Hello! I’m still figuring out this substack thing.
I recently discovered this somewhat puzzling untitled 1947 Philip Larkin poem. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I enjoy trying to explicate poems that confuse me, so I thought I’d give it a try with this one.
Here it is:
Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair,
I looked down at the empty hotel yard
Once meant for coaches. Cobblestones were wet,
But sent no light back to the loaded sky,
Sunk as it was with mist down to the roofs.
Drainpipes and fire-escape climbed up
Past rooms still burning their electric light:
I thought: Featureless morning, featureless night.Misjudgment: for the stones slept, and the mist
Wandered absolvingly past all it touched,
Yet hung like a stayed breath; the lights burnt on,
Pin-points of undisturbed excitement; beyond the glass
The colourless vial of day painlessly spilled
My world back after a year, my lost lost world
Like a cropping deer strayed near my path again,
Bewaring the mind’s least clutch. Turning, I kissed her,
Easily for sheer joy tipping the balance to love.But, tender visiting,
Fallow as a deer or an unforced field,
How would you have me? Towards your grace
My promises meet and lock and race like rivers,
But only when you choose. Are you jealous of her?
Will you refuse to come till I have sent
Her terribly away, importantly live
Part invalid, part baby, and part saint?
For people familiar with Larkin’s later writing, this must look quite uncharacteristic. The Larkin of “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” is not a poet you expect to surprise in a romantic idyll with some romantic someone. The central image of the gentle, easily startled deer also seems out of place. Larkin is known as a poet of shabby cities and middle-class crowds, not of woodland creatures and their fragile bowers.
Before Larkin was Larkin though, he wrote differently. His earlier verses are often conventionally romantic, and some come off as virtual Yeats pastiche.
Dawn
To wake and hear a cock
Out of the distance crying.
To pull the curtains back
And see the clouds flying —
How strange it is
For the heart to be loveless, and as cold as these.
I like Yeats, and Larkin’s Yeats imitation is pretty good. But there’s a long way from that pellucid heartstring-twanging evocation of emotional inadequacy to the older Larkin’s dry (and more openly misogynist) take on the same topic.
Wild Oats
About twenty years ago
Two girls came in where I worked—
A bosomy English rose
And her friend in specs I could talk to.
Faces in those days sparked
The whole shooting-match off, and I doubt
If ever one had like hers:
But it was the friend I took out,And in seven years after that
Wrote over four hundred letters,
Gave a ten-guinea ring
I got back in the end, and met
At numerous cathedral cities
Unknown to the clergy. I believe
I met beautiful twice. She was trying
Both times (so I thought) not to laugh.
Parting, after about five
Rehearsals, was an agreement
That I was too selfish, withdrawn,
And easily bored to love.
Well, useful to get that learnt.
In my wallet are still two snaps
Of bosomy rose with fur gloves on.
Unlucky charms, perhaps.
Larkin himself was of course very aware of his own shift in style. And he identified “Waiting for breakfast” as an important turning point. It was the poem in which, he said, you can see the Yeatsian “Celtic fever abated and the patient sleeping soundly.” He placed the poem as the last poem in his first (mediocre) volume, The North Ship, closing his romantic period and embarking upon his anti-romantic maturity.
As I’ve already pointed out, the Yeatsian patient isn’t exactly sleeping in “Waiting for Breakfast”; there are still a lot of dewey-eyed frills. The poem vacillates between a traditional late Victorian capital P poetic rhetoric and a post-War valence of skepticism and mundanity. In the first stanza, the poem looks down, very Larkin-ly, from a window upon “Drainpipes and fire-escapes…rooms still burning their electric light.” He dismisses the run-down vista as “Featureless morning, featureless night.” But shortly afterwards, the world he’s taken the piss out of starts to reinflate. “The mist/Wandered absolvingly past all it touched,/Yet hung like a stayed breath.” Is the featureless dinginess a disappointment, or does it provide a passage to Yeats’ Elfland?
The duality of language here is mirrored in the poem’s dual loves. One of these is Larkin’s companion, the actual woman brushing her hair. The other is what Larkin calls his “lost, lost world,” creeping back after a year like a shy “cropping dear.”
beyond the glass
The colourless vial of day painlessly spilled
My world back after a year, my lost lost world
Like a cropping deer strayed near my path again,
Bewaring the mind’s least clutch. Turning, I kissed her,
Easily for sheer joy tipping the balance to love.
The pronoun in that last sentence is ambiguous. It could refer to the “lost, lost world.” But it could also refer to Larkin’s lover, who has perhaps returned from her ablutions, ready to be kissed. The return of the “lost world” may pull him away from physical love, but it may also dump him back, “Easily for sheer joy” into it.
Alan Jenkins at the Philip Larkin society arguesthat the “lost, lost world” is poetic “vocation,” or maybe inspiration. On that reading, Larkin is choosing between the romantic love of a woman and his poetic muse. That muse maybe collects the kisses and caresses that would otherwise go to a lover. And it’s the muse he asks
Are you jealous of her?
Will you refuse to come till I have sent
Her terribly away, importantly live
Part invalid, part baby, and part saint?
To love the muse means to turn inward, forswearing human love, and thus becoming impotent (invalid), innocent (baby, saint), and transfigured.
There are other ways to read the binary though. The “lost, lost world” could, for example, be the memory of a former lover. It could be an evocation of Larkin’s past or childhood, which often figures in his poems as a kind of blank or erasure which he can’t or won’t remember.
Alternately, the two women could also stand for, not reality and art, but two different kinds of poetry. Again, Larkin was in this period poised between a Yeatsian poetry of plenitude and a poetry of dimming expectations and lack. The woman brushing her hair at the mirror could, in this reading, be Larkin’s new, boring, mundane love, sitting there amid the drainpipes and the featurelessness. What he remembers suddenly, what comes back to him, with all that overwrought poetic trembling, is in fact overwrought poetic trembling. Yeats inspires him and fills him with affection for even his smaller love, his smaller life, his smaller muse.
In this case, the last stanza is addressed, not to the “lost, lost world”, but to the lover. To be true to his new poetry, Larkin has to abandon the poetic fire of Yeats, and “importantly live/Part invalid, part baby, and part saint?” —not a bad description of Larkin’s mature poetry of impotence, petulance, and occasional transcendence.
The puzzle at the center of the poem is that her and heraren’t clearly distinguished from one another. We don’t know much about the woman brushing her hair, and we know equally little about the “lost, lost world.” As a result, the two tend to blur or switch places. Which is supposed to be the real? Which is the muse? Which is the past and which the future? Larkin doesn’t give us enough information to settle those questions with any certainty. Which is, frankly, a little irritating.
If her and her are the same, or interchangeable, or indistinguishable, what does that say about Larkin’s poetic pivot? Did he ever cast off Yeats? The romantic and the anti-romantic are maybe less like opposites than like mirror images, gazing into each other’s identical eyes. Yeats loved to write about being crotchety and old (“a tattered coat upon a stick”) and loveless too. And of course women in Yeats’ poems also tended to lack specificity, draped—or smothered—in the poet’s own self-pity and symbolic gush. “Waiting for breakfast” may be about Larkin throwing off the anxiety of influence and becoming the invalid baby saint he was meant to be. But it’s also about how there’s not much to choose between one invalid baby saint and the next. In very Larkinish style, Larkin looks before and behind, and with a wistful beauty sits down, going nowhere.