February 15, 2006
Larkin around the web
Yesterday I realized that lately there has been a proliferation of articles and weblog posts concerning Philip Larkin. (So did Maud Newton, who commented here.) Much of the activity seems spurred on by John Banville's "homage" in the current New York Review of Books, though I found the article without much merit aside from the revelation that Larkin capitulated to a request from the Countess of Dartmouth to remove an anti-business stanza from a poem she had commissioned. I had hoped for a greater engagement with Larkin's poetry. (To my mind J.M. Coetzee's review-essay on Gabriel García-Márquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores, in the same issue, is a much stronger piece.) Nonetheless Times Literary Supplement editor Peter Stothard has now commented on the article twice (one, two). Elsewhere, the Guardidan reported yesterday that a trove of audio recordings of Larkin reading his poems has been discovered in a garage in Yorkshire, a story that led me back to his well-known recording of "Aubade," one of his last poems. (Click here and scroll down for an MP3 of the recording.) All of this inspired me to spend time with my 1988 FSG edition of his Collected Poems; below is "Ambulances," perhaps my favorite in the volume.
Ambulances
Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.
Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,
And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;
For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there
At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable inside a room
The traffic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.
10 January 1961