Comment 12 of 12, added on July 9th, 2006 at 12:23 PM.

The last two lines are perhaps the most shockingly naked part of this poem for me and they remind me of how I realized the brutal nature of death many years ago: not only am I to perish, be gone, but life in this world will go on as if nothing ever happened. A few may mourn, maybe even be seriously saddened but the vast majority, the world, will grind on relentlessly. For work has to be done.

The doctor that announces my death may the very next minute be planning his holiday, go for lunch, pluck his nose and worry about the colour and texture of his faeces.

The postman carries not only news about my death; he carries bills, advertisements about circus in town and the shopping centre’s latest offers.

And all the time I am dead!

Not even when 6 millions perished up the chimney, when the Mongols divided heads from bodies until their arms hurt or when the Turks slaughtered the Armenians did the universe halt for a sentimental second.


Gautama from Norway

Comment 10 of 12, added on March 26th, 2006 at 10:41 AM.

"This for me", says Heaney, while commenting on Larkin's 'Aubade', "is the definitive post-Christian English poem, one that abolishes the soul's traditional pretension to immortality and denies the Diety's immemorial attribute of infinite personal concern". This for me, however, doesn't quite convey what the poem is really about.

Where Larkin himself confesses that "This is a special way of being afraid / No trick dispels", there is also the typical explicitness in the definition of the courage Larkin always thought so important: "Courage is no good: / It means not scaring others". These lines constitute the two often overlooked 'Larkinesque Aubade' elements. First is the element of subjectivity, the 'special way' of looking at things, and second is 'to be brave or not to be brave, that is NOT the question', the element of the psychological makeup of the poem, and, more importantly, of the poet himself.

Larkin is a stoic, people say: he is obssessed with death and is a very morbid poet. Okay, I agree. But then in order to accept this we will have to question that donnee of cold detachment in his poetry, recurring in almost every other poem of his, like the leitmotif in Hamlet. And even Hamlet is "but mad north north west", whereas for Larkin, it seems, the wind never becomes southerly; for in order to be displaced you need to be placed first: detachment is but an aftermath of attachment. And Larkin struggles throughout his poetry between the two states. Trying to appear different from the Romantics, he tries not to involve himself in anything that nourishes pleasure (thus appearing a stoic), and his espial talent allows him to talk about 'things unfair' (thus showing morbidity), yet his 'cult of ugliness' is very different from that of 'fleurs du mal'.

And what detachment? What difference? What courage? No matter how different you appear, no matter how morbid you become, no matter how courageous you are, you are going to die: death is the ONLY truth everyone can be certain of (“Most things may never happen: this one will”). Yes, we do see the typical Larkin here, obsessed with death and oblivion, resigning to what has to come in terms of finality: “Death is no different whined at than withstood”. But what we don’t see here is the element of detachment. It seems as if the wind has finally changed its course for Larkin. The wind is “southerly” now, and he can “tell a hawk from a handsaw”. He is not drawing inferences from the happenings in the external world (like in Ambulances for example), and he is most certainly not concerned about the voids of the sky (High Windows), looking for some higher moral order that can finally settle the question of hell and heaven. He is looking into the abyss within, and his realization is only too dark, too real, too obvious: “Being brave / Lets no one off the grave”. Brave he certainly was. Living alone, mechanically looking into his childhood (Arrival), he ‘arrived’ at the notion that “They fuck you up, your mom and dad” (This Be The Verse) and ‘bravely’ decided not to have any kids himself. Present, too, was gloomy enough for him to suggest that “life is boredom, then fear” (Dockery and Son), as he had already chosen wrong (Arrivals, Departures) because he had to “…take it” (Mr. Bleaney). And about the future he, somehow, knew that something was pushing him “to the side” of his own life (Afternoons). But he did not know for sure where all these factors would take him (Cf. “I don’t know” in Mr. Bleaney), and kept on rejecting, ‘bravely’, all the hailed notions of Auden and Yeats, laughing at the institution of marriage (The Whitson Weddings) and religion (Church Going), and cherishing only the “devaluing dichotomies / Nothing and paradise” (On Being Twenty-Six). But he is too old for “that kinda shit” now. He’s been working “all day” everyday of his life, but his room stays precisely the same (“Till then I see what’s really always there”)… and the then ‘unknown’ is only ‘too known’ for him now. Yes, “I will take it” (Mr. Bleaney) was the answer then. And he did take it. He did choose his loneliness, his misery, his profession, and he is not “in remorse” of all “the good not done, the love not given, time / Torn off unused”. No! He is not your ordinary poet who will waste his, and, if you like, your, time in remorse… but he, nevertheless, is afraid, though in his own “special way”. And this fear of death he won’t bother communicating to others, for “Courage… means not scaring others”. For ‘others’, the doctor-like-postman suffices, only if they are wise enough to notice the peculiar similarities between a marriage ceremony invitation and a medial report confirming HIV positive in the blood, both delivered to your doorstep, both ‘arriving’ in time. Let others wonder about these things, let others ‘lose’ themselves in the ‘daily activities’ of life, let others ‘choose’ now. His decisions were made in time, costing him the ‘indecision’, for the fear that ‘stays just on the edge of vision’, is only too overwhelming to either permit him remorse, or to suggest any philosophical interpretation of death. Hereafter or no hereafter, he is going to die, and all his courageous choices won’t do him any good. Yes, he did reject religion in his own way, and yes, he is thinking about total oblivion (in a worldly sense, for we don not, whatsoever, get any evidence from the poem itself about his denial of any life hereafter), but the moth-eaten musical brocade becomes much more than just that. It becomes everything he ‘could have’ and, if you like, ‘should have’ ‘linked with’… for now this is what he fears: death, and that too without any sense of belonging: “That this is what we fear… Nothing to love or link with”.

This, for me, is Larkin’s ultimate realization. This, for me, is the end of his poetic journey. This, for me, is his very own ‘little cross’, with which left alone, he displayed it proudly on his chest, until he died, and was forgotten.


Muhammad Yahya from Pakistan