[1387] The Explosion

Proceeding with the mining disaster theme, here's a guest poem submitted
independently by Mike Christie <mike.christie@> and
Ameya Nagarajan <ameya_nn@>

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead:
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins,
Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face -

Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said, and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed -
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.

    -- Philip Larkin

Note: the sixth verse ("The dead go on . . . ") should be in italics.

[Mike's commentary]

I've liked the two poems people sent in about mining disasters: I wanted to
add this one to the list.  It's long been one of my favourite Larkin poems.
It manages to be powerfully moving without being sentimental; the last image,
of the men somehow expanding and disappearing away from this mortal world, as
the wives understand they are dead, is one of my favourite images in all of
poetry.

Mike Christie

[Ameya's commentary]

All these mining poems reminded me of larkin, what I like about this poem is
that it focuses on the life of the miners and thus highlights even more the
tragedy of their death.

The saddest image is the one conjured by "Gold as on a coin" because it
implies the miners are worth more to their families after death because of
compensation, an amount of money that their labour could never provide.

Ameya


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From: "Ian Baillieu" <ianbaill@>

For such a serious and tragic subject, I find it odd and
unfortunate that Larkin chose to use a rhythm now forever
associated with Longfellow's oft-parodied 'Hiawatha'.  The
2nd, 3rd and 4th stanzas especially.