Comment 31 of 32, added on January 3rd, 2007 at 7:34 PM.

I think most of the readers got it perfectly wrong, because the poem is neither about religion nor about losing one’s religion or such like. It’s a sad poem, as “everyone old” is meant to be Larkin himself (in 1974, when the book was published, he was 52), and he complains that, when he was young, having sex was thought to be sinful, there were “bonds and gestures” (line 5) to forbid sex before marriage, and masturbation was connected with fear of hell (“or sweating in the dark / About hell and that”, lines 12 – 13), and furthermore you had to be careful not to tell too much when confessing to a priest. So he looks at a couple of young ones and believes that they are able to go down a slide (comparable to a children’s slide on a playground) to joy or even eternal bliss or happiness (children do go down slides because doing so is pure fun or joy). Then he wonders whether some forty years ago, when he, Larkin, was young, some older person might have looked at him with similar thoughts of the young ones being able to lead happier lives than “everyone old”. At last there’s the image of the “high windows”: their glass catches the light and the warmth of the sun, which means happiness (as everybody feels happy in the sun), but from the outside you can’t see into this happiness, you just see a deep blue, which is not a real physical object (as happiness itself is no physical object), and as it is not physically real, it’s also limitless, but the important thing to Larkin is: he is kept outside, he is one of the “everyone old” who cannot participate in this happiness or joy. (There’s another poem in the same volume, called “Annus Mirabilis” (= year to admire, which is 1963, the year of the Beatles’ first LP), which tells a similar story.)


richard glabotki from Germany