Free Cultural Cohesion by Clive James Page B

suspended skeins
    Above their scrap of history,
    Only an attitude remains . . .
    And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
    A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
    Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain . . .
    How distant, the departure of young men
    Down valleys, or watching
    The green shore past the salt-white cordage
    Rising and falling . . .
    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 . . .
    Later, the square is empty: a big sky
    Drains down the estuary like the bed
    Of a golÏd river . . .
    At death, you break up: the bits that were you
    Start speeding away from each other for ever
    With no one to see . . .
    Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
    The sun-comprehending glass,
    And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
    Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
    Drawn in by the subtle gravity beam of such bewitchment, the reader becomes involved for the rest of his life in Larkin’s doomed but unfailingly dignified struggle to reconcile the golden light in the high windows with the endlessness it comes from. Larkin’s sense of inadequacy, his fear of death are in every poem. His poems could not be more personal. But, equally, they could not be more universal. Seeing the world as the hungry and thirsty see food and drink, he describes it for the benefit of those who are at home in it, their senses dulled by satiation. The reader asks: How can a man who feels like this bear to live at all?
    Life is first boredom, then fear.
    Whether or not we use it, it goes,
    And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
    And age, and then the only end of age.
    But the reader gets an answer: There are duties that annul nihilism, satisfactions beyond dissatisfaction, and, above all, the miracle of continuity. Larkin’s own question about what life is worth if we have to lose it he answers with the contrary question, about what life would amount to if it didn’t go on without us. Awkward at the seaside, ordinary people know better in their bones than the poet among his books:
    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.
    Just as Larkin’s resolutely prosaic organization of a poem is its passport to the poetic, so his insight into himself is his window on the world. He is the least solipsistic of artists. Unfortunately, this fact has now become less clear. Too much light has been shed. Of the poems previously unpublished in book form, a few are among his greatest achievements, many more one would not now want to be without, and all are good to have. But all the poems he didn’t publish have been put in chronological order of composition along with those he did publish, instead of being given a separate section of their own. There is plenty of editorial apparatus to tell you how the original slim volumes were made up, but the strategic economy of their initial design has been lost.
    All three of the original volumes start and end with the clean, dramatic decisiveness of a curtain going up and coming down again. The cast is not loitering in the auditorium beforehand. Nor is it to be found hanging out in the car park afterwards. The Less Deceived starts with “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,” which laments a lost love but with no confessions of the poet’s personal inadequacy. It ends with “At Grass,” which is not about him but about horses: a bugle call at ­sunset.
    Only the groom, and the groom’s boy,
    With bridles in the evening come.
    Similarly, The Whitsun Weddings starts and ends