[73] I Remember, I Remember

Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with number plates
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
'Why, Coventry!' I exclaimed. "I was born here.'

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign
That this was still the town that had been 'mine'
So long, but found I wasn't even clear
Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates
Were standing, had we annually departed

For all those family hols? . . . A whistle went:
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.
'Was that,' my friend smiled, 'where you "have your roots"?'
No, only where my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to retort, just where I started:

By now I've got the whole place clearly charted.
Our garden, first: where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,
And wasn't spoken to by an old hat.
And here we have that splendid family

I never ran to when I got depressed,
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,
Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be
'Really myself'. I'll show you, come to that,
The bracken where I never trembling sat,

Determined to go through with it; where she
Lay back, and 'all became a burning mist'.
And, in those offices, my doggerel
Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read
By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,

Who didn't call and tell my father There
Before us, had we the gift to see ahead -
'You look as though you wished the place in Hell,'
My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well,
I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.

'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'

    -- Philip Larkin

The title of today's poem is, of course, a take on Thomas Hood's famous
'I Remember, I Remember', one of those poems which *everyone* seeems to
have studied in school or read at some point in their lives. Larkin
brings a whole new perspective to childhood and growing up; like Auden
in 'Musee des Beaux Arts' (Minstrels, Poem #68), he is concerned with
the meaningfulness of 'events' in our lives, as opposed to the unadorned
fact of 'living'.

The whole poem hinges on the effectiveness of the last line, a line
whose 'truth' comes as a revelation. And (in my mind, at least) the
purpose of poetry is to create such revelations, to open up new ways of
looking at the world, to make the reader feel
                    " - like some watcher of the skies
                When a new planet swims into his ken;"
Larkin's poem performs this task admirably.

As an aside, note the exquisite skill with which Larkin translates the
rhythms of conversational English into metrical (and rhymed) verse - it
seems effortless because it's done so very well.

thomas.

[Biography]

Philip Larkin was born in 1922 in Coventry, England. He attended St.
John's College, Oxford. His first book of poetry, 'The North Ship', was
published in 1945 and, though not particularly strong on its own, is
notable insofar as certain passages foreshadow the unique sensibility
and maturity that characterizes his later work. In 1946, Larkin
discovered the poetry of Thomas Hardy and became a great admirer of his
poetry, learning from Hardy how to make the commonplace and often dreary
details of his life the basis for extremely tough, unsparing, and
memorable poems. With his second volume of poetry, 'The Less Deceived'
(1955), Larkin became the preeminent poet of his generation, and a
leading voice of what came to be called `The Movement,' a group of young
English writers who rejected the prevailing fashion for neo-Romantic
writing in the style of Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Like Hardy, Larkin
focused on intense personal emotion but strictly avoided sentimentality
or self-pity.

In 1964, he confirmed his reputation as a major poet with the
publication of 'The Whitsun Weddings', and again in 1974 with 'High
Windows': collections whose searing, often mocking, wit does not conceal
the poet's dark vision and underlying obsession with universal themes of
mortality, love, and human solitude. Deeply anti-social and a great
lover (and published critic) of American jazz, Larkin never married and
conducted an uneventful life as a librarian in the provincial city of
Hull, where he died in 1985.

    -- from the Academy of American Poets website,
http://www.poets.org/LIT/findfst.htm

You can read the original 'I Remember, I Remember' by Thomas Hood at
http://www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/hood01.html#1

From: "Frank Wintle" <frank@>

You'll get immeasurably more out of this if (as well as with Hood) you frame
it with Thomas Hardy's poems of 1912-13: rhythm, vernacular, but above all,
topic - nostalgia, the revisit, the mourning - contrasting Hardy's loss with
Larkin's loneli-/emptiness. Sequence starts with "The Going", for a flavour
of which:
http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1350
FW


Frank Wintle
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