Larkin Poems for the New Year

Bridge for the Living

(The words of a cantata composed by Anthony Hedges to celebrate the opening of Humber Bridge, first performed at the City Hall in Hull on 11 April 1981)

Isolate city spread alongside water,

Posted with white towers, she keeps her face
Half-turned to Europe, lonely northern daughter,
Holding through centuries her separate place.

Behind her domes and cranes enormous skies

Of gold and shadows build; a filigree

Of wharves and wires, ricks and refineries,

Her working skyline wanders to the sea.

In her remote three-cornered hinterland

Long white-flowered lanes follow the riverside.

The hills bend slowly seaward, plain gulls stand,

Sharp fox and brilliant pheasant walk, and wide

Wind-muscled wheatfields wash round villages,

Their churches half-submerged in leaf. They lie

Drowned in high summer, cartways and cottages,

The soft huge haze of ash-blue sea close by.

Snow-thickened winter days are yet more still:
Farms fold in fields, their single lamps come on
Tall church-towers parley, airily audible,
Howden and Beverly, Hedon and Patrington,

While scattered on steep seas, ice-crusted ships
Like errant birds carry her loneliness,
A lighted memory no miles eclipse,
A harbour for the heart against distress.

*

And now this stride in our solitude,
A swallow-fall and rise of one plain line,
A giant step for ever to include

All our dear landscape in a new design.

The winds play on it like a harp; the song,
Sharp from the east, sun-throated from the west,
Will never to one separate shire belong,
But north and south make union manifest.

Lost centuries of local lives that rose
And flowered to fall short where they began

Seem now to reassemble and unclose,

All resurrected in this single span,

Reaching for the world, as our lives do,
As all lives do, reaching that we may give

The best of what we are and hold as true:
Always it is by bridges that we live.

According to Wikipedia, “The Humber Bridge, near Kingston upon Hull, England, is a 2,220-metre (7,280 ft) single-span suspension bridge, which opened to traffic on 24 June 1981. It was the longest of its type in the world when opened, and is now the eighth-longest. It spans the Humber (the estuary formed by the rivers Trent and Ouse) between Barton-upon-Humber on the south bank and Hessle on the north bank, connecting the East Riding of Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. When it opened in 1981 both sides of the bridge were in the non-metropolitan county of Humberside until its dissolution in 1996. The bridge itself can be seen for miles around and as far as Patrington in the East Riding of Yorkshire. As of 2006, the bridge carried an average of 120,000 vehicles per week.”

MCMXIV

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently

As if they were stretched outside

The Oval or Villa Park,

The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces

Grinning as if it were all

An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached

Established names on the sunblinds,

The farthings and sovereigns,

And the dark-clothed children at play

Called after kings and queens,

The tin advertisements

For cocoa and twist, and the pubs

Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring:

The place-names all hazed over

With flowering grasses, and fields

Shadowing Domesday lines

Under wheat's restless silence;

The differently dressed servants

With tiny rooms in huge houses,

The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word—the men

Leaving the gradens tidy,

The thousands of marriages

Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

New Eyes Each Year

New eyes each year

Find old books here,
And new books, too,

Old eyes renew;
So youth and age

Like ink and page

In this house join,
Minting new coin.

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Street Lamps

When night slinks, like a puma, down the sky

    And the bare windy streets echo with silence,
Street lamps come out, and lean at corners, awry,

    Casting black shadows, oblique and intense;
So they burn on, impersonal, through the night,

    Hearing the hours slowly topple past

Like cold drops from a glistening stalactite,
    Until grey planes splinter the gloom at last;

Then they go out.

                                 I think I noticed once

    —'Twas morning—one sole street-lamp still bright-lit,

Which, like a senile grin, like an old dunce,

    Vied with the blue sky, and tried to rival it;

And, leering pallid though its use was done,

    Tried to cast shadows contrary to the sun.

Night-Music

At one the wind rose,
And with it the noise,
Of the black poplars.

Long since had the living

By a thin twine

Been led into their dreams

Where lanterns shine

Under a still veil

Of falling streams;

Long since had the dead

Become untroubled

In the light soil.
There were no mouths

To drink of the wind,

Nor any eyes

To sharpen on the stars'

Wide heaven-holding,

Only the sound

Long sibilant-muscled trees

Were lifting up, the black poplars.

And in their blazing solitude

The stars sang in their sockets through the night:
'Blow bright, blow bright

The coal of this unquickened world.'

Absences

Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.

Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,

A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play

Where there are no ships and no shallows.

Above the sea, the yet more shoreless day,

Riddled by wind, trails lit-up galleries:
They shift to giant ribbing, sift away.

Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!

Pigeons

On shallow slates the pigeons shift together,

Backing against a thin rain from the west
Blown across each sunk head and settled feather.

Huddling round the warm stack suits them best,

Till winter daylight weakens, and they grow

Hardly defined against the brickwork. Soon,

Light from a small intense lopsided moon
Shows them, black as their shadows, sleeping so.

Midwinter Waking

Paw there. Snout there as well. Mustiness. Mould.
Darkness; a desire to stretch, to scratch.

Then has the— ? Then is it the—? Nudge the thatch,

Displace the stiffened leaves: look out. How cold,

How dried a stillness. Like a blade on stone,

A wind is scraping, first this way, then that.

Morning, perhaps; but not a proper one.
Turn. Sleep will unshell us, but not yet.

'When first we faced, and touching, showed'

When first we faced, and touching, showed

How well we knew the early moves,
Behind the moonlight and the frost,

The excitement and the gratitude,

There stood how much our meeting owed

To other meetings, other loves.

The decades of a different life

That opened past your inch-close eyes

Belonged to others, lavished, lost;

Nor could I hold you hard enough

To call my years of hunger-strife

Back for your mouth to colonise.

Admitted: and the pain is real.
But when did love not try to change

The world back to itself—no cost,

No past, no people else at all—
Only what meeting made us feel,
So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?

New Year Poem

The short afternoon ends, and the year is over;
Above trees at the end of the garden the sky is unchanged,

An endless sky; and the wet streets, as ever,

Between standing houses are empty and unchallenged.

From roads where men go home I walk apart

—The buses bearing their loads away from works,

Through the dusk the bicycles coming home from bricks—

There evening like a derelict lorry is alone and mute.

These houses stand deserted, felt over smashed windows,

No milk on the step, a note pinned to the door

Telling of departure: only shadows

Move when in the day the sun is seen for an hour,

Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses:

To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget,

That there is always a changing at the root,

And a real world in which time really passes.

For even together, outside this shattered city

And its obvious message, if we had lived in that peace

Where the enormous years pass over lightly

—Yes, even there, if I looked into your face

Expecting a word or a laugh on the old conditions,

It would not be a friend who met my eye,

Only a stranger would smile and turn away,

Not one of the two who first performed these actions.

For sometimes it is shown to me in dreams

The Eden that all wish to recreate

Out of their living, from their favourite times;

The miraculous play where all their dead take part,

Once more articulate; or the distant ones
They will never forget because of an autumn talk

By a railway, an occasional glimpse in a public park,
Any memory for the most part depending on chance.

And seeing this through that I know that to be wrong,
Knowing by the flower the root that seemed so harmless

Dangerous; and all must take their warning

From these brief dreams of unsuccessful charms,

Their aloof visions of delight, where Desire

And Fear work hand-in-glove like medicals

To produce the same results. The bells

That we used to await will not be rung this year,

So it is better to sleep and leave the bottle unopened;

Tomorrow in the offices the year on the stamps will be altered;

Tomorrow new diaries consulted, new calendars stand;

With such small adjustments life will again move forward

Implicating us all; and the voice of the living be heard:
'It is to us that you should turn your straying attention;

Us who need you, and are affected by your fortune;
Us you should love and to whom you should give your word.'

     (31 December 1940)

To the Sea

To step over the low wall that divides

Road from concrete walk above the shore

Brings sharply back something known long before—

The miniature gaiety of seasides.

Everything crowds under the low horizon:
Steep beach, blue water, towels, red bathing caps,

The small hushed waves' repeated fresh collapse

Up the warm yellow sand, and further off

A white steamer stuck in the afternoon—

Still going on, all of it, still going on!

To lie, eat, sleep in hearing of the surf

(Ears to transistors, that sound tame enough

Under the sky), or gently up and down

Lead the uncertain children, frilled in white

And grasping at enormous air, or wheel

The rigid old along for them to feel

A final summer, plainly still occurs

As half an annual pleasure, half a rite,

As when, happy at being on my own,

I searched the sand for Famous Cricketers,

Or farther back, my parents, listeners

To the same clear water over smoothed pebbles,

The distant bathers' weak protesting trebles

Down at its edge, and then the cheap cigars,

The chocolate-papers, tea-leaves, and, between

The rocks, the rusting soup-tins, till the first

Few families start the trek back to the cars.

The white steamer has gone. Like breathed-on glass

The sunlight has turned milky. If the worst

Of flawless weather is our falling short,

It may be that through habit these do best,

Coming to water clumsily undressed

Yearly; teaching their children by a sort

Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.

The Whitsun Weddings

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

     Not till about

One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense

Of being in a hurry gone. We ran

Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street

Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence

The river’s level drifting breadth began,

Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept

     For miles inland,

A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.

Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and

Canals with floatings of industrial froth;

A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped

And rose: and now and then a smell of grass

Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth

Until the next town, new and nondescript,

Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn’t notice what a noise

     The weddings made

Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys

The interest of what’s happening in the shade,

And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls

I took for porters larking with the mails,

And went on reading. Once we started, though,

We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls

In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,

All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event

     Waving goodbye

To something that survived it. Struck, I leant

More promptly out next time, more curiously,

And saw it all again in different terms:

The fathers with broad belts under their suits

And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;

An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,

The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,

The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.

     Yes, from cafes

And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed

Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days

Were coming to an end. All down the line

Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;

The last confetti and advice were thrown,

And, as we moved, each face seemed to define

Just what it saw departing: children frowned

At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;

     The women shared

The secret like a happy funeral;

While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared

At a religious wounding. Free at last,

And loaded with the sum of all they saw,

We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.

Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast

Long shadows over major roads, and for

Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say

     I nearly died,

A dozen marriages got under way.

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side

—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,

And someone running up to bowl—and none

Thought of the others they would never meet

Or how their lives would all contain this hour.

I thought of London spread out in the sun,

Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across

     Bright knots of rail

Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss

Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail

Travelling coincidence; and what it held

Stood ready to be loosed with all the power

That being changed can give. We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.