Free Cultural Cohesion by Clive James Page A

should survive the perilous journey across the sea is therefore perhaps misplaced. A mission like this might have no more need of a fighter escort than pollen on the wind.
    The size of the volume is misleading. Its meticulous editor, Anthony Thwaite—himself a poet of high reputation—has included poems that Larkin finished but did not publish, and poems that he did not even finish. Though tactfully carried out, this editorial inclusiveness is not beyond cavil. What was elliptically concentrated has become more fully understandable, but whether Larkin benefits from being more fully understood is a poser. Eugenio Montale, in many ways a comparable figure, was, it might be recalled, properly afraid of what he called “too much light.”
    During his lifetime, Larkin published only three mature collections of verse, and they were all as thin as blades. The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) combined to a thickness barely half that of the Collected Poems . Larkin also published, in 1966, a new edition of his early, immature collection, The North Ship , which had first come out in 1945. He took care, by supplying the reissue with a deprecatory introduction, to keep it clearly separate from the poems that he regarded as being written in his own voice.
    The voice was unmistakable. It made misery beautiful. One of Larkin’s few even halfway carefree poems is “For Sidney Bechet,” from The Whitsun Weddings . Yet the impact that Larkin said Bechet made on him was exactly the impact that Larkin made on readers coming to him for the first time:
    On me your voice falls as they say love should,
    Like an enormous yes.
    What made the paradox delicious was the scrupulousness of its expression. There could be no doubt that Larkin’s outlook on life added up to an enormous no, but pessimism had been given a saving grace. Larkin described an England changing in ways he didn’t like. He described himself ageing in ways he didn’t like. The Empire had shrunk to a few islands, his personal history to a set of missed opportunities. Yet his desperate position, which ought logically to have been a licence for incoherence, was expressed with such linguistic fastidiousness on the one hand, and such lyrical enchantment on the other, that the question arose of whether he had not at least partly cultivated that view in order to get those results. Larkin once told an interviewer, “Deprivation for me is what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”
    In the three essential volumes, the balanced triad of Larkin’s achievement, all the poems are poised vibrantly in the force-field of tension between his profound personal hopelessness and the assured command of their carrying out. Perfectly designed, tightly integrated, making the feeling of falling apart fit together, they release, from their compressed but always strictly parsable syntax, sudden phrases of ravishing beauty, as the river in Dante’s Paradise suggests by giving off sparks that light is what it is made of.
    These irresistible fragments are everyone’s way into Larkin’s work. They are the first satisfaction his poetry offers. There are other and deeper satisfactions, but it was his quotability that gave Larkin the biggest cultural impact on the British reading public since Auden—and over a greater social range. Lines by Larkin are the common property of everyone in Britain who reads seriously at all—a state of affairs which has not obtained since the time of Tennyson. Phrases, whole lines and sometimes whole stanzas can be heard at the dinner table.
    There is an evening coming in
    Across the fields, one never seen before,
    That lights no lamps . . .
    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 . . .
    Now, helpless in the hollow of
    An unarmorial age, a trough
    Of smoke in slow