Philip Larkin - Sad Steps

Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

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September has been a bit chaotic so far. Aside from the other insanity unfolding in the world around us, I've been getting back into the swing of a pretty meaty work schedule. For me, in these times, it's nice to have some old reliables to lean back on. A movie I've watched 1000 times, a song I've heard a million times, or a book of poems I’ve read until the spine is screaming. I suppose that's why I found myself reading Philip Larkin's High Windows this last weekend in between students. I first came across it as most people do, drawn in by the simple, reflective brilliance of “This Be The Verse,” but ever since that first read-through, my absolute favorite poem from the collection has remained “Sad Steps”.

I am a sucker for irreverence. I love how unglamorous the poem’s entry point is: "after a piss." This is some anti-Romantic moon-gazing. Not Keats wandering a nightingale grove, not Shelley’s "intellectual beauty" of moonlight on a midnight stream. It's a man in his forties stumbling back from the toilet, fumbling curtains with one hand. Larkin undercuts the whole tradition of lofty lunar invocation by shoving the words groping and piss into a single opening sentence. The vowels are blunt and bodily: the short, sour i in "piss" is still hanging in the mouth when "thick curtains" arrives. It’s like the piss follows us. It won’t stop there either. Notice also how heavy the consonants in “thick curtains” feel at this moment. Great example of how you can draw a line down with weighty sounds.

But then with "startled by/ The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness” the poem vaults into sudden grandeur. We’ve traded the trappings of biology for the glory of the cosmic. Note how the syntax elongates: "the moon’s cleanliness" isn't just visual description, it's a kind of moral condition. It is clean because it is untouched, absolute, and so far beyond the piss and curtains and human heaviness. The enjambment after “by” highlights the stumble forward into the sublime.

This is a good time to mention the rhyme scheme. There’s so much flow here. To my ear, at least, I hear ABA / BBA / CDC / EDC / FGF / GGF. In the same vein as this piece is a playful nod to Romantic poems, the structure feels like a poke as well. Rhyme keeps tugging us toward order, but the pattern loosens, slides, reforms. Like the clouds themselves, dashing, separating, reforming. There are some cool things happening midline as well. Larkin builds a whole subterranean echo chamber out of the piss. It becomes the phonetic seed that sprouts weird blossoms across the poem. “Cavernous,” “preposterous,” “hardness,” “singleness,” “undiminished” all carry that sibilant hiss or the muttering -us ending, as if the language can’t quite wash the piss out of its mouth. Even the supposedly “clean” moon is tethered by this sound.

Larkin flexes his skills in using sound to build sensation in "Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie/ Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky." If you read it out loud, it does not feel like it would follow a stanza opening on a trip to the bathroom. It feels huge and dramatic, punctuated by the plucky stops of “wind-picked sky.” Those k sounds in particular do such a good job of tying a bow on the image.

He doesn’t linger on the heft, though. The irreverence returns with "There’s something laughable about this." Larkin, the speaker, the reader, all of humanity is caught, like this poem, between the grimy realness of life and the celestial splendor of the heavens. (I’ve come back to this line about 5 times at this point wondering if celestial splendor is laying it on too thick, but fuck it. I’m leaving it.)

After building the cathedral-sky, Larkin suddenly shrugs. The moon galloping around is just silly. "Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!" He actually parodies moon-poetry clichés It’s deliberately absurd, exclamation marks and all. The vowels are showy and puffed up on purpose. Fucking “Immensements!” That "No" is everything, though. The clipped, deflating negation bringing us right back to the reality that he can’t keep the language up without cracking. And in it, there’s an admission that no one can keep up that cleanliness. We are what we are. Piss filled, or something.

To underscore this, it’s a bodily function that brings us back to earth. "One shivers slightly, looking up there." The rhythm here is bare, almost childlike. No flourishes. Just shivering under the stare of the moon.

The closing stanzas are brutal. "The hardness and the brightness and the plain/ Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare/Is a reminder of the strength and pain/ Of being young; that it can’t come again,/ But is for others undiminished somewhere." You suddenly remember that this is a poem about a guy getting up to use the bathroom at 4 am. The wonders of an aging prostate. The repetition of -ness flattens into inevitability. The singular, eternal and unblinking moon is juxtaposed against a similarly singular but very limited youth. He ends with the cruelest consolation that it will happen again but only for others. Not you. Your time is done. The timelessness of the moon and all that have looked up at it in wonder becomes a sort of cruel joke.

So the poem stages the whole comedy and tragedy of midlife in twelve lines. From piss to parody to metaphysical ache. It’s Larkin both mocking the tradition and unable to escape it, ending up shivering in its light. Which is kind of what we do with aging. Romanticism becomes an analogy for age. We make fun of it, then we find ourselves sitting in the middle of it.