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The Ironic Detachment in Philip Larkin's Poetry

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AL-USTATH No 502 Volume Two 2013 AD, 1434 AH

The Ironic Detachment in Philip larkin’s Poetry

Nadia Faydh, Ph.D.
University of Mustanserya
College of Arts
Department of English

Abstract
In spite of the numerous studies written on Philip Larkin‘s poetry, it still invites
comments and further exploration, because of its richness and appeal to the professional
as well as common reader. Philip Larkin established himself as a distinguished poet
worthy of reading and study in a time that poetry lost its connection with immediate
reality after the 1940s. He managed to restore to poetry its popularity among the
ordinary readers; he became their poet, who lives next door, the voice that expressed
their daily-life ventures and disappointments.
In his rejection to the modernist poetry of Eliot, he produced poetry easily
flowing with images from daily life routines, free of the mythological burdens and
historical juxtaposition. However, what sounds simple and direct is in fact rich with
multi-layers of meaning as the poet conveys his themes with a tone of irony which
meant hide the pathos of sympathy and failure. Thus his seeming detachment appears in
fact to be only a curtain which covers the lyrical persona‘s involvement with the
experience.
The poems selected for the study are mostly published after 1945, when Larkin
abandoned his romantic attitudes toward more empirical ones.

Ironic Detachment in Philip Larkin's Poetry

While often associated with the group of poets who were introduced
during the 1950s to the public under the title ―The Movement‖, Philip
Larkin entered the English literary scene before that decade as independent
poet through his first volume of verse called The North Ship (1945), and as
a novelist with two not quite successful works of fiction, namely, Jill
(1964) and A Girl in Winter (1947). His early writings showed the

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influence of the neo-romantics of the twentieth century, especially W.B.

Yeats and Dylan Thomas; the influence that was mostly shown in his
extensive celebration of the theme of failure in love and personal
disappointments [Bedient, 1974: 73, Weiner, 2010: internet].
This theme, expressed in the poet‘s indulgence in personal feeling,
was actually a reflection of the poet‘s personal experiences in this domain.
Larkin went through several relationships, but none was fruitful, which
explains to certain extent the dominant melancholic tone of his early
pomes. It was an expression of self pity continued to the second volume,
The Less Deceived (1955). However, the vision presented this time was
clearer, the voice firmer and meant for detached observation instead of the
earlier indulgence in personal frustration. With its twenty poems, written
between 1945-51 and published in a pamphlet entitles ―XX Poems‖, The
Less Deceived was Larkin‘s ticket toward fame and established his
reputation as a major poet in the modern literary scene [Fraser, 1970: 346].
Leaving Yeats‘ romanticism toward the objective realism of Thomas
Hardy was the most important achievement on the part of Larkin in The
Less Deceived. This does not mean that he escaped one influence just to
fall under another. Hardy gave Larkin‘s talent a sense of ―liberation‖,
[Thwaite, 1978: 104], as he became more himself rather than an imitator of
others. Larkin explains that, saying:

When I came to Hardy it was with a sense of relief that I didn't

have to try to jack myself up to a concept of poetry that lay
outside my own life—this is perhaps what I felt Yeats was
trying to make me do. [Quoted in Al-Qaysi, 1995: 22]

What exactly Hardy taught him to do with his poetry was to "relapse back
into one's own life and write about it". Larkin goes on, saying:

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Hardy taught me to feel rather than to write … of course one

has to use one's own situations, and he taught one as well to
have confidence in what one felt. [Ibid.]

In fact, Larkin shows Hardy's influence on him by tackling "truthful

themes", and be more responsive and sensitive to his immediate world,
which he ignored in his early verse. He started to present a world
dominated by that sense of disillusionment and futility which was
pervasive in England after World War II [Bedient: 75].
Furthermore, as Larkin freed himself from the influence of Yeats, he
managed to leave that romantic world which transcends ordinariness and
suffering, by relenting on art (the religion of art) [Motion, 1986: 37]. He
went instead into a different world which taught him to achieve "spiritual
wisdom" through endurance and acceptance, rather than through protesting.
Between Yeats and Hardy, Larkin also found support and guidance
throughout his literary career in Kingesly Amis (1922-95). He helped
Larkin to leave the world of juveniles towards more mature self-confident
writing, urging him "to reject youthful romantic pretentious in favor of a
more robust, ironical attitude to experience‖ [ibid.].
This kind of attitude is what led Larkin to secure a distinct rank
among his contemporaries and asserting himself as the poet of the 1950s.
His poetry started to reflect an observing detachment toward the world,
pointing out its disillusionment and frustration, showing more cynicism his
comments on man's past illusions and present realities. However, this
cynical detachment is ironic in the sense that it hides strong association or
attachment on the part of the poet toward the scene or the experience he is
reflecting on.
With this approach of writing, Larkin became more associated with
The Movement, the group of poets who were active during the mid-1950.

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This group was brought together, actually, by their common tone and
interest rather than by a pre-planned program. All of them were loosely
connected with each other, united in their rejection of the poetry written
during the 1930s for its political orientation. They rejected the surrealist
neo-romantic poetry of the 1940s also, and tried to represent the young
generation growing up under the shadow of World War II which shattered
any romantic ideas and asked for more rational, resigned attitude toward its
aftermath futility. [Regan, 2007: 147]
P. R. King [1979:3] describes Larkin‘s association with the
‗Movement‘ poets as being "casual not causal‖: participated in their New
Lines anthology (1956), and shared with them the negative reaction against
the modernist poetry of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His statements against it
summarize the Movement's stance against modernism. For Larkin, as well
as for other Movement poets, Eliot's modernism put poetry under some sort
of "critical industry" by discussing culture in an abstract way. He rejected
their techniques of using myth in immediate juxtaposition with
contemporary images describing it as "myth-kitty business". This kind of
poetry, according to Larkin, required highly intellectual readers in order to
grasp the poet's intent and meaning; a quality that makes poetry
inaccessible to ordinary readers; it becomes instead, the subject of
academics and classrooms.
The difficulty imposed on poetry modernist techniques, betrays the
duty of communicating pleasure, and this mission is what Larkin insists on
in his argument against modernism [ibid.]. He wants his readers to share
with him the experience he presents in his poems, which can be achieved
when the poem tackles what they can themselves experience in their
immediate world rather than worrying their minds attempting to discover

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AL-USTATH No 502 Volume Two 2013 AD, 1434 AH

the meaning of what they read. Larkin believes that art is meant to preserve
a perceived experience:
I write poems to preserve things I have seen / thought / felt (if
I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both
for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime
responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to
keep from oblivion for its own sake. Why I should do this I
have no idea, but I think the impulse to preserve lies at the
bottom of the art. [Thwaite: 106]

Such a statement, which he made in 1955, put Larkin at the opposite

extreme of Eliot concerning the function of the poet, he is not a visionary
or seer of some metaphysical experience that no ordinary man is capable of
achieving; he is a man talking to man [King: 2]. (This does not make
Larkin as a follower of Hardy only, but also connects him to the
Wordsworthian tradition also). Thus, Larkin's subject matter is everybody
life, the simple experiences that any man may have experienced: poems
like "Waiting for Breakfast…", "Church Going", "Dockery and Son",
"Toads" and many others testify to this end in Larkin's poetry.
Yet, the simplicity of the subject matter and language conceals
beneath a deeper meaning which reveals itself through the complexity of
the emotions conveyed throughout the poem. This makes Larkin's poetry
heavily ironical, easily read but not completely grasped unless sharing with
the speaker his point of view.
That 'deeper meaning' which most of his poems try to communicate
is the futility of contemporary world that is devoid of any ideals which man
can relent on or seek for [Motion: 60]. It is the result of his losing faith in
any "inherited and reliable absolutes", thus most of the speakers in his
poems try to seek beauty, ironically, in their sterile life. Their search is

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doomed to end in disillusionment, and they have to submit themselves to

the dominating unfaithfulness [Whalen, 1986: 8].
The purpose of the coming discussion is to illustrate this ironic
presentation of subject matter and the "deeper meaning" that each poem
reveals. Irony here is used in the sense that Northrop Frye introduces in
Anatomy of Criticism:
The term irony, then, indicates a technique of appearing to be
less than one is, which in literature becomes most commonly a
technique of saying as little and meaning as much as possible,
or, in a more general way, a pattern of words that turns away
from direct statement or its own obvious meaning. [1957:40]

The first poem which denotes Larkin's departure from the self-pity
tone to the more objective and detached is "Waiting for Breakfast. While
She Brushed Her Hair". The poem appeared in the second issue of The
North Ship (1945), but actually written a year after the first publication of
his first volume of verse [Al-Qaysi, 1995: 52] . The poem, moreover,
denotes some of the elements that are seen in his later mature poems: the
speaker is an observer commenting in the poem on what he sees and how
this observation leads to a deeper contemplation of his past and future.
The experience is a commonplace experience of a man standing by
the window waiting for the woman whom he spent the night with in the
hotel to prepare herself for breakfast. His feelings are obscure, yet the
outside atmosphere may reveal something of what he thinks:
Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair
I looked down at the empty hotel yard
Once meant for coaches. Cobblestones were wet,
But sent no light back to the loaded sky
Sunk as it was with mist down to the roofs [NS, ll. 1-5]1

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The melancholic weather reflects his own melancholy. He makes the

connections between what is outside and his own experience the previous
night and concludes the stanza: ―I thought: featureless morning,
featureless night‖.
Then, he finds that this could be a ‗misjudgment‘, for there are
‗lights burnt on / pin-points of undisturbed excitement‘. It is an
excitement that happens far away from him in those ‗rooms‘ whose
‗electric light‘ is ‗still burning‘. The melancholy and sense of futility
seem to be generated in him and the outside world is not really concerned
with it. He stands there by the window and the ‗colourless day‘ reminds
him of his ‗lost, lost world‘. The repetition of the adjective denotes a
longing on the part of the speaker to have again this ‗lost‘ world. It is
different from that mechanical life in which love presented as a routine
activity rather than being real excitement: ‗Turning, I kissed her/ Easily
for sheer joy tipping the balance of love‘.
The last stanza is a further elaboration on the speaker's longing for
his lost world. The ‗you‘ addressed in this stanza is controversial among
critics. Some read it as referring to the ―muse‖ and some say it refers to
the speaker's lost freedom after committing himself to a serious relation
[ibid.]. It is safe to say, however, that this ‗you‘ addressed in the last
stanza of the poem represents the 'lost lost world' mentioned in the
previous one. The connection will be clear when the simile of the
‗cropping deer‘ is considered. His mind is a hunter who wants to catch
that 'cropping deer':
My lost lost world
Like a cropping deer strayed near my path again,
Bewaring the mind's least clutch. [ll. 14-16]

In the next stanza the metaphor is repeated: the memory of that 'lost
world' is dear to him, again ‗as a deer or an unforced field‘. This nostalgia

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for a lost world is a central characteristic in Larkin's poetry along with

melancholy [Childs, 1999: 134]. It is what makes his detached
observation ironic as it reveals a deeply responsive attitude to what the
speaker experiences against a seeming detachment. The nostalgia here
does not imply the speaker's desire for the past as much as a
disillusionment with the present. He is not certain if that 'lost' past would
ever come back to him. He needs to relinquish a dominating present
which may increase his sense of loss. He does not assume that the past is
better, nor is the present for him, which signifies a typical attitude of
Larkin towards life. He means to say our past is bad, but our present is
worse [ibid.].

How would you have me? Towards your grace

My promises meet and lock and race like rivers,
But only when you choose. [ll. 20-22]

His past (you) and present (her) are in conflict: choosing the past means
sending the present ‗terribly away‘, yet it makes him ‗importantly live‘,
but the irony is that he'll live fragmented and lost.
Are you jealous of her?
Will you refuse to come till I have sent
Her terribly away, importantly live
Part involved, part baby, and part saint? [ll. 22-5]

If the speaker in this poem finds, if only for a moment, "a recovered joy"
[Whalen: 5], even if it is not for him, his more mature poems in later
volumes abandon totally the illusion for more 'less deceived' attitude,
detached, ironic and determined.
Adopting the ironic attitude comes only when the speaker in ―Next,
Please‖ affirms the inevitable end of man: death. Larkin thinks this
ultimate fact puts an end to all our happiness since we know we're going

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to die [Childs: 135] . Peter Childs thinks that this attitude toward life is
behind the pervasive melancholy of his poetry which implies Larkin‘s
"dread of endless extinction".
"Next, Please" does not present an individual experience observed
by a speaker. It is a lyric on the general condition of mankind. It opens
with a generalized statement that develops further in the poem through
the metaphor of "armada of promises".
Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy
Something is always approaching; every day… [LD, ll. 1-3]

But that "armada" of what we expect approaches slowly, mocking man's

restless eagerness to grasp his dreams. The coming ships are visibly
distinct, yet they never anchor to our harbors leaving "us holding
wretched stalks / of disappointment". The speaker mocks further man's
ironical situation developing his statement with the same metaphor of the
ships of our dreams:
It‘s
No sooner present then it turns to past.
Right to the last

We think each are will leave to and unload

All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong: [ll. 14-20]

Man realizes the futility and unfruitfulness of his life, gets to the truth,
only when confronted with the only 'ship' that seeks him without delay:
the 'black-sailed' ship of death.
Only one ship is seeking us, a black
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break. [ll. 25-8]

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AL-USTATH No 502 Volume Two 2013 AD, 1434
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The development of the first generalized statement can be the result of

personal experience on the part of the speaker. Yet, the general
impersonal tone is grasped again in the last stanza which speaks of
common reality: ―death becomes a sterile emptiness‖ which breeds
nothing [King: 9].
Terry Whalen finds in this poem a demonstration of "the
inevitability of Larkin's arrival at a cleansing skepticism" [Whalen: 37].
It seems that this agnosticism is a common characteristic among The
Movement poets, a fact which denotes a tendency in the writings of their
generation [Fraser: 348]. Yet, this does not mean they were anti-religious.
Larkin's poem, "Church Going" is "an agnostic's reluctant recognition of
what the church has meant". George Macbeth believes the poem is
autobiographical, representing" a highly serious attempt by a reverent
agnostic to express and come to terms with his feeling about religion‖
[Quoted in Rengachari, 1996: 94] .
The speaker is a detached, indifferent visitor who gets into the
church once he is "sure there's nothing going on", meaning that he would
avoid it if there was a service conducted. The spontaneous remarks with
which he starts reveal what the speaker hides behind his detachment, i. e.,
a reverence and sensitivity towards the place he is exploring as a tourist
[Whalen: 14].
He claims that it is only "Another church", yet he is aware and
responsive, in his own way, to that "awkward reverence" that fills the
place: He takes off his "cycle-clips", instead of taking off the hat. He goes
on in his touring exploration around the place, noticing the newness of
the roof. He questions "cleaned, or restored?", but dismisses the question
immediately restraining in himself any sign of his responsive curiosity to
the place: "some one would know: I don't".

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The visitor goes to the 'lectern', reads some verses. Yet his
emotions are betrayed unwillingly when "Here endeth" is pronounced
much more loudly then he intends. Here he ends his visit and goes to the
door, donates worthless "Irish six pence" and reflects "the place was not
worth stopping for".
In spite of the visitor's attempts to detach himself from such
experience, he admits the fact that he does stop and go into those places,
even if they were not "worth stopping for". This raises the question: why
is he doing this? Why does the place affect him, leaving him "at a loss
like this/ wondering what to look for"? His reflection on the effect of this
experience takes him further to question the ultimate destiny of the
churches.
Wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places? [LD, ll. 21-7]

This reflection on the purpose of these places in the near future denotes
the speaker's certainty over the inevitable decline of religion [Childs:
136].
The last line in this extract is heavily ironic in its reference to
churches as "unlucky places": the house of God is no longer regarded as
such. This prepares the reader for the next argument: when religion dies,
it is substituted by superstitions. One of the possible purposes of the
church is to be a place for "dubious women" who "come/ To make their
children touch a particular stone? But this is dismissed too by the speaker,
for superstition may die just like belief.

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But superstition, like belief, must die

And what remains when disbelief has gone? [ll.34-5]

If this is the inevitable end of the church, ―A shape less recognizable each
week‖, who will be the last man to enter the church? He suggests several
possibilities, the last of which is someone like him: "Bored, uninformed",
fully aware that "the ghostly silt", religion, is 'dispersed'. It is noticeable
that among his possible 'last' visitors there is no one who may come for
religious reasons. However, the speaker reveals his admiration to that
place as
It held unsplit
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation-marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built
This special shell. [ll. 48-52]
He does not only admire the place's power to survive and attract people to
itself through guiding them in their most important activities, birth,
marriage and death. He is pleased to be there in spite of his unknowing
why he feels that.
For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here, [ll. 52-4]
With such statement, the speaker ends his ironical exploration of the
place and reflection on his experience toward the place. The poem ends
with this
A serious house on serious earth it is
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destines. [ll. 55-7]
The speaker concludes his reflection over the worth of the church in an
age no longer gives religion its due, with a statement that opens his
agnosticism into questioning. For him, these churches will never "be
obsolete", there will be always someone like him in search of some

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meaning get attracted to the place which will awaken something in

himself.
And that much never will be obsolete
Since someone will for ever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious
And gravitating with it to this ground
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in
If only that so many dead lie round. [ll. 58-63]
This "ironic scorn" with which the speaker starts his exploration of the
place gives way at the end to praise and admiration; this helps the speaker
to turn "his agnostic humanism [to] an oddly religious glow" [Whalen:
17].
―Church Going‖ does not simply record personal experience of one
individual, P. R. King finds in this poem universal meaning that touches
upon an important issue in the modern world: the crisis of faith.
The value of this poem is that it does two things at once, both of
which summarize the basic dilemma of an age without faith: it
reveals that age's desire to dismiss what it considers to be spurious
crutches of superstition and religion; and it reveals our containing
need to recognize and symbolize our deepest nature. [33]

Yet, the poem does not endorse Christianity or religion. It is, rather, an
acknowledgement on the part of an agnostic that our modern world has
lost something valuable: it lost the "inherited order" [Thwaite: 107].
Not all Larkin poems end in the same positive tone. The speaker of
"Church Going" suggests a way to put an end to modern man's death-in-
life; to grasp again what we have lost.2 But reality does not offer the
chance to get back what we have once lost. It is a dominating force, and
to learn how to resign ourselves to it, the less we will be deceived by its
illusions. It is an illusion to think that there is an alternative, a satisfactory
and comforting alternative, to the "conventional, humdrum life" man
leads today [Rengachari: 135].

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Larkin mocks such an illusory thought in his ―Poetry of

Departures‖. The irony here is not directed against the man who "chucked
up everything/ And just cleared off". It is directed actually against the
speaker's desire to do the same, yet stays in the home he hates and the
room he detests. King, on the other hand, finds the irony is doubly used
against both: the escapist romantic who rebelled against his life and the
speaker's ordered life [King: 16-7]. For the speaker in this poem, the
romantic action of rebellion is embarrassing and shocking as reading
'pulp' fiction. Yet, he agrees (and approve) with such "Elemental move"
which every one wants to do:
And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
Its specially-chosen junk
The good books, the good bed
And my life, my perfect order: [LD, ll. 9-15]
Thus, he challenges himself with the question:

Surely I can, if he did?

Ironically, the answer to this challenge is quite the opposite. He decides

to stay home and be "sober and industrious". His rebellion is not leaving
everything he hates and starts new life, but commits himself to hard work,
walk the dark brown ("nut-strewn") roads "swaggering" with self
confidence and satisfaction. This is Larkin's "ironic realism" which takes
his readers to a more "conservative choice", to submit to the limitedness
of life, rather than follow the romantic cliché of rebellion (35).
In their critical introductory of Philip Larkin in The Norton
Anthology of Modern Poetry (1985), the editors say that Larkin chose to
be a less deceived rather than among the more deceived who still dream
of illusory world. The conflict between both parties is shown in his "The

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Whitsun Weddings", another autobiographical piece that recalls the same

attitude adopted by the poet in "Church Going": a detached observer who
gradually, through the process of reflecting on what he observes, gets
involved with what he sees that evokes in himself a deeper response then
his seeming detachment. Yet, this time the subject of the poem is
different, it is not faith, but the illusion of happiness. The illusion here is
exemplified in the newly married couples and their unawareness of what
may be their future life (the picture of this future is seen in another poem
of the same volume "Afternoons").
For the poet, unhappiness is the dominant condition; he said in an
interview "most people are unhappy" [Childs: 138]. Unhappiness in
marriage is particularly close subject to the poet's heart, since he himself
suffered from it as a son of a miserable couple. He wrote in his diary: "At
1:45 p.m. let me remember that the only married state I intimately know
(i.e. that of my parents) is bloody hell. Never must it be forgotten"
[quoted in Al-Qaysi: 139].
Yet, the poem, "The Whitsun Weddings", claim for more
importance than its mere personal background. It testifies for the poet‘s
ability to relent on symbolism in conveying his meaning. Andrew Motion
puts the poem as one of those that still show Yeats‘ lingering influence on
Larkin [Motion:77]. The sun, the train, the journey, the shade, the fake
ornaments of the crowd, all communicate a symbolic meaning that
enriches the poem and puts the poet alongside with Eliot in their ironic
criticism of modern life.
The speaker assumes the role of a passenger to remain detached in
watching the crowds bidding farewell to the newly married couples. He
gets into the train late, but the "tall heat" of the sun overwhelms the
atmosphere to the extent of boredom.
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense,

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Of being in a hurry gone. [WW, ll. 5-6]

Under this dominant reality (the heat of the sun), the speaker is incapable
of recognizing what happens in the "shade":
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. [ll. 31-4]
The event till now does not attract his attention, he "went on reading"
indifferent to what happens around him. The view of the girls "In
parodies of fashion" and all their other celebrating activities strikes him,
motivating in him a sense of curiosity. He starts to look at what is
dragging into "the shade"; he does not abandon completely the world of
reality to that of illusion. Thus, from his realistic stance, he satirizes the
deluded crowds:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seeing foreheads: mothers loud and fat
The nylon gloves and jewelry-substitutes
The uncle shouting smuts; and then the perms,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest. [ll. 46- 51]

For the speaker, the parents are only a future picture of those newly-
married couples
And as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw deporting. [ll. 58-9]
The speaker reflects then what each person in the crowd think of this
festival, projecting his own idea of the illusory experience of marriage:
for the fathers the whole thing is merely "farcical", the women know it is,
ironically, "happy funeral", the girls see it as "religious wounding". As
the train moves toward London, the speaker goes on contemplating the
couples sitting with him in the train. They are unaware of what is
awaiting them, and it seems that these moments will be the only worthy

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time in their lives, for the life of London, dominated by harsh reality (hot
sun) is what awaits them ahead.
A dozen marriages got underway
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
… … … … … … 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. [ll. 73- 79]

The journey ends with "a sense of falling", and this challenges any
attempt to find a positive meaning in the poem's end: the falling happens
swiftly like arrows shower. Though the image of the "arrow-shower" and
"rain" promises positive fertility, Calvin Bedient finds in this a reminding
of "inevitable dissolution, as arrows fall and rain means mould,
dampness, the cold, the elemental‖ [93].
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. [ll. 87-90]

The speaker of this poem stands in the same position of the visitor in
"Church Going": he starts as ironical witness or observer then gradually,
and through deeper reflection, he gets emotionally involved without
abandoning completely the sense of irony.
The ironic future of these newly married couples is presented
clearly in "Afternoons" of the same volume. The brides become ironically
"young mothers" who get aged before their time. Reality, symbolized by
the wind, "is ruining their courting places" which do not belong to them
anymore. Love is for the teenagers. They are no longer the deceived just-
wedded couples: the wedding albums are thrown away indifferently
"Near the television".

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Throughout his mature poetry, Larkin uses irony to mock false

beauty or idealism to show reality as a stronger destroyer against any
illusion. Love, hope, religion and even marriage, any kind of value is
doomed to be shattered away when confronting reality. The modern man
is not ready to accept false beauty in an age that cannot offer but one sure
possibility: futility or death. In "Sunny Prestatyn", the speaker passes by
an advertising poster for the seaside resort. The illusion of false beauty is
presented through a girl in a swimsuit. Someone protests and distorts the
poster:
Someone has used a knife
Or something to stop right through
The moustached lips of her smile. [WW, ll. 18-20]
Even this false beauty is changed because it is rejected and reality
imposes itself again against the alluring images:
She was too good for this life
Very soon, a great transverse tear
Left only a hand and some blue
Now fight the Cancer is there. [ll. 21-24]
That is the way Larkin looks to life after the Second World War. The
protest is not violent but negative to the extent of accepting. His only way
to signify this rejection is his irony, yet it is not the heavily satirical irony
of T. S. Eliot who wanted to shock his readers and motivate them to
change. Larkin's is a defensive irony that mocks the deceived, those who
still cherish hopes in illusory thoughts inviting them to accept and live
that greatly rejected reality. To rebel, for him is "so artificial" as he
declares in "Poetry for Departures", whose last stanza fits to clarify
generally, Larkin's way of dealing with the world:
But I'd go today

Yes swagger the nut-strewn roads

Crouch in the fo ć śle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial

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Such a deliberate step backwards

To create an object:
Books, china, a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

Notes
1- Philip Larkin, The North Ship (London: Fortune Press, 1946),
abbreviated as NS. Subsequent quotations of Philip Larkin‘s poetry
will be followed by the title of the volume abbreviated as the
following: LD for The Less Deceived, WW for The Whitsun
Wedding, HW for High Windows.

2- Larkin is not a religious person; he himself admits the fact: "I am

not someone who's lost forth: I never had it". Yet, he admits too
that there is a longing inside for religion:
No one could help hoping Christianity
Was true, or at least the happy ending,
Rising from the dead and our sins forgiven.
One longs for these miracles, and so in
A sense one longs for religion".
Quoted in AsmaAl-Qaysi, p. 88. This attitude links Larkin further to
Hardy who expressed the same hope in being able to believe in religion in
his poem "The Oxen" (1917).

Bibliography
- Al-Qaysi, Asma'a Riyadh. "Realism versus Illusion in the poetry of Philip Larkin"
unpublished M. A. thesis, Baghdad University Press, 1995.
- Bedient, Calvin. Eight Contemporary poets. London: Oxford University Press,
1974.
- Childs, Peter. The Twentieth-Century in poetry. London: Routledge, 1999.
- Davie, Donald. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. London: Routledge, 1973.
- Fraser, G. S. The Modern Writer and His World. London: Penguin Books, 1970.
- Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
- King, P. R. Nine Contemporary Poets. London: Methuen, 1979.
- Kirkham, Michael. "Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson: Realism and Art. "in
Boris Ford (ed.). The Present: Volume VIII. London: Penguin Books, 1983.
- Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin. London: Methuen, 1986.
- Press, john. A Map of Modern English Verse. London: Oxford

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University Press, 1969.

- Regan, Stephen. ―Philip Larkin, a Late Modernist‖. In The Cambridge Companion
of the Twentieth Century English Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Pp. 147-158.
- Rengachari, S. Philip Larkin. Bara Bazar: Parakash Books, 1996.
- Rosenthal, M. L. The New Poets: American and British Poets Since World War II.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
- Thomas, Frances Noel. ―Philip Larkin, Barbara Pym, and the Accident of Literary
Fame‖. In New England Review, 27, 2006. pp.8-26.
- Thwaite, Anthony. Twentieth Century Poetry. London: Hienmann, 1978.
- Weiner, Joshua. ―Philip Larkin: ‗The Whitsun Wedding‘‖ (2010). Published by
Poetry Foundation, available at:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/poem-guide.html?guide_id=180154
- Whalen, Terry. Philip Larkin and English Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1986.

‫التورية االنفصالية في شعر فيميب الركن‬

‫ نادية فايض محمد‬.‫د‬
‫الجامعة المستنصرية‬
‫كمية االداب‬
‫قسم المغة االنكميزية وادابها‬
‫الخالصة‬
‫ فاليزال شعره يدعو الى البحث والدراسة لكل ما‬،‫بالرغم من الدراسات العديدة التي اجريت عن شعر فيميب الركن‬
.‫ فمقد استطاع الشعر فيميب الركن‬.‫فيو من معاني و مواضيع قيمة بالنسبة لمقارئ الباحث و القارئ العادي‬

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