somewhere: Death’s not a part of life, it isn’t lived through. Poets, for the most part, should leave it alone, unless, as in Sylvia Plath’s odd case, they manage to write about it posthumously. Compare “death” as conceived in the Larkin poem with Plath’s “Death & Co.” What do you think the comfy old librarian (knighted, too, I believe!) would’ve made of Plath’s poem?
Well, for me, I think it's too much to say that poets should leave death alone - I mean, Lowell didn't and (remembering your wonderful poem about Berryman) neither do you. Obviously there's a sense in which death isn't a part of life, but another sense in which it's one of the main parts of life.
As I remember, Larkin was not a very sympathetic reader of Plath, partly because he thought that the emotions she wrote about were too extreme to resonate (which he was surely wrong about). I don't remember if he ever wrote about 'Death & Co.' but I doubt he'd have liked it. He was indeed a comfy old librarian (as far as I know, he wasn't knighted) and nostalgic, as you say... Plath's madness was just too strange for him, perhaps.
I think it rather odd that one should chastise R.S. Thomas for his relentless pessimism, and praise Philip Larkin for a great poem that is a superior manifestation of thanatopic obsessions. Nor is it self-evident that acute sensitivity to psychological experience is denied to Larkin by poets who object to him. There is perhaps transcendence in the very creation of the poetic artifact. Nonetheless, I could never love a poem like “Aubade.” I don’t think it is an uncomfortable truth so much as an insipid one, and one utterly lacking the dimension of the vatic poet. There is a rationalist certitude in its despair. The mystery of language itself is missing, even as it is exercised with facility.
You could usefully pair Milosz’s view of Larkin’s poem with his essay, “Shestov or the Purity of Despair,” where Milosz sides with Shestov’s repudiation of Necessity. Milosz approves of Shestov’s existential fury, his advocacy for life not as abstraction, but as intimate reverence for the incommensurable, unique particular. If anything, Milosz is acutely aware of the brutality of the world. He can be tempted towards a gnostic aesthetic. And yet, there is still this resistance invoked in “One More Day”: “And though the good is weak, beauty is very strong./Nonbeing sprawls, everywhere it turns into ash whole expanses of being,/It masquerades in shapes and colors that imitate existence/And no one would know it, if they did not know that it was ugly.”
Of course, ugliness, the banal, anything can be taken up by the poet and by artistry transformed. Olivier-Thomas Venard’s A Poetic Christ asserts that Christ underlies all language. And yes, all language includes the language of protest, despair, sorrow, blasphemy and the monotony of bitterness; all that is held within the breadth of language which is also the universal compassion that is the gift of breath. Yet for Venard and ultimately for Milosz the art that contains the darkness is borne by Christ. In words that echo Dostoevsky, Milosz concludes his poem “And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil/Only beauty will call to them and save them/So that they will know how to say: this is true and that is false.”
Thank you for reading and for your comment, though of course I disagree with it.
I certainly do love ‘Aubade’ and I don’t think (for reasons stated in the essay) that it is insipid, facile, or lacking in mystery. I also don’t agree that sensitivity to experience is denied to Larkin by all of his detractors: the notion that there is transcendence in the creation of the poetic artefact is more or less exactly the conclusion of Heaney’s mentioned in the essay.
The different attitudes I have to Larkin and to R. S. Thomas may seem odd (and maybe they are). But I chastised the latter for misanthropy, not pessimism, and I argued (wrongly, perhaps) that Larkin doesn't display that type of misanthropy. About Thomas’s pessimism all I said was that it was incoherent, given his Christianity, for reasons which seem obvious enough (and, I admit, are clichés): Larkin’s despair at the horror of existence is not contradicted by a belief in the goodness that grounds all things.
As for the assertion that ‘the art that contains the darkness is borne by Christ’, I suspect Larkin’s attitude would probably have been depressingly commonsensical: that, if it makes sense at all, it only makes sense in a Christian context; and that (for all the reasons familiar to the theodiceans) it may not make much sense even there.
I certainly think (again, perhaps wrongly) that Larkin would have agreed with me that such an assertion is, in part at least, a complicated way of denying the possibility, and therefore the legitimacy, of unbelief: i.e. in practice, it is way of not permitting disagreement. This was the ‘threatened’ reaction that I identified in Miłosz—the kind of intolerance that he was formidably capable of recognising in the political sphere but not (or not so much) in the religious one.
Anyway, clearly we don’t agree, but it’s worth saying that, judging from some of the other comments here, it’s possible to be a believing Christian and yet love this poem. Obviously, no one is obliged to do so. Thank you again for a thought-provoking comment.
Thank you for the courtesy of response. I made no claims about whether other Christians could love the poem. I expressed a personal opinion. And of course, one can recognize a poem’s excellence without loving it, I think. I suppose one might look at the appreciation and criticism Milosz articulated for the poetry of Robinson Jeffers for further elucidation of his criteria of judgment. The question of the legitimacy of unbelief brings in many subjects regarding metaphysics, freedom, the nature of person, etc. that would be more suitable for another forum.
I was unfamiliar with 'Aubade' and old/fashioned -- and print-blinkered -- enough to be shocked by a poet's voice. Then by the dawngreet inversion. Then, felt riven. So your meticulous refinery built round poem, critiques and critics was a lifeline and oxygen. Thanks.
Thank you, Dean! - I'm glad you liked it and that you were struck by Larkin's voice. You'll have gathered that he's an important figure for me so I'm glad to share some of the reasons that he matters so much to me
Reading your quotations from Miłosz, I’m reminded of Gore Vidal’s remarks on the hatred borne by the positive man against one who strikes the negative — especially if he does so with force or skill. Nor can I quite understand why a Christian should object to Aubade while admitting that Ecclesiastes is inspired by the Holy Ghost. How deny the greatness of the poem on the grounds that it’s nihilistic? Would anyone say the same of Vergil, Horace? Lacrimae sunt rerum, and Aeneas returns through the gate of ivory. Wonderful essay, Alexander.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I rather like the book of Ecclesiastes and I've wondered some of the same things: its very existence continually suggests that it's at least plausible that nihilism of a sort can be a starting-point for some religious feeling rather than a negation of it. And I definitely agree with Gore Vidal's remark (which I didn't know - thanks for my drawing my attention to it), as well as your conclusions from it - if someone's too hostile to moments of nihilism, they'll end up throwing out a lot of literature that they shouldn't throw out.
Anyway, thank you so much for reading and I'm glad you enjoyed this!
Well, I probably wouldn't go quite that far myself, but I know what you mean. I often find myself disliking the man as I find him in biographies and letters, but the poems stay close to my bed all the same. Thank you so much for reading!
Reading In Far Fields by Gerald Murnane, I just came across this passage:
I cannot remember when I read a certain poem by a poet I had first become interested in during the 1960s: Philip Larkin. The speaker in the poem claimed to work all day and to get half-drunk at night and to wake in the early hours and to understand that he would one day die. I came close to cutting out this poem from the pages of the TLS in the way that I had cut out many items years earlier, as mentioned previously. What kept me from cutting out the poem was its title, which I took to be a word in the French language and which I considered pretentious as a title for a poem. I had never previously seen the word and I cannot recall having seen the word since, even though I may have read the word and even an explanation of its meaning in English in the pages of my copy of one or more of The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, The Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, or Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life
Very pertinent - it's wonderful to add this to my store of information. For all of Larkin's rather theatrical and very English dislike of 'abroad', there is a more 'precious' side to him (if that's the word) - I've read a few things that convince me he was a lot more familiar with French poetry than he liked to admit. It's an interesting reaction in a way, because I can more readily understand somebody disliking the title because it's almost cruelly ironic, rather than because it's pretentious.
Fantastic! So much to unpack here!!!
Thank you - happy unpacking!
I've read a lot of Miłosz but I was unaware of his attitude to this poem. Thanks for digging into it.
There aren't many poems that express this degree of hopelessness, but off the top of my head I can think of a couple: Georg Trakl's "Grodek," and the lines that Yesenin wrote with his own blood after slashing his wrists.
Thank you for reading it!
I knew Trakl's poem, but not Yesenin's - a very upsetting story which I feel like I'm going to be reading more about. To your list I would add want to add many other poems, but perhaps one which is particularly important to me: Leopardi's 'A se stesso', which is one of the most extraordinary instances I know of despair made beautiful
I really enjoyed this piece. And I really love Larkin—even here at what appears his most bleak—
And I think one way of thinking about what is affirming, even in the face of the manifest content of this poem, is to bear in mind something of the idea of the great poet/critic Allen Grossman about what poetry does—that it confers the dignity of personhood on its speaker through representation (by participation in the "universal" personhood of poetry).
In Aubade, even as the mortal part of Larkin is lamenting the inevitable dissolution of his being, the poem itself is lifting up his voice into such immortality as poetry may confer, with all the resources of its art disposed toward preserving and elevating--representing--the everyday inner voice of the man in its social particularity—as you point out, this is part of the exhilaration of reading Larkin—the way the colloquial and the elevated become part of the same voice. It's something of a magic trick, really how he does this here, even while lamenting his own extinction.
Poetry grants life beyond life, but not for our body or our living consciousness.
Nevertheless here “Larkin” is, still going strong.
Thank you so much for reading it - and obviously I share your love of Larkin.
I didn't know Grossman's notion of what poetry does, but I think I agree with it. The lines of Leopardi that I mentioned in the essay express the notion that poetry (or art in general) can be affirmative in some way even when vividly representing the unhappiness of life - since they restore to it the life that it had lost. Perhaps that is similar in way to what Grossman says: for us as readers, Larkin is still living (as you say), because he was able to express his personhood in poetry, notwithstanding what it did to his body or consciousness. And part of that personhood was his fear of death, which was so strong that to deny it would be not fully to participate.
Thank you for this wonderful piece! Aubade has given me lots of joy over the years, even though I strongly disagree with it.
well said
I'm very glad that you liked it, William, thank you! I probably only scratched the surface of what kind of power 'Aubade' has - it's extraordinary how it can resonate with people (Alan Bennett, mentioned in the essay, is another) who disagree with it
Didn't Alan Bennett recite Aubade at every dinner party he went to? I remember reading that somewhere...
He may have done, I don't know - I seem to remember reading the same thing about Harold Pinter. I'd very much like to hear both of them recite it
Oh, you're right -- I think it was Pinter and I got the two confused.
I like the idea of a series on particular poems.
Wonderful! I've been thinking about that idea for a while, so I'm very glad for the encouragement
Thank you Alexander. As it happens, I just reread Aubade 2 nights ago before bed. Lucky for me I went to sleep and did not repeat the poem's dark meditation. Also, your description of how Larkin maintains a speaking voice in formal stanzas and uses the colloquial to launch the inspired (your description was eloquent!) had a huge impact. I still know Mr. Bleany by heart. But, as to his nihilism, I don't think it right to take This Be the Verse as his souls deepest voice (look at the end of The Whitsun Weddings). He is more like the Buddha before enlightenment refusing to submit to illusion. And light breaks through for him, though not often and not for long. But this is excellent, Thank you.
Fascinating that you should say that about Larkin, especially as I find myself both probing something of Larkin's 'refusing' (good way of putting it) and looking, or trying to look, eastwards. I don't know what familiarity he had with the Buddha (if he was to be believed when he talked about foreign countries in general, none) but there are plenty of things which might be quite consonant: the end of The Whitsun Weddings is an example, and perhaps so is the deep blue endless air at the end of High Windows.
I'm probably cursed to be one of the few people in this world who takes the last two lines of This Be the Verse literally, but I agree with you that to see that poem as his deepest voice would be a mistake. As with Schopenhauer, who at one point calls the world a multicoloured marvel, Larkin in a poem as bleak as The Old Fools describes 'the million-petalled flower of being here.' Probably neither of them would have accepted that there was a contradiction there - perhaps there is, I don't know.
Thank you so much for reading and for such a thought-provoking comment!
I don’t think he saw himself as Buddhist or had an interest. I asked myself why someone would so consistently refuse to “look on the bright side of life” and not end up dead inside, and i thought of the Buddha who refused to turn away from suffering. There is much true in Larkin’s peesimism.
This is a fine read.
Thank you very much - I'm glad you liked it!
I am a fan of Aubade, so much so that I have committed it to memory, and I love it for some of the reasons you have outlined here. I experience the poem like a puzzle that snaps things into place with its precision. I also experience this poem as communicating something akin to the message Alan Watts shares in The Wisdom of Insecurity or Pema Chodron in Things Fall Apart. As a meditation teacher put it to me once: the bad news is, we are falling through the air without a parachute. The good news is, there is no ground. Aubade is the "there is no ground" for dour, British, middle-aged atheists.
Thank you for reading!
I like this perspective a lot, and it ties well with the more Stoic attitude I mentioned in the start of the piece, i.e. how to deal with the bad news. Aubade is in my head too and I've found myself saying it and saying it to myself in all sorts of bad moments, when (in the Miłosz-Heaney view of things) it ought to help - and yet it does.
Another terrific essay from you. That poem has always bugged the hell out of me. "I work all day, and get half-drunk at night." "Half-drunk," of course, for as we are later reminded, "Work has to be done." "Death" here is domesticated, tame, mild, passive ("The anaesthetic from which none come round."). One gets the impression that death wouldn't be so frightening ("furnace-fear"!) if one could die and still make it to work on time the next morning. Death as dissolution of body, of matter, is not to be found here. Death is merely a disruption ("no different whined at than withstood"). There will be no choking to death on phlegm in this marvelously constructed poem. 'Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil, says Lady MacBeth. Larkin himself paints the devil, so his fear is particularly unconvincing. I'm astonished when this poem (or Larkin's poetry in general) is described as bleak, dour, pessimistic, etc. To me, he seems perfectly comfortable.
Thanks for reading - I'm glad you enjoyed the essay!
I think I remember reading that somebody said of Kafka that he was happy in his unhappiness, and I can think of a few examples of people who said that similar things about Larkin. I don't (personally) agree on balance, but it's definitely something that could be argued, as you do very well, and even more definitely there's clearly a sense in which the man settled into a kind of grim attitude to life and death ('deprivation is to me what daffodils were for Wordsworth') - at the very least he got used to living and thinking as he did. Perhaps that's the side of him seen at the end of Toads Revisited: 'give me your arm, old toad / help me down Cemetery Road.'
I’m familiar with Larkin’s famous “deprivation” quip, but it seems to me, reading him, that his idea of deprivation has much in common with that rosy variety known more accurately as “nostalgia,” deprivation touched with sentiment. As far as the “Aubade” is concerned, I think of what Robert Lowell said somewhere: Death’s not a part of life, it isn’t lived through. Poets, for the most part, should leave it alone, unless, as in Sylvia Plath’s odd case, they manage to write about it posthumously. Compare “death” as conceived in the Larkin poem with Plath’s “Death & Co.” What do you think the comfy old librarian (knighted, too, I believe!) would’ve made of Plath’s poem?
Well, for me, I think it's too much to say that poets should leave death alone - I mean, Lowell didn't and (remembering your wonderful poem about Berryman) neither do you. Obviously there's a sense in which death isn't a part of life, but another sense in which it's one of the main parts of life.
As I remember, Larkin was not a very sympathetic reader of Plath, partly because he thought that the emotions she wrote about were too extreme to resonate (which he was surely wrong about). I don't remember if he ever wrote about 'Death & Co.' but I doubt he'd have liked it. He was indeed a comfy old librarian (as far as I know, he wasn't knighted) and nostalgic, as you say... Plath's madness was just too strange for him, perhaps.
I think it rather odd that one should chastise R.S. Thomas for his relentless pessimism, and praise Philip Larkin for a great poem that is a superior manifestation of thanatopic obsessions. Nor is it self-evident that acute sensitivity to psychological experience is denied to Larkin by poets who object to him. There is perhaps transcendence in the very creation of the poetic artifact. Nonetheless, I could never love a poem like “Aubade.” I don’t think it is an uncomfortable truth so much as an insipid one, and one utterly lacking the dimension of the vatic poet. There is a rationalist certitude in its despair. The mystery of language itself is missing, even as it is exercised with facility.
You could usefully pair Milosz’s view of Larkin’s poem with his essay, “Shestov or the Purity of Despair,” where Milosz sides with Shestov’s repudiation of Necessity. Milosz approves of Shestov’s existential fury, his advocacy for life not as abstraction, but as intimate reverence for the incommensurable, unique particular. If anything, Milosz is acutely aware of the brutality of the world. He can be tempted towards a gnostic aesthetic. And yet, there is still this resistance invoked in “One More Day”: “And though the good is weak, beauty is very strong./Nonbeing sprawls, everywhere it turns into ash whole expanses of being,/It masquerades in shapes and colors that imitate existence/And no one would know it, if they did not know that it was ugly.”
Of course, ugliness, the banal, anything can be taken up by the poet and by artistry transformed. Olivier-Thomas Venard’s A Poetic Christ asserts that Christ underlies all language. And yes, all language includes the language of protest, despair, sorrow, blasphemy and the monotony of bitterness; all that is held within the breadth of language which is also the universal compassion that is the gift of breath. Yet for Venard and ultimately for Milosz the art that contains the darkness is borne by Christ. In words that echo Dostoevsky, Milosz concludes his poem “And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil/Only beauty will call to them and save them/So that they will know how to say: this is true and that is false.”
Thank you for reading and for your comment, though of course I disagree with it.
I certainly do love ‘Aubade’ and I don’t think (for reasons stated in the essay) that it is insipid, facile, or lacking in mystery. I also don’t agree that sensitivity to experience is denied to Larkin by all of his detractors: the notion that there is transcendence in the creation of the poetic artefact is more or less exactly the conclusion of Heaney’s mentioned in the essay.
The different attitudes I have to Larkin and to R. S. Thomas may seem odd (and maybe they are). But I chastised the latter for misanthropy, not pessimism, and I argued (wrongly, perhaps) that Larkin doesn't display that type of misanthropy. About Thomas’s pessimism all I said was that it was incoherent, given his Christianity, for reasons which seem obvious enough (and, I admit, are clichés): Larkin’s despair at the horror of existence is not contradicted by a belief in the goodness that grounds all things.
As for the assertion that ‘the art that contains the darkness is borne by Christ’, I suspect Larkin’s attitude would probably have been depressingly commonsensical: that, if it makes sense at all, it only makes sense in a Christian context; and that (for all the reasons familiar to the theodiceans) it may not make much sense even there.
I certainly think (again, perhaps wrongly) that Larkin would have agreed with me that such an assertion is, in part at least, a complicated way of denying the possibility, and therefore the legitimacy, of unbelief: i.e. in practice, it is way of not permitting disagreement. This was the ‘threatened’ reaction that I identified in Miłosz—the kind of intolerance that he was formidably capable of recognising in the political sphere but not (or not so much) in the religious one.
Anyway, clearly we don’t agree, but it’s worth saying that, judging from some of the other comments here, it’s possible to be a believing Christian and yet love this poem. Obviously, no one is obliged to do so. Thank you again for a thought-provoking comment.
Thank you for the courtesy of response. I made no claims about whether other Christians could love the poem. I expressed a personal opinion. And of course, one can recognize a poem’s excellence without loving it, I think. I suppose one might look at the appreciation and criticism Milosz articulated for the poetry of Robinson Jeffers for further elucidation of his criteria of judgment. The question of the legitimacy of unbelief brings in many subjects regarding metaphysics, freedom, the nature of person, etc. that would be more suitable for another forum.
You're quite right - I may have gone on a bit long in that comment. Thanks again for taking the time to read the essay and respond!
I was unfamiliar with 'Aubade' and old/fashioned -- and print-blinkered -- enough to be shocked by a poet's voice. Then by the dawngreet inversion. Then, felt riven. So your meticulous refinery built round poem, critiques and critics was a lifeline and oxygen. Thanks.
Thank you, Dean! - I'm glad you liked it and that you were struck by Larkin's voice. You'll have gathered that he's an important figure for me so I'm glad to share some of the reasons that he matters so much to me
Cheers Alexander. Larkin and Woody, together at last.
Death is thin gruel but it goes such a long way!
Woody takes on a stanza
Religion offered swelling orchestras,
Soft-focus choirs arranged above the set.
I never trusted extras.
Eternity felt overlit, over-met.
And those who say we cannot fear the void
Since we won’t feel it - logic unemployed -
Miss that the terror lies in being cut:
No sight, no sound,
No wraparound,
No nervous if or but.
Fantastic - I love this. And I'm very glad you read the piece (and that there's someone else that sees that Larkin and Woody belong together...)
Reading your quotations from Miłosz, I’m reminded of Gore Vidal’s remarks on the hatred borne by the positive man against one who strikes the negative — especially if he does so with force or skill. Nor can I quite understand why a Christian should object to Aubade while admitting that Ecclesiastes is inspired by the Holy Ghost. How deny the greatness of the poem on the grounds that it’s nihilistic? Would anyone say the same of Vergil, Horace? Lacrimae sunt rerum, and Aeneas returns through the gate of ivory. Wonderful essay, Alexander.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I rather like the book of Ecclesiastes and I've wondered some of the same things: its very existence continually suggests that it's at least plausible that nihilism of a sort can be a starting-point for some religious feeling rather than a negation of it. And I definitely agree with Gore Vidal's remark (which I didn't know - thanks for my drawing my attention to it), as well as your conclusions from it - if someone's too hostile to moments of nihilism, they'll end up throwing out a lot of literature that they shouldn't throw out.
Anyway, thank you so much for reading and I'm glad you enjoyed this!
I think of Larkin as a weasel-faced little cretin, and yet keep his poems on my bedside table. I really love Aubade ...keeps me honest.
Well, I probably wouldn't go quite that far myself, but I know what you mean. I often find myself disliking the man as I find him in biographies and letters, but the poems stay close to my bed all the same. Thank you so much for reading!
Reading In Far Fields by Gerald Murnane, I just came across this passage:
I cannot remember when I read a certain poem by a poet I had first become interested in during the 1960s: Philip Larkin. The speaker in the poem claimed to work all day and to get half-drunk at night and to wake in the early hours and to understand that he would one day die. I came close to cutting out this poem from the pages of the TLS in the way that I had cut out many items years earlier, as mentioned previously. What kept me from cutting out the poem was its title, which I took to be a word in the French language and which I considered pretentious as a title for a poem. I had never previously seen the word and I cannot recall having seen the word since, even though I may have read the word and even an explanation of its meaning in English in the pages of my copy of one or more of The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, The Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, or Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life
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Very pertinent - it's wonderful to add this to my store of information. For all of Larkin's rather theatrical and very English dislike of 'abroad', there is a more 'precious' side to him (if that's the word) - I've read a few things that convince me he was a lot more familiar with French poetry than he liked to admit. It's an interesting reaction in a way, because I can more readily understand somebody disliking the title because it's almost cruelly ironic, rather than because it's pretentious.
Anyway, thank you very much for reading!
A wonderful addition to death-denial literature. I’m not sure why but I find the Larkin point of view rather comforting.
I do as well. Thank you for reading!