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“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.
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Archive
Poets' Corner #1 – Poetic Pessimism, 13th September 2012
Poets' Corner #2 – The Workman's Friend, 10th October 2012
Poets' Corner #3 – On The Trail of Two Dylans, 12th November 2012
Poets' Corner #4 – Omar Khayyam, 14th December 2012
Poets' Corner #5 – William Blake, 25th January 2013
Poets' Corner #6 – A Minor Poet, 19th February 2013
Poets' Corner #7 – Thomas Hardy, 20th March 2013
Poets' Corner #8 – Shakespeare's Sonnets, 21st April 2013
Poets' Corner #9 – Edward Thomas, 20th May 2013
Poets' Corner #10 – Harry Smith's Anthology, 19th June 2013
Poets' Corner #11 – William Plomer, 21st July 2013
Poets' Corner #12 – Ghosts, 20th August 2013
Poets' Corner #13 – William Dunbar, 20th September 2013
Poets' Corner #14 – Bathtub Thoughts, 20th October 2013
Poets' Corner #15 – Bagpipe Music, 20th November 2013
Poets' Corner #16 – Sylvia & Emily, 20th December 2013
Poets' Corner #17 – The Fall Of Icarus, 16th January 2014
Poets' Corner #18 – Those Gone Before, 20th February 2014
Poets' Corner #19 – Rudyard Kipling, 20th March 2014
Poets' Corner #20 – Martin Bell, 20th April 2014
Poets' Corner #21 – Another Modest Proposal, 20th May 2014
Poets' Corner #22 – Thomas Gray and The Eighteenth Century, 20th June 2014
Poets' Corner #23 – Edgar Allan Poe, 18th July 2014
Poets' Corner #24 – Tread Softly, 19th August 2014
Poets' Corner #25 – Mad To Be Saved, 24th December 2015
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