Philip Larkin Read Free Page A

from the everyday world which his poetry serves and celebrates.
    However, his resignation to his lot has, it seems, caused the ‘first brick’ of a new imaginative building to be laid, and he finds himself suddenly excited ‘to fever-pitch again’ by the sight of ‘two old ragged men’ clearing the drifts ‘with shovels and a spade’:
 
The beauty dries my throat.
Now they express
All that’s content to wear a worn-out coat,
All actions done in patient hopelessness [. . .]
     
    The beauty he had seen in the young girl reappears in the epiphany of these two shabby old men. They ‘sweep the girl clean from my heart’. Here it seems is a different version of the muse, realer and less conventionally beautiful than the girl. The structure of the poem imitates that of Yeats’s early Platonic meditation ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’. Yeats sought ‘Eternal beauty wandering on her way’ in the symbolic rose itself, but then found that he must come down to earth and turn his attention also to the ‘rose-breath’: to the reflection of eternal beauty in the mortal world of ‘common things that crave’. 27 Larkin retreads Yeats’s tortuous poetic steps, turning from the transcendent beauty of the girl to the less obvious beauty of the commonplace old men. The speaker claims, ‘I’m content to see / What poor mortar and bricks / I have to build with.’
    But at this point the young poet begins to slip and slide between alternative inspirations and the momentum falters. He abruptly reverts to his hopeless desire to be the girl, and the old men change from alternative muses into metaphorical artists:
     
Damn all explanatory rhymes!
To be that girl! – but that’s impossible;
For me the task’s to learn the many times
When I must stoop, and throw a shovelful [. . .]
     
    The poem ends by leaping to a quite different evocation of the beauty he seeks, in the form neither of the girl nor of the two old men, but of a preposterous Yeatsian ‘snow-white unicorn’, which in reward for his service may ‘Descend at last to me, / And put into my hand its golden horn.’ Are there invisible inverted commas of irony here? Unicorns traditionally entrust themselves to virgins; is he perhaps making derisive reference to his own virginal state? The word ‘horn’, which in letters to male friends Larkin uses frequently in its vulgar meaning, also hints at an obscene joke. The poet conjures an image of a girlish muse while holding a horn in his hand as he stoops to throw a shovelful.
    On its publication in the summer of 1945 The North Ship received only a single brief notice, in the Coventry Evening Telegraph (26 October 1945), which gives every sign of having been written by Larkin himself: ‘He has an inner vision that must be sought for with care. His recondite imagery is couched in phrases that make up in a kind of wistful, hinted beauty what they lack in lucidity.’ 28 Nevertheless his literary career was at last on track, however modestly. In May, shortly after Victory in Europe Day, he completed work on his second novel, The Kingdom of Winter , in ‘Proustian’ mood, and Montgomery’s agent Peter Watt agreed to seek a publisher for it. By now Montgomery had completed his own second novel, The Moving Toyshop , intensifying Larkin’s feeling of impatience at not yet being a published novelist. He remained passive, however. Kingsley Amis, demobbed in September 1945, was horrified to find that the finished manuscript of The Kingdom of Winter was still untyped. Larkin wrote to his parents asking for help and they paid the £5 typist’s fee. He sent the book to Watt in October 1945. Months were to pass before, in June 1946, he heard that no less a publisher than Faber had accepted it, offering an advance of £30. At last, it seemed, he was breaking into the larger literary world. Then in October 1946 the Fortune Press published Jill . He sent a copy to his father who, characteristically, responded with a