Philip Larkin - Observation

Only in books the flat and final happens,
Only in dreams we meet and interlock,
The hand impervious to nervous shock,
The future proofed against our vain suspense;

But since the tideline of the incoming past
Is where we walk, and it is air we breathe,
Remember then our only shape is death
When mask and face are nailed apart at last.

Range-finding laughter, and ambush of tears,
Machine-gun practice on the heart’s desires
Speak of a government of medalled fears.

Shake, wind, the branches of their crooked wood
Where much is picturesque but nothing good,
And nothing can be found for poor men’s fires.

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I want to talk about today’s piece as an early sketch of the person Philip Larkin would become, specifically how the young man already sounded like the old one. And because this is the kind of literary evolution that happens inside a deeply contentious person, it’s worth some primers. Let’s start with the obvious: Philip Larkin was racist. If Larkin were alive today, I can guarantee that he and I would have very different political leanings. Chances are high that my guy would have some bold lettering on his red hat. I’ve known this for as long as I’ve known about Larkin’s work. The letters that exposed him were published in 1992, which was long before I ever picked up a Larkin poem.

But being that he was born in 1922, I sort of expect him to be a piece of shit. That’s not to say that your parents or grandparents were pieces of shit, but my grandparents were born around the same time as Larkin and I can tell you that they were pieces of shit. Good, hard-working people who mostly tried to do right by folks, but by today’s standards they were definitely pieces of shit. Because people are complicated and if we’re lucky, we live long enough for our grandkids or our great-grandkids to explain to us exactly why we’re pieces of shit. We won’t believe them and will probably vote against their interests, but you know at least they tried. (It is worth specifying that when I use the term “piece of shit,” I’m really using it as a stand in for “has archaic moral standards possibly resulting from but not limited to ignorance, regressive societal norms, anxiety over change, insecurity, fear of the unknown, or unprocessed trauma”)

All of this is actually why I still get excited to read him. Because Larkin understood something about the human tendency to rot gracefully. He was a man terrified of change who couldn’t stop documenting it. And in his early poem “Observation,” written when he was barely out of college, you can already see that fear starting to calcify into craft. There’s a sort of anxious beauty to those opening lines, symmetrical and yet off kilter slightly. “Only in books the flat and final happens,/ only in dreams we meet and interlock.” The first line is clearly wartime logic that closure belongs to literature rather than life. Larkin was barely 20, studying English while the world was being leveled. You can hear the fatigue in the phrasing and in the content of the line itself. Larkin is leading with his conclusion about life, that logical endings don’t exist. The f’s (flat, final, future, proofed) exhale with a measurable exhaustion. There’s this resigned sigh that is felt in the caesura after “books” that is given literal breath when we hit the end of the line. Even the rhyme between happens and suspense doesn’t quite fit. This is form already fraying under pressure, reflecting a world that is coming apart. Contradictorily, each line itself is a unit of sense and balance in an otherwise unstable piece. “Dream” and “meet”, “impervious” and “nervous”, “future” and “proofed”. These central sounds keep us moving along despite something feeling a bit off.

The second stanza opens with what might be the clunkiest line of the poem. It’s heavy on the mouth and arguably even heavier to the mind. It’s sort of a riddle, but we don’t have time to unpack it before the line balance returns with where and air. From there, we pivot from cosmic to personal, and from idea to physical horror. “When mask and face are nailed apart at last” is such a percussive and mechanical line that it presents death as a type of disassembly. Before we were interlocking in dreams and now we are being nailed apart. In Larkin’s later work, he often takes the role of some observer who is commenting on humanity as if he is somehow outside of it. We see that detached voice that will later watch weddings from a train window or aging from a hospital corridor starting to form. Larkin’s speaker is already distancing himself from humanity as this overly self-aware observer, taking notes on how people feel. Jim Persoon wrote a great essay (here) where he talks about being shocked by Larkin writing about ejaculation on bedsheets, but even in that extreme context Larkin puts so much distance between himself and the moment he’s living in.

The third stanza turns emotion into ordinance. The political commentary is pretty obvious by the diction. “Range-finding laughter, and ambush of tears,/ Machine-gun practice on the heart’s desires/ Speak of a government of medalled fears.” He’s toying with cynicism that he will embrace fully in his future poems like “Homage to a Government.” For all it’s political references and clear displeasure with the state of things, this piece is more of a field report than a protest poem which makes sense when you consider his comfort with distance. If you’re a Larkin fan, you probably associate him with High Windows but also with windows in general. The Whitsun Wedding, Here, Mr. Bleaney, or even the darkness-as-a-window stare that he does in Aubade. One of the things that I love most about his poetry is that even his passion feels calculated. It’s less like he’s sharing his feelings with you and more like he’s sharing the random thoughts his feelings have inspired.

The final stanza opens up with an explosion of sounds. “Shake, wind, the branches of their crooked wood/ Where much is picturesque but nothing good” is fucking magical. First off, he uses a vowel contrast between the long a in “shake” and the short, nasally a in “branches” to create a sense of motion in the line. On either side of the sounds he’s got sibilance tying it all together. Ending the line with “crooked wood” slows everything down, allowing us to move into the more mouthy “much is picturesque” without stumbling over our tongues. I don’t often mention the visual rhyme of lines (because I’m a bit more obsessed with sounds) but there is a beautiful visual rhyme in that phrase. Finally, the poem collapses in on itself. “And nothing can be found for poor men’s fires.” No more ornament, no internal rhyme, no swirl. Just a fall of stress after stress in “found”, “poor” and “fires”. We opened with a repetition of “only” and we end on the repetition of “nothing”. None of it matters. It brings to mind the Aubade lines “Not to be here,/ Not to be anywhere,/ And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.” In this piece, the sound dies as it hits the word “fires”. It’s perfect and terrible. The poem ends like a match going out.