I read this poem last night when I was a bit pissed and enjoyed the first half and didn't understand the second half at all. In the cold light of day I am just as confused. Explain!
On Being Twenty-six
I feared these present years,
The middle twenties,
When deftness disappears,
And each event is
Freighted with a source-encrusting doubt,
And turned to drought.
I thought: this pristine drive
Is sure to flag
At twenty-four or -five;
And now the slag
Of burnt-out childhood proves that I was right.
What caught alight
Quickly consumed in me,
As I foresaw.
Talent, felicity —
These things withdraw,
And are succeeded by a dingier crop
That come to stop;
Or else, certainly gone,
Perhaps the rest,
Tarnishing, linger on
As second-best.
Fabric of fallen minarets is trash.
And in the ash
Of what has pleased and passed
Is now no more
Than struts of greed, a last
Charred smile, a clawed
Crustacean hatred, blackened pride – of such
I once made much.
And so, if I were sure
I have no chance
To catch again that pure
Unnoticed stance,
I would calcine the outworn properties,
Live on what is.
But it dies hard, that world;
Or, being dead,
Putrescently is pearled,
For I, misled,
Make on my mind the deepest wound of all:
Think to recall
At any moment, states
Long since dispersed;
That if chance dissipates
The best, the worst
May scatter equally upon a touch.
I kiss, I clutch,
Like a daft mother, putrid
Infancy,
That can and will forbid
All grist to me
Except devaluing dichotomies:
Nothing, and paradise.
– Philip Larkin
― Sam (chirombo), Tuesday, 8 October 2002 15:37 (twenty-three years ago)
NB I stink with poetry, particularly in terms of drawing strict literal meaning out, BUT: I think the trick to the dichotomies bit, paradise and nothing, is that the word "devaluing" can be read as fitting into that phrase two ways
― nabisco (nabisco), Tuesday, 8 October 2002 16:29 (twenty-three years ago)
My reading is its a twist on the Wordsworth's Immortality Ode -"there hath past away a glory from the earth". The main twist is that Larkin has no Intimation of Immortality to console him for the loss of the "visionary gleam" of youth. (All his adult life Larkin was morbidly afraid of death - compare these lines from "Aubade"
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. ).
"If [he] were sure" that paradise is gone - he could "live on what is" - ie settle for what is left: but there is no ABSOLUTE certainty; so he is left yearning for a "paradise" that is ALMOST certainly illusory (the first part of the dichotomy).
At the same time, if "chance" can dissipate the best it can equally dissipate the "worst": just accepting that the best is gone and settling for the grey "what is" is not an option, since there is no basis for thinking that "what is" is any less precarious or transient than what has already gone. The logic of accepting transience is acceptance of not of what is, but death - "nothing" - the second part of the dichotomy.
Both parts of the dichotomy are "devaluing" because one is an illusion - the pearliness of putrescence - and the other is death - "nothing" , the inevitability of which is "the deepest wound of all".
― ArfArf, Tuesday, 8 October 2002 16:55 (twenty-three years ago)