Poets' Corner

Number Twenty Six : 18^th January 2016

Wants

“Beyond all this , the wish to be alone.” So begins the Philip Larkin two-verse poem he calls Wants. For those condemned to prolonged and unchosen isolation , being alone means loneliness. The poet is talking about another species altogether , one whose busy existence full of work and family responsibilities has them pining for the luxury of some solitude. In a later poem he asks us to ‘Just think of all the spare time that has flown / Straight into nothingness by being filled / With forks and faces , rather than repaid / Under a lamp , hearing the noise of wind / And looking out to see the moon thinned / To an air-sharpened blade.’ In Wants he addresses our busier selves :

However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff -
Beyond all this , the wish to be alone.

Larkin imagined his American biographer in jeans and sneakers labelling him ‘one of those old-type natural fouled-up guys’. The poet could never be described as a happy-go-lucky sort of chap. Nor are Wants going to get any brighter , as he turns our attention to that ‘consummation devoutly to be wished’ in the final verse.

Beneath it all , desire of oblivion runs :
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death -
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

The inevitability of aging and ‘the only end of age’ certainly runs just under all that we do but what is this desire of oblivion ? For the irredeemably sad or despairing and indeed , for many a disenchanted celebrity caught in the endless spotlight’s glare , perhaps. Or is Larkin referring to that feeling of exasperated satiety we all get from time to time ? Sated with the incessant Wants of a babbling ego. Exasperation with the devious artifices of ‘civilised’ life , with the wall-to-wall clamour of consumer capitalism. The desire to be unmindful of the oppressor’s wrong , the law’s delay and the insolence of office has a variety of options to hand. There’s sleep , alcohol , meditation , a variety of narcotics. Here , as elsewhere , consumer choice is paramount. Larkin led a notoriously gaunt life as a nine-to-five librarian. He siphoned all his spare-time energies out of his existence and into the poetry. His misanthropy and for some critics , his debilitating pessimism , creep into that poetry on a regular basis (‘something is pushing them to the side of their own lives’) but in there as well is the same comic voice of authentic dowdiness that surfaces in his letters (‘I bought a pair of shoes and they don’t even try to keep the water out’ ; ‘My holidays loom like fearful obstacle races’). He wrote several letters a week , to his widowed mother , his long-term companion-at-a-distance Monica and a few acquaintances from the past. After leaving University he had no close friends throughout his working life. He just about dodged the electronic revolution that closed in on libraries and letter-writing equally. We can imagine his reaction to the email age. (Facebook ! Twitter !) In one of the last letters he wrote before dying in 1985 he writes ‘How very bold of you to buy an electric typewriter’. While he was still in his twenties , Larkin joined the ranks of those whose get-up-and-go has wandered off. For his long-suffering generation , you played the cards you’d been dealt. Self-improvement was for posers and Americans only. When he turned his attention to the elderly and the infirm in The Old Fools(See Poets’ Corner #21) , he asked “Why aren’t they screaming ?” Some people say that we can get very near the end and still be thankful to have lived. Larkin would have said otherwise but from the evidence of his published poems he could alternate between being thankful and resentful for having lived.

Archive

Poets' Corner #1 – Poetic Pessimism, 13^th September 2012
Poets' Corner #2 – The Workman's Friend, 10^th October 2012
Poets' Corner #3 – On The Trail of Two Dylans, 12^th November 2012
Poets' Corner #4 – Omar Khayyam, 14^th December 2012
Poets' Corner #5 – William Blake, 25^th January 2013
Poets' Corner #6 – A Minor Poet, 19^th February 2013
Poets' Corner #7 – Thomas Hardy, 20^th March 2013
Poets' Corner #8 – Shakespeare's Sonnets, 21^st April 2013
Poets' Corner #9 – Edward Thomas, 20^th May 2013
Poets' Corner #10 – Harry Smith's Anthology, 19^th June 2013
Poets' Corner #11 – William Plomer, 21^st July 2013
Poets' Corner #12 – Ghosts , 20^th August 2013
Poets' Corner #13 – William Dunbar, 20^th September 2013
Poets' Corner #14 – Bathtub Thoughts, 20^th October 2013
Poets' Corner #15 – Bagpipe Music, 20^th November 2013
Poets' Corner #16 – Sylvia & Emily, 20^th December 2013
Poets' Corner #17 – The Fall Of Icarus, 16^th January 2014
Poets' Corner #18 – Those Gone Before, 20^th February 2014
Poets' Corner #19 – Rudyard Kipling, 20^th March 2014
Poets' Corner #20 – Martin Bell, 20^th April 2014
Poets' Corner #21 – Another Modest Proposal, 20^th May 2014
Poets' Corner #22 – Thomas Gray and The Eighteenth Century, 20^th June 2014
Poets' Corner #23 – Edgar Allan Poe, 18^th July 2014
Poets' Corner #24 – Tread Softly, 19^th August 2014
Poets' Corner #25 – Mad To Be Saved, 24^th December 2015
Poets' Corner #26 – Wants, 20^th January 2016
Poets' Corner #27 – Samuel Johnson, 15^th February 2016
Poets' Corner #28 – T.S.Eliot, 10^th March 2016
Poets' Corner #29 – Alfred Lord Tennyson, 18^th April 2016
Poets' Corner #30 – Leonard Cohen, 12^th November 2016