Poetry Break: As in Breaking a Poem...
King Henry VIII School, Coventry
Where Philip Larkin attended...
(Image from Wikipedia)
I'm feeling under the weather this morning, so I'll once again take out my mood on that cad Philip Larkin, the British poet whose verse brought death into the world and all our woe, with loss of Eton, till one greater poet restore us...
(King Henry VIII School, after all, is a decline from Eton College, a fall from Catholic Medievalism to Protestant Modernism. But I'm being obscure, otiose, and arguably wrong, yet mostly just frivolous.)
Now to my point: does anyone recognize this poem by Philip Larkin?
The music in the piano stool. That vase.It's almost familiar, wouldn't you say? Turn it around (with original punctuation restored):
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
And turn again to what it started as.
Having no heart to put aside the theft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go,
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left.
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,The poem is "Home is so Sad," which Larkin wrote in 1964. What most interests me is that this poem almost works even if the lines are posted with their sequence reversed.
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
I wonder why that intrigues me. Perhaps because most poems can't possibly work that way . . . and because this one works that way even though Larkin probably didn't consciously intend it to do so.
Or perhaps the reversed sequence intrigues me because there's something more mysterious than the original in these lines: "Having no heart to put aside the theft / Of anyone to please, it withers so, / As if to win them back."
Or am I the only one to sense this?
Labels: John Milton, Philip Larkin
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 6:22 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Don't you see what's happened! I have it on good sources that he was writing beneath an electrically operated ceiling fan. That most insidious.
He wrote the words in pencil, by hand. When he got up to take a leak and retrieve another beer the fan made all the words rearrange.
This is why all serious scholars should never write in pencil beneath a whirling fan. Especially poets.
JK
I agree, and therefore always avoid the dizzying effects caused by the whirling blades of electric fans.
But thanks for reminding us all, for fan death can take many forms, even aesthetic ones.
Jeffery Hodges
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What would make you think to reverse the lines? Did you see them that way?
Sometimes I see a group of numbers and immediately see the series in them, and others like my birthday took me 50 some years to recognize 01/23/45.
Hathor, I wish that I were smart enough to have seen them that way!
Honestly, I don't recall exactly how I came to see that. I started this post last week, then put it off until now, so I've forgotten the original moment of recognition.
Probably, I was just playing around with the poem. I do that sometimes.
For instance, my line referring to Larkin as "the British poet whose verse brought death into the world and all our woe, with loss of Eton, till one greater poet restore us" was a play on Milton's line about the fruit of the tree of knowledge, "whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe, / With loss of Eden, till one greater Man / Restore us, and regain the blissful seat."
Once, I played around with Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" in order to figure out why it sounded meaningful despite its nonsense words. I even wrote it out backwords (and it made far less sense).
Anyway, if you can immediately perceive numerical series, you're a far cry better than I.
Hey, that sounds like a poem...
Jeffery Hodges
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