Philip Larkin Read Free

satisfying and poetic. But, following this valediction, the speaker expresses puzzlement that ‘love can have already set / In dreams, when we’ve not met / More times than I can number on one hand.’ The cosy ventriloquism of Yeats is broken by the poet’s dismay that he is rehearsing the end of the relationship when he should by rights be rejoicing at its beginning.
    Similarly it is easy to read ‘Love, we must part now’ (XXIV) as a Yeatsian spell, designed to avert the threat of Ruth’s growing emotional dependence by anticipating the end of the relationship in fin de siècle world-weariness:
     
Love, we must part now: do not let it be
Calamitous and bitter. In the past
There has been too much moonlight and self-pity [. . .]
     
    There is a whiff of the nineties decadents Dowson and Symons here. And the young poet was only too aware that such gorgeous rhetorical gestures were irrelevant to his real situation. His and Ruth’s parting, nearly six years later, was indeed to be ‘calamitous and bitter’. But he could not realistically expect her to share his enjoyment of his gaudy rhetoric of tall ships ‘wet with light’, ‘waving apart’ as the sun boldly paces the sky. The poem’s tone, indeed, is so high-falutin that one might suspect the young poet of mocking himself, in Montgomery mode, inserting invisible inverted commas of irony: ‘There is regret. Always, there is regret. / But it is better that our lives unloose [. . .]’ It seems that following the bitter reproaches and self-reproaches of his long engagement to Ruth he felt painfully embarrassed by the manipulative bad faith of these poems. The quarrel was perhaps less with Yeats’s rhetoric itself than with his own use of it in the emotional mistreatment of Ruth.
    Implicit in the imagery of The North Ship is an ominous gender theme. At times we see a Larkin concerned to empathize with women in a straightforward human way. The speaker of ‘Ugly Sister’ (XIX), disregarded, climbs the thirty steps to her high room.
 
Since I was not bewitched in adolescence
And brought to love,
I will attend to the trees and their gracious silence,
To winds that move.
     
    This lonely, ugly girl offers a protest against simplificatory gender archetypes which do not allow ugly sisters to be objects of empathy. But she is not quite a real girl in a real place. The theme is expressed in the terms of the ‘myth-kitty’; she finds her consolation in a symbolic attic, communing with the elements. Overwhelmingly in the volume, women remain archetypal and idealized. They are muses, ‘sudden angels’, sweet severed images, floating wing-stiff in the sun; or, like the Polish airgirl, they are embodiments of Beauty. They may even be, as in ‘The North Ship’, femmes fatales .
    In the most complex poem in the volume, ‘I see a girl dragged by the wrists’ (XX), the girl is on the one hand the male poet’s unattainable muse; on the other she shows, in Brunette vein, his intense desire to ‘be that girl!’ The mixing of the two motives makes for a powerful but muddled effect. The poem opens with a stark antithesis between the girl rejoicing in the flux of life and the male poet alienated and self-doubting. With affected world-weariness he regrets his inability to identify himself with this girl as she is dragged laughing across the snow in courtship horseplay:
 
Nothing so wild, nothing so glad as she
Rears up in me,
And would not, though I watched an hour yet.
     
    He will never, as he had once hoped, ‘be / As she is’. Remarkably, the man who is dragging the girl by the wrists is of no concern to the poet. He feels no rivalry, no envy of this man’s masterful control over the girl. Instead he strains to identify himself with her delighted passivity. His vain hope had been to achieve her breathless submission to life. On this level the poem propounds, if with an unusual gender twist, the familiar fin de siècle theme of the alienated poet’s exclusion