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Comment 5 of 5, added on January 25th, 2006 at 12:13 AM.
Your comments on the poem are very well articulated and thought out, but perhaps the failure is within your ability to read the poem and not in Larkin's art. If the poem is written about the dreamy idea of being able to leave it all behind (whether or not that be dreamy to you is for you to decide, and "all" is up to you to define), and Larkin has left us with an incomplete idea, then has he not truely completed his poem?.. He, assumning that Larkin is the speaker, and we as the reader, have not left it all behind. We did no walk out on our lunch break, but merely thought about it, dreamed about it and left the thought hanging in our other world, the impractical world that Larkin has commented on and left unsolved in his poem. Although not a brilliant poem... it stumped you. If infact it hadn't done so, I wouldn't have found the true value of the poem!
bobbi from Canada
Comment 4 of 5, added on October 27th, 2005 at 1:23 PM.
First--thank you to Ged for the corrections. I have lost my copy of the anthology in which I first encountered this poem decades ago. I probably would not have noticed the misspelling of "detest" until I had already read the poem with my group--embarassing! Next to Chris--if he ever checks back all these months later... I, too, first read the poem during college days, when the life I had and the life I envisioned for myself were (of course) nothing like the life I have had in the last thirty-five years. I suppose that's why a poem like this (or the other one I looked up today--WB Yeats' "Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?") which deals with the way in which people look at life, feels different and evokes different reactions at different times in our lives. I have a feeling that when I was eighteen or twenty I imagined that I would have a life much like the one the poem's voice describes--safe, dull, neatly arranged. To my surprise, I find I have lived more adventurously than I ever imagined I would. I have even had a job for which I was quartered in the fo'c'sle, with a wooden locker and a pipe-berth. So now, when circumstance draws the horizon in on me and I look at the carefully chosen stuff around my cozy home, I can read this poem and understand that at one time I was the one who "chucked up everything/And just cleared off" leaving behind people who would not admit to their envy, instead intimating that my choices were too bizarre to be practical. Philip Larkin helps me to understand why I have often got odd reactions at reunions from those I haven't seen in years. It makes their coolness easier to forgive. But--and this is a pretty big "but," I think, when I left my safe career and ran off to adventure (first a waitress at a resort, but eventually on a sailing vessel in the tropics) it wasn't "artificial" or a "step backwards," at least not for me. I think that way of seeing it is indeed the speaker's excuse, a rationalization for why it is not the proper step for that particular person, as it seemed to be for me. I don't know whether Larkin's images are as "far-fetched" as Chris would suggest, but I agree that there is an inconsistancy in Larkin's own way of picturing himself and his feelings. Perhaps that is the point! Ambivalence is to a large degree what the poem is about.
Bethany from United States
Comment 3 of 5, added on October 10th, 2005 at 2:38 PM.
Second stanza, fourth line should be "detest" not "detect". Following line should be "Its", not "It's". Third stanza, "helps me to stay" should be "helps me stay". At least according to my copy of the poem in Alvarez' /The New Poetry/.
That Larkin "fails to stick honestly to his own failure of decision" is arguable. For me, the "far-fetched images" are an ironic representation of the excuses we make for our own failures: instead of being sour, the grapes are bah! too sweet, off-puttingly, "reprehensibly" juicy - and the result is the same, a convenient rationalization of our not having even tried to seize them (he says as much in some other poem from the collection: "fat neglected chances that we insensately forbore to fleece", or thereabouts). Larkin knows this mental self-justification for what it is: cowardice, laziness, excuses - that is /precisely/ why the images are so far-fetched.
Ged Lewis from Ecuador
Comment 2 of 5, added on May 30th, 2005 at 4:06 PM.
the last lines, and indeed the whole poem, make the point that the dream of chucking everything up and just walking off is just a dream and cannot be realised; it is 'reprehensibly perfect'. As much as 'we all hate' our homes, Larkin suggests, to avoid this hate and instead remain 'sober and industrious' in reveries about chucking it all up is 'a deliberate step backwards'. Larkin is not attacking his current lifestyle, but the dreams that in providing relief, allow him to continue in said lifestyle.
Jed Wang from United States
Comment 1 of 5, added on May 20th, 2005 at 2:48 PM.
I've just re-read this poem, I think for the first time since studying it thirty years ago for A level. I'm completely stuck on the last stanza's meaning. I gather the voice - let's call it Larkin's - is rejecting the option of 'chucking up everything and just clearing off' as 'artificial', as 'a deliberate step backwards' but I'm not in the least clear how that leads him to a vision in the last two lines which seems remarkably close to the bourgeois claustrophobia of the second stanza which he also purports to reject.
Is it me? Thirty years ago, I'd have assumed so. Now I'm not so sure. There's a directness and an engagement in the writing throughout the first three stanzas - both in terms of the snippets of overheard conversation, and his commentary on them - which is lost in the last stanza to hyperbole and a kind of intellectual sophistication; hyperbole in the sense that 'swaggering the nut-strewn roads' and 'crouching in the fo'c'sle', whether stubbly or not, constitute a leap into never-never land. Wherever these locations may be, they emphatically do not belong to the quotidian, mundane everyday world in which the earlier italicized glimpses exist and constitute, in their way, heroic gestures: gestures of rejection, overthrowal and liberation. Larkin can imagine himself the other side of the world or at large on the ocean but cannot realize the much less grandiose yet far further-reaching action that would take him there, something as simple, say, as walking out of the library one lunchtime and never walking back. In a curious way, and not in any way to detract from the great truth Gide expresses, the precise nature of Larkin's failure here is captured in the very opposite of the these words: "Savoir se liberer n'est rien; l'ardu, c'est savoir etre libre" (Anyone can simply break free; the tricky thing is knowing how to stay free). Is it Larkin's failure or a poetic failure? I'm tempted, now, to suggest there is a poetic kind of failure which consists in the poet not staying uniformly close to his subject throughout. His disgust at his own dulness is believable if a little overdone and the shock of sudden light penetrating it with the promise of freedom is most of all really felt. But he doesn't stick as honestly to his own failure to seize it. He palms us off with a couple of far-fetched images rather than evoke the critical failure which is one of decision and then loses me, at any rate, in the intellectual sophistication of the last four lines.
Or am I just missing the point somehow???
chris thomson from United Kingdom
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Your comments on the poem are very well articulated and thought out, but perhaps the failure is within your ability to read the poem and not in Larkin's art. If the poem is written about the dreamy idea of being able to leave it all behind (whether or not that be dreamy to you is for you to decide, and "all" is up to you to define), and Larkin has left us with an incomplete idea, then has he not truely completed his poem?.. He, assumning that Larkin is the speaker, and we as the reader, have not left it all behind. We did no walk out on our lunch break, but merely thought about it, dreamed about it and left the thought hanging in our other world, the impractical world that Larkin has commented on and left unsolved in his poem. Although not a brilliant poem... it stumped you. If infact it hadn't done so, I wouldn't have found the true value of the poem!
bobbi from Canada