writing fifty: adventures everyday and extraordinary
You can read this poem, and hear the poet reading it, here.
The simplicity and beauty of this poem silence me. It captures an experience of ecstasy, release and hope—an access into eternity—which all who have shared it will recognise. ‘Delight… beauty… tears… horror… song’… In his autobiography CS Lewis defines joy as ‘an unsatisfied desire which is in itself more desirable than any satisfaction’. This quietly, profoundly moving poem makes me think of that.
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
This poem is so well-known, and rightly loved, that I feel slightly silly commenting on it, so I shall try to restrain myself. But I have to rejoice in the perfection of its form: how the regularity of the 4-iamb lines—an iamb is a ‘di-dum‘, with the stress on the dum—and the use, almost always, of perfect rhyme, combine to mimic the relentlessness of time—throughout, but particularly in the first three lines of stanza two. (In line 4 of that stanza, ‘deserts of’ breaks that rhythm, but for me has always had feeling of “galloping” in it which, I guess, is what Time’s horses would be doing.)
I also have to note the way he makes reference to a very C17th literary conceit, the blazon, which is where the poet lists the beloved’s attributes and praises them in turn, usually extravagantly—the formal trick Shakespeare was sending up in ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’. Here Marvell gives both the literary convention, and the beloved’s beauties, a mere nod, as it were in passing. ‘Yes, darling: nice eyes, great boobs… I’ve got all the moves— but hey, we’re on a clock here’.
Unlike ‘Water’, our last poem, this poem is constructing an argument, which pivots neatly—and inevitably—around the ‘But’ which opens stanza two, and which we’ve anticipated all the way from ‘Had we’, the first words of stanza one. So rhetorically brilliant, the way that all the reasons to go slowly thus somehow end up seeming to strengthen the case for going quickly! Would this deftness, or the agony of being mortal, or the sheer chutzpah win me over, I wonder, or would I have the presence of mind to point out that there are other ways of making time run, too? But just imagine the twinkle in his eye as he says those last lines, the anticipatory relish…
So: we walked the 25ish miles from Frome to Bath, stopping to swim, eat and pour water at various points along the way.Sounds like a kicking weekend, huh? But this turned out to be one of those experiences where time seems to expand to accommodate all the stuff its brings. I think of this as herniated time—time which bulges sideways and intrudes into eternity, or timelessness, or both (if they’re not the same).* All this to be obtained merely by putting one foot in front of the other.
The morning’s walk on day one took us across fields, past poplar-copses (we stopped to listen to the wind in the leaves) (more…)
I’m having a lovely time beginning to fill the bookshelves at what the afternoon knows.
A few posts ago I hit upon the happy idea of linking each post about a Thing with a poem (or sometimes even poems) which would then go into the wtak anthology. Pleasing, don’t you think? So I have today just put up a page about ‘Water’, the poem linked to the first post about thing 4. And I’m already excited about which poem is going to go with the next post. It’s like having access to a sweet shop, but one where the sweets only do you good. How marvellous is that? How can you resist? There’s not a huge range up there yet, but it is growing. Have a look!
The second post about thing 4, part two of the pilgrimage, will be with you in a few days. For the moment, I’ll just mention that I’m hoping to go and watch murmurations some time over the next few weeks or so, as one of my Things. Anyone want to join me?
You can read this poem here.
This poem has a unsentimental but quietly beautiful sense of longing in it, which may come as a pleasant surprise to those more familiar with the angrier, more bitter bits of himself which Larkin often shares. I love the idea of him getting ‘called in’ as a religion construction engineer (“Hello, Phil…? We’ve got a job in your area—are you available?”); but who better, perhaps, than him, as someone who, in the absence of faith, finds the contemplation of death so desperately terrifying? It doesn’t seem surprising, either, that he should see religion as as something ‘construct[ed]’. In ‘Aubade’ he refers to it as ‘That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/Created to pretend we never die’. A man-made construct: intricate, ornate, dense, beautiful perhaps, but ultimately something fabricated to soften and conceal something starker; something ‘motheaten’, too, which is wearing out; and not something concerned with how we might live, but only with how we might face dying. Eeeek. As so often with Larkin, I move between deep and relieved empathy with configurations of him as glimpsed through the poetry (“we read to know we are not alone…”), and an equal sense of relief that I don’t always feel as he does. I’m interested, too, that in both ‘Aubade’ and ‘Water’ he seems to conflate religion and faith. Surely, Philip, they are different things?
It’s as though this poem is haunted by the ghost of belief, echoing as it is with the significance of water in many spiritual traditions. Stanza two, for instance, evokes Christian’s crossing of the river in The Pilgrim’s Progress; and there are obvious recollections of baptism in the ‘furious devout drench’. I love it that it’s a ‘furious devout drench’: that suggests such passion, such intensity, such need and desperation. And ‘dry, different clothes’ is so economical: ‘dry’ evokes a restoration of comfort, a relief, while ‘different’ acknowledges the absoluteness of the change belief would bring about. He/we would not be the same after this ‘sousing’— could never experience the world, and life, in the same way again.
But these are all conditional verbs: ‘If I were called in…I should… Would entail… would employ…I should raise’. ‘Water’ offers a vision of something beautiful, certainly: ‘any-angled light’ is a dazzling phrase, simple, mysterious and coruscating, like the thing it describes. But though Larkin can conjure this vision so vividly, he cannot, in the end, see it with his heart—cannot give felt assent to it. A teetering thing built on ‘If’ as the opening word, ‘Water’ captures a longing, an impulse which, though powerful, can find nowhere to go. It’s not one of those poems which constructs an argument. It leads nowhere. And in this its form enacts something of its content (which I think much great poetry does). Larkin is articulating something in himself which finds no real issue—a spiritual sense without form to embody it or trust to allow it to flow. There’s an inability to resolve which leaves us hanging, ‘endlessly’. Such yearning, such an absence of what to do with it. Oh, the hole where faith might once have been…
Pass the biscuits, would you? I need my post-Larkin carb-fix…