I'm going to change the tack of the blog for a while, and start a series of posts about other poets.
The reason?
Blogger and 'attempting poem-maker'
Katy Murr's brief comment about Philip Larkin's minor poem 'Days' got me thinking - and frankly I rather enjoyed the process. More of that in a moment. First, here is Larkin's poem - and underneath Katy's point:
Days
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
Philip Larkin
---
The first stanza seems stronger: I don't like the 'Ah,' which niggles at the rest of that stanza for me. But, arguably the images of the second stanza are needed to ground the poem, give the reader some tether?
My reponse was that I rather like the "Ah," my reasoning as follows.
By simplistically raising the notion of 'happy days', the first stanza is a whimsical, abstract, pleasant line of thought about the nature of life. So it's a question, a puzzle. The "Ah" is a more concrete moment from that life, a more real expression, a sort little moment of little realisation that we all experience each day. But crucially here, a falsely comforting one, because it ushers in the realisation of impending death. This operates to destroy the previous stanza's limited daydream, by actually being a concrete part of the life the first stanza supposes to summarize. This change of tone and focus is also reflected rhythmically: it's the first line with a pause after the first syllable. (In some ways this rhythmical device is not atypical of Larkin, as he often wedges incidental words - typically images too - in amongst his poems to make them scan; a very simple but effective technique.)
If that's a bit much for you, I can put it another way. Try reading the poem with the "Ah," omitted: you'll find it much colder I think. The emphasis then rests more on "Solving that question" - an abstracted thing to do - rather than on the answer to the question itself.
Well, if you liked this little preamble, I'll post up over the next couple of days more on Larkin. And if you didn't, well, the comments are still open to you as well.
