Blog #7

Englands of the Mind:

Seamus Heaney’s comparison of Ted Hughes and Phillip Larkin acknowledges their differences in writing style and contextualization of their perspective of England. Hughes and Phillip utilize different styles of writing developed from their corresponding backgrounds and experiences of living in England.

Hughes uses northern, pagan, Anglo-Saxon and Norse language elements in his writing. He uses sensuous language to describe to readers the essence: ” the substance, nature and consequences of life,” (p.829), that his poems entail. Hughes’ language is simple and ordinary talk; an informal prose but of which express clear, direct and intense feelings. Hughes’ poems achieve an energy with lasting quality because his words create a “being there in the moment” feeling. His image of England is primeval, filled with a religious force, in which he is a wanderer among the ruins. He uses alliterative tradition, and guttural dialects of Nordic stratum he obtained from childhood. Hughes states his real self is expressed through his dialect which connects him to Middle English poetry (p.828).

Philip Larkin utilizes English language from a different era than Hughes. Larkin’s humanist language is derived from the history of the Norman conquest and Renaissance. His words are nimble, melodious and are meant to attract attention. Larkin does not attribute his style to his childhood, but instead credits his insight as a urban, modern man. He exists in an England of customs, institutions and industries, of which success depends on deprecating the hinterland of his nation. Larkin writes in a manner which sheds light on the beauty of England but also in one that exposes it’s ugly truths. Larkin expressions are mannerly, but not exquisite. To contrast Hughes, Larkin’s language is not as deep or ‘classical’. What Larkin may lack in eloquence, he makes up for in vulgarity and rarely fails to create reaction from his readers.

Reading Question:

Aubade: is an early morning song or poem, the motif of waking lovers and their reluctant parting. In Larkin’s poem, the lover is life. Larkin clearly states that he is frightened to part with life. He says we try to pretend we never die, and religion tries to fool us into not being afraid. My favourite line of his is: “No rational being can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing/ That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,/ No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,/ Nothing to love or link with,” (lines 26-28, p.704). His vision of the afterlife is one of emptiness. All feeling, all sense of being ceases completely and we become nothing. The end of Larkin’s poem brings in the morning as sunlight fills the room. However, with the imagery Larkin creates, of telephones ringing and mailmen going door to door, we are not intended to view it as a pleasant thought, but instead one in which the sun brings us one monotonous day closer to death.

Response to Rebecca Mason’s: High Windows discussion:

I didn’t really understand this poem until I looked at with the life/death binary in mind. I agree with Rebecca’s insight of the beginning of the poem. Larkin’s vulgarity in the first lines is quickly deferred by his relation of the kids act as ‘paradise’. Larkin is trying to express the inaccessibility of pleasure in his life through social and sensual experiences. I view the end of the poem and the significance of the high window slightly differently than Rebecca. I think the high window at the end of the poem signifies Larkin’s regret of a life not lived, the unattainability of experiences we have seen others live and wanted for ourselves. That the window “shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless,” (lines 19/20), contrasts the opening of the poem (of sensual satisfaction, with no fear of God or death) with loneliness and desolation. Larkin does not seem relieved by the thought of death, of the endless nothingness it would bring. He asserts that death would equate to (or perhaps be a continuum of) nothing more than the failures, and lack of meaningful experiences in his life.