High Windows

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High Windows

Philip Larkin 1974

The title poem of his 1974 poetry collection, “High Windows” is one of only 117 poems the highly respected poet Philip Larkin published during his lifetime. The collection itself was the last of only three volumes of poetry he published at intervals of almost a decade. “High Windows,” with its frank sexual language, traditional form, and search for transcendence in the everyday world, is often cited by critics as an example of Larkin at his stubborn and cranky best.

The poem, triggered by an older speaker’s envy at seeing a younger man and woman whom he speculates are sexually involved, quickly widens in scope to raise questions of personal freedom, definitions of paradise, religious transcendence, and even the act of writing poetry itself. Driven by an undercurrent of sexual jealousy bordering on rage, the poem moves quickly from image to image, perhaps to reflect the speaker’s obsessive train of thought. Some critics have said that “High Windows” may look, at first glance, like a poem about sex, but that it turns into a commentary on religion. By the end of the poem, Larkin’s relentless questioning leads him to a surprising and almost inarticulate revelation. Larkin published no more poetry after High Windows and died in 1985.

Author Biography

Although Philip Larkin only published five slim volumes of poetry during his lifetime, by the time

High Windows was published, he was regarded as one of the greatest British postwar poets, commonly known as “England’s other Poet Laureate.” In fact, he was officially offered the position when it became available in 1984, but he politely declined, insisting instead on keeping a more private life away from the public eye. Even when his work was most popular, he refused to choose a career exclusively in poetry, working instead as a librarian while also writing novels, criticism, and essays on jazz.

Born August 9, 1922, in Coventry, Warwickshire, England, Philip Arthur Larkin was the second child of Sydney and Eva Larkin. His father being the city treasurer, he grew up in a “quite respectable house” in a middle-class neighborhood. His poems reflect a negative view of these early years, which he described as an “opaque childhood” punctuated by “forgotten boredom.” An undiagnosed near-sightedness, combined with a speech stammer, caused Larkin to withdraw from other children, learning instead to dislike them outright. After years of considering himself an “unsuccessful schoolboy,” he began feeling more comfortable during his final terms at the King Henry VIII high school, where he learned to balance his love for cricket, football, jazz music, and reading in his father’s extensive library. It was during these late teen years when Larkin began writing prose and poetry, inspired by the lush novels of Henry James, whom many critics consider his biggest writing influence. He continued to write at Oxford in 1940, where he enrolled in St. John’s College and, later that year, published his first poem “Ultimatum” in the school literary magazine The Listener.

World War II required many college students to join the British military, but due to his poor eyesight, Larkin was free to finish up his schooling in English language and literature. Acquiring a deep love for W. H. Auden’s and W. B. Yeats’s poetry, he remained at the university until 1943, when he received a First Class B. A. degree. Larkin received his M.A. from Oxford in 1947. Larkin decided not to pursue a teaching career due to his stammer, which persisted late into his life. Instead, he chose to work as a librarian at the Wellington urban district council in Shropshire while completing a professional accreditation in a librarianship correspondence course. In 1946 he was appointed assistant librarian at the University College in Leicester, and shortly after that appointed sublibrarian at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Perhaps faster than expected, Larkin was settling into his lifetime career; in 1955 he became librarian of Brynmor Jones Library of the University of Hull in Yorkshire, where he worked until his death in 1985.

The drudgery of work became a common theme throughout Larkin’s work, most notably in the two half-serious poems “Toads” and “Toads Revisited.” “Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life? / Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork / And drive the brute off?” the speaker of “Toads” asks. As a younger poet Larkin told an interviewer for the Guardian “Work encroaches like a weed over the whole of my life.… It’s all the time absorbing creative energy that might have gone into poetry.” But an older Larkin learned to balance work with his creative vocation. As the speaker of “Toads Revisited” writes, “No, give me my in-tray, / My loaf-haired secretary / … Give me your arm, old toad; / Help me down Cemetery Road.” It was while working at the public library in Shropshire that Larkin wrote his first two novels, Jill (1945) and A Girl in Winter (1947). Stories of “displaced working-class heroines,” they reflect a cheerless and gloomy postwar England. Both novels were critically praised for their carefully textured landscapes, and A Girl in Winter was so well received that Larkin’s publisher pressured him for a third book of prose, though by this point his energies were shifting back toward poetry.

Although Larkin’s first collection of poetry. The North Ship, was published before his two novels, it was not until Marvell Press published The Less Deceived in 1955 that he began to gain a reputation as a poet. His inclusion in the influential anthology New Lines, in which editor Robert Conquest first dubbed Larkin a member of “The Movement,” further reinforced his place in modern British literature. Larkin’s work appeared regularly in such notable journals as Atlantic Monthly and The Partisan Review. These poems were later collected in the book The Whitsun Weddings in 1964. It was another ten years, in 1974, before High Windows appeared as his final collection of poetry.

Publishers Faber and Faber celebrated Larkin’s 1982 birthday with the publication of Larkin at Sixty, which was a collection of tributes from friends and colleagues. By this point in his life Larkin had earned an international reputation as, in the words of Alan Brownjohn, “the most technically brilliant and resonately beautiful, profoundly disturbing yet appealing” poet to be writing in the second half of this century. He received many honors, including several doctorates, appointments to the National Manuscript Collection of the Contemporary Writers Committee and the literature panel of the Arts Council for Great Britain, as well as such literature awards as the Queen’s gold medal for Poetry in 1965 and the Lioness Award for Poetry in 1974. In addition, Larkin was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. A man who saw life “more as an affair diversified by company than as an affair of company diversified by solitude,” Larkin died shortly after an operation for throat cancer in 1985.

Poem Text

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like and outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly, I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high
       windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Poem Summary

Lines: 1-3

These first lines establish the dramatic situation that triggers the rest of the poem: the speaker records his response to seeing two young people together whom, he assumes, are lovers. He calls them “a couple of kids,” suggesting that the speaker is older than they are. The speaker immediately supposes that the boy is “fucking her and she’s / Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm.” Modern birth control—and its contribution to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s—was a fact of life at the time the poem appeared, but was not a common theme in mainstream poetry. The narrator’s hasty assumption serves as the basis for everything to follow; it is the first clause of a sentence that will stretch into the third stanza. The sight of the couple and the speculation about their sexual activity leads the speaker to examine his own, perhaps “less fulfilled,” life.

Line: 4

Following the clause that begins the poem, “when I see a couple of kids,” the speaker continues, “I know this is paradise.” We have already learned that the speaker is older than the couple, and from the tone he establishes in the first three lines, we might guess that he is saying this fourth line sarcastically, with wry regret, or with an edge of jealousy. How would this be paradise? Viewed from a Judeo-Christian point of view, the original paradise was the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve were innocent—or ignorant—of sexuality before the Fall. In this sense, the young couple—sexually active but protected from the risks or consequences of their actions—might represent a modern-day Adam and Eve, the opposite of the Biblical couple. Although the phrase “I know this is paradise” may not be meant seriously, the religious reference is reinforced and developed further throughout the poem.

It is important to note as well that the first stanza ends without punctuation, letting the speaker’s train of thought flow from line to line and stanza to stanza without pause. This technique is called “enjambing.” Larkin may have used this technique to let the form of the poem reflect the building tension in the speaker’s voice and the momentum of thought that continues to push his ideas forward.

Lines: 5-7

Here the speaker develops further how the young couple’s way of life might be paradisiacal. He also specifies that it is “everyone old” who considers this a paradise, associating himself with that group. The younger generation can engage in premarital sex without much risk of unwanted pregnancy, and they no longer have to worry about the “bonds and gestures” associated with old-fashioned “courting.” Instead, the youth push the older generation’s traditions “to one side / Like an outdated combine harvester.” Larkin makes the fairly abstract ideas of tradition, emotional bonds, and old fashioned “gestures” concrete by using a simile, or comparison. To perhaps emphasize the magnitude of the gap between his generation’s idea of courting and the modern concept of dating, Larkin compares the “outdated” traditions to a hulking, obsolete piece of farm machinery.

Lines: 8-9

Often the process of aging is referred to as “heading downhill,” or as being “over the hill.” Larkin may be thinking of those terms when he muses that for the very young, who are healthy and active, oblivious to their own mortality, this downhill journey still seems to be a “long slide / to happiness.” Not only is it a pleasant journey for them, it is seemingly “endless” and without consequence. Line 9 ends the first sentence of poem, a long run-on depending more on the energy of the speaker’s voice than perfect grammar to carry it forward. It is useful to read the sentence as a whole before moving to the next lines.

Line: 10

Beginning with the end of line 9 and continuing through line 10, Larkin shifts the perspective of the poem by wondering if anyone looked at him “40 years back” the same way he is looking at the young couple. Gradually, the speaker has been revealing just how old he is in relation to the couple, and here we learn specifically that he may be more than 40 years older than they. This shift is important because it is the second main “leap” of thought in the poem (the first was the sight of the couple, triggering the speaker to begin). He progresses from observing “the kids” to imagining himself “in their shoes,” which perhaps shows that

Media Adaptations

Readings (by the Poets): Philip Larkin; Thom Gunn; Ted Hughes; Seamus Heaney; Douglas Dunn; Tom Paulin; Paul Muldoon. Audio cassette and paperback. 1995.
Douglass Dunn and Philip Larkin book and cassette (Faber Poetry Cassettes). Faber & Faber, 1984.

he is trying to empathize or better understand them.

Lines: 11-14

Imagining what a person his current age would have thought of himself as a younger man, the speaker wonders if they might have been just as envious of him as he is now of the young couple. Did someone see him as a young man and think “That’ll be the life?” (Note that the italics indicates a new voice in the poem that is not necessarily the speaker’s.) This raises a question concerning the possible cause of envy, and the first answer the speaker gives is that there is “no God anymore.” This sudden statement may seem a unexpected and drastic leap to a new theme, but the question of paradise is raised as early as the fourth line. What made the speaker first think of paradise was the absence of the old-fashioned “bonds and gestures” for the couple living without consequence, like a modern Adam and Eve.

Having taken this religious turn, the speaker continues his list. Without God, of course, there is no “sweating in the dark / About hell and that,” because without a heaven there is no hell—where humankind is punished for its sins—about which to worry. And on a lighter note, Larkin finishes off the list of reasons that “that’ll be the life” with not “having to hide / what you think of the priest.” Of course, if the speaker is concerned with concealing his opinion, it is not likely a kind one. This adds to the tone of the poem, which has been interpreted as sarcastic, bitter, and as seething with jealousy.

Lines: 15-16

Larkin returns to the downhill-slide image first mentioned in the second paragraph. He is still imagining what an older observer might have said about him forty years earlier. The simile, or comparison, “like free bloody birds” adds fuel to the argument that the speaker is quite bitter (“bloody” is a mild British swear word similar to “damn” or “hell” in American speech).

Line: 17

Beginning at the end of line 16 and continuing through line 17, Larkin makes a final shift in the poem, in an attempt to reckon with where his thoughts have taken him. Perhaps envious at seeing the young couple and forced to face his own aging, the speaker wants to say more, but does not seem able to. He has seen the couple, thought about sex (present in their lives but, apparently, no longer in his), wondered if anyone thought of him the same way when he was still young, questioned a life without God or hell … where does all of this lead him? “Rather than words,” he says, indicating an inability to articulate his feelings, “comes the thought of high windows.” Again he brings us back to subtle religious imagery, the “high windows” perhaps evoking the stained glass in a church. The word “high” also means elevated or transcended, which also carries religious connotations. Rather than having a logical response to the flood of emotion depicted in the poem, the speaker has only the thought of windows—an image that is both a transparent barrier and a source of light.

Lines: 18-20

Since no more words come to the speaker, only the image of “high windows” in these final lines, it is the glass that “comprehends” the sun. Any last ounce of understanding is achieved by the intimate object rather than the speaker. Beyond the glass he imagines “the deep blue air,” but this still doesn’t reveal anything more to him. Instead, it “shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.” If these last lines seem to break down or even trail off rather than explode into a fanfare of revelation, it may be because the speaker lacks the ability to explain the depth of his emotion. The more personal the feeling or experience, especially something extremely private such as sex or religion, the more difficult it is to put into words.

We should note that the last word of this poem is “endless,” which mirrors the earlier image of “everyone young going down the long slide / To happiness, endlessly.” Larkin may finish the poem in this way to give structure to an otherwise purposefully elusive ending. It also leaves the reader with a sudden sense of open space—a void where words no longer communicate.

Themes

Sex

The triggering subject of “High Windows” is the speaker’s sight of “a couple of kids” and his assumption that they are sexually involved and that the girl is using birth control. To the older speaker, this realization fuels a deep jealousy toward the couple that, in turn, leads him to explore larger questions. In another of Larkin’s poems he reported feeling excluded and “out of touch” when it came to sex: “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me).” The older speaker’s envy, though, is more than a simple reaction to feeling sexually excluded or impotent. Although Larkin chooses to shock us early on with his deliberately colloquial word choice, he spends more time describing the couple’s possible birth control methods than the sexual act itself. The effectiveness of the diaphragm and the birth control pill radically changed a young generation’s perception of sex. Suddenly young couples could eliminate the consequence of unwanted pregnancy. Before the side effects of these birth control methods were known, and before the outbreak of incurable and fatal sexually transmitted diseases, a “sexual revolution” took place in the 1960s and early 1970s. What triggers the apparent resentment toward “the kids” is the speaker’s realization that the younger generation has more sexual freedom than did his own, and that they are no longer restrained by the “bonds and gestures” enforced on his generation.

God and Religion

Assuming that the young couple is having “protected” sex—and are thus free to fulfill their desires without the consequence of pregnancy—leads the speaker to much larger issues of religion and spirituality. He considers their sexual freedom the “paradise / Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives,” as if the couple were a new Adam and Eve, no longer requiring the sexual ignorance imposed on their tenure in the Garden of Eden. “High Windows” raises many theological questions. If man can now control or prevent the creation of more life, what then is the role of God? If young couples can “sin” without the natural consequences, why do we need to “[sweat] in the dark / about hell and that” anymore? Who cares “What you think of the priest? / He and his lot will go down the long slide / Like free bloody birds.” Although Larkin paints a picture of a new world without God, he doesn’t dismiss an underlying hope for spirituality. The sexual freedom the speaker is most jealous of is only part of a larger search for personal freedom and possibility of spiritual transcendence. “Rather than words,” Larkin concludes the poem, “comes the thought of high windows,” as if language can no longer describe the place where these questions have led him. What Larkin leaves us with is an image which reminds of the stained glass windows of cathedrals, but doesn’t locate us specifically in a house of worship. And it is ultimately not the speaker who understands what this all means, but the “sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”

Human Condition

The speaker’s feelings of spiritual isolation in the poem may reflect the overall mood of people living in post-World War II England. Some critics cite Larkin as the postwar poet who most articulately and poignantly recorded the spiritual desolation of a world in which the large majority of people have abandoned the religious faith that once gave their lives meaning and hope. Larkin finds a connection between the young who have dismissed the moral code of the previous generation and pushed all “bonds and gestures to one side / Like an outdated combine harvester” and the resulting rejection of religion. This is a new world, without God, hell, or concern about hiding “what you think of the priest.” This new generation has unrestrained sexual freedom and an absence of religious morals. Nevertheless, religion is the fundamental structure and source of meaning in many lives. What does it say of the human condition if a new generation is growing up spiritually “desolate?” If the younger generation has rejected the faith that structured the lives of their parents and gave them meaning, what will take its place to give their lives meaning and structure?

Style

Larkin combines formal poetic structure with colloquial language to create a refreshingly interesting speaker’s voice in “High Windows.” Using traditional poetic devices borrowed from William

Topics for Further Study

During lunch with friends over a period of a week or so, keep a journal of interesting phrases and slang expressions you hear. Write a poem in four-line stanzas, rhymed xAxA, using only language you recorded from everyday conversations.
Some community leaders have banned the teaching of “High Windows” because of its use of profane language. Does the poem have enough “redeeming educational value” to justify its inclusion in textbooks? How so?
Begin a poem with a simple image, perhaps something you saw on the way to class or on television the night before. Using a speaking tone similar to Larkin’s, write as fast as you can, exploring the questions this subject raises and making sure you don’t repeat any idea or image as the poem progresses. See how far this frantic pace and exploration can take you from the original scene.

Butler Yeats and Thomas Hardy, he contains an otherwise obsessive and wandering train of thought inside five quatrains (four-line stanzas). The stanzas themselves are built on an xAxA rhyme scheme, which means that although the first and third lines don’t have end rhymes (indicated by an “x”), the second and fourth lines do. Larkin loosens the rules a little, though, with the use of “slant rhymes,” or words which may have matching consonant or vowel sounds, but not both. An example of this is in the first stanza, which rhymes “she’s” with “paradise,” or the third stanza which matches “back” with “dark.” This use of “half” or “slant” rhymes, made famous by Emily Dickinson, helps soften and hide a traditional form so the content of the poem isn’t overshadowed by its “container.”

Larkin often used traditional meter, or a set structure of accented and unaccented beats per line. The most famous of metric beats, the iamb, with its daDUM daDUM rhythm, is the building block of most traditional forms, matching the human heartbeat. Although Larkin doesn’t use this meter exclusively throughout the poem, it is the most prevalent of rhythms, adding a driving beat to the speaker’s voice. The second line of the poem contains four perfect iambs (otherwise known as an iambic tetrameter), composed using far from traditional language. It is this marriage of traditional meter with the most common “tavern” language which characterizes Larkin’s poetic voice the best: “And GUESS he’s FUCKing HER and SHE’S …”

Another device Larkin uses in “High Windows” is heavily enjambed lines. These lines have no punctuation to slow or stop them at the end, so they enjamb, or “run over” to the next line without pause. Lines which do end with punctuation are called “end-stopped lines.” Whereas an end-stopped line slows down the pace of the poem with a comma or period, enjambed lines let each thought flow without pause. Because the speaker’s voice in “High Windows” seems to grow increasingly frantic and fast-paced, perhaps Larkin chose to employ more enjambed lines than end-stopped lines to help reflect the obsessive mood of the poem. This technique also helps hide the end-rhymed words in each stanza by “blending” them into the flow of an image or idea which may span several lines without pause.

Historical Context

Some critics cite Larkin as the postwar poet who most articulately portrayed the spiritual desolation of a world which has lost the religious faith that had previously structured human lives. This paints a grim view of the postwar England in which Larkin lived and worked. He had been rejected for military service because of poor eyesight. While he studied literature and language at St. Johns College, many of his peers were fighting and dying in Europe. Nazi bombing during the Blitz devastated many cities in England, and citizens lived under a constant threat of death amid severe shortages of basic goods, including food and clothing. Some biographers cite this grim period in England’s history as the root of Larkin’s pessimism and isolation.

“High Windows,” published in 1974, is one of Larkin’s later poems, yet the speaker is still searching for “the last rages of religious faith.” The sexual freedom of the young is of almost obsessive interest to the speaker: “When I see a couple of kids / And guess he’s fucking her and she’s / Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm / I know this is paradise.”

“The Pill,” a hormone-based contraceptive that suppresses ovulation, was introduced to the British public in 1961. A 99 percent effective form of birth control, its development had a huge impact in both Britain and America on how an entire generation viewed sex. It eliminated the risk of unplanned or unwanted pregnancy, allowing people to explore their sexuality with limited consequences (in the 1970s, most known venereal diseases were easily curable and none were known to be fatal). The speaker in “High Windows” considers this open approach to sex a type of paradise, all of his generation’s values, “bonds and gestures pushed to one side / Like an outdated combine harvester.” But where does he fit in this new sexual freedom? The speaker’s age and solitary condition reinforce his isolation from the vibrant sexuality of the young couple. The commonplace sight of two lovers walking down the street triggers an emotionally charged narrative.

Critical Overview

Much of the commentary on “High Windows” is woven into the larger criticism of Larkin’s work as a whole. Many critics focus on the often isolated and distanced tone of Larkin’s work. In The Dictionary of Literary Biography Bruce Martin describes the speaker of Larkin’s poems as often an “unmarried observer,” “a staple in Larkin’s poetic world” who “enjoys only a curious and highly limited kind of communion with those he observes.” Andrew Sullivan, writing for the Harvard Observer, calls the overall tone of Larkin’s work that of an “irrelevant and impotent spectator.” This quality may be intended to mirror the mid–century, postwar human condition. Peter King claims in the introduction to Nine Contemporary Poets: A Critical Introduction that Larkin is the postwar poet who “most articulately and poignantly [reflects] the spiritual desolation of a world in which men have shed the last rages of religious faith that once lent meaning and hope to human lives.”

In Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin, Andrew Swarbrick writes that the voice in “High Windows” is that of “an older man jealous of youth’s sexual freedom.” In another Larkin poem, “Annus Mirabilis,” a similar jealous or perhaps wryly regretful narrative voice states, “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which

Compare & Contrast

1960: Enovid 10, the first oral contraceptive for women, is introduced by G.D. Searle.
1970: The Pill may cause blood clots, the FDA warns over 300,000 physicians in an urgent letter. The notice requires doctors to fully explain the risks of the hormone treatment to their patients before prescribing the drug.
1993: Numerous compounds and dosage levels of contraceptive pills are available. Research suggests that taking birth control pills may decrease the risk of some cancers in women. The Food and Drug Administration approves Norplant, an under-the-skin implant for women which releases the hormone progestin into the bloodstream and prevents pregnancy.
1974: President Richard Nixon becomes the first American president to resign after the House Judiciary Committee votes to impeach him on grounds of obstructing justice and failure to uphold laws.
1997: House Republicans call for a House Judiciary Committee investigation into President Clinton’s alleged campaign finance illegalities. Other members of the government call for the president’s impeachment on the grounds of personal misconduct, including extramarital affairs and sexual harassment while serving as the Governor of Arkansas.
1974: The British company EMI develops the “Catscan,” an invaluable new medical diagnostic tool which uses computed axial tomography to create colored cross-section images of the human body. EMI, formerly known as Electronic Musical Instruments, uses profits from Beatles musical recordings to develop the machine.
1997: British surgeons perform the first human brain cell transplant.
1997: Scientists in Scotland successfully clone a sheep. Worldwide debate erupts about ethical and moral issues concerning cloning.

was rather late for me).” Many critics see sexual jealousy as the driving force of “High Windows.” This emotion leads the speaker of the poem, which “starts out looking like its about sex but becomes a poem about religion,” to a transcendental ending which is more inarticulate than it is logical. Swarbrick contends that the poem represents the speaker’s search for “an imagined escape into pure freedom, a freedom from all desire and language, an escape from identity and expression,” leading Larkin to the final image of “deep blue air that shows / nothing.”

Criticism

Bruce Meyer

Bruce Meyer is Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Toronto. He has taught at several Canadian universities and is author of three collections of poetry. In the following essay, Meyer provides historical background for “High Windows” and argues that the poem explores “the issue of human sexuality in relation to morality and belief.”

According to Andrew Motion, Larkin’s biographer and author of Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, Larkin’s original title for “High Windows,” was “The Long Slide.” In the original draft of the poem, dated March 3, 1965, Larkin raises the question of the new sexual freedom sweeping England during the 1960s and tells the reader “all the writers / Born Eighty years ago said this is what we wanted …” Larkin’s initial reaction may have been to view the poem as a statement on the change in public mores, on the relationship between hope and realization, and on the widening gulf of the generation gap. What “High Windows” became by the time the poet had revised it two years later was a very different statement: an examination of the distance between

What Do I Read Next?

Larkin saved over 700 of his personal letters, revealing fascinating biographical information which lends interesting perspective to his creative writing. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985, edited by Anthony Thwaite, 791 p.
Calvin Bedient’s Eight Contemporary Poets: Charles Tomlinson, Donald Davie, R. S. Thomas, Philip Larkin, W S. Graham provides an excellent sense of Larkin’s work within a larger poetic context.
Salem Hassan explores Philip Larkin’s role in British poetry in his book Philip Larkin and His Contemporaries: An Air of Authenticity.
Another British poet who wrote during the same period as Larkin is Stevie Smith. Her Collected Poems is available from University of Oxford Press.

a man caught out on the edges of life and the reality and sensuality of love, passion, and human contact in a changing world that had left him behind. As pathetic a note as “High Windows” sounds on the part of the persona, it ends with a vision of eternity, extemporality, and nothingness—a small glimpse of heaven, a possible afterlife, and another world. The poet’s perspective in this examination of the distance between life and himself is the “godlike” vantage point of a “high window” that is remote, isolated, and dislocated.

Philip Larkin is a poet of distances. In many of his best poems, such as “The Whitsun Weddings” where he watches couples boarding a London-bound train on their wedding day, or in “Church Going” which parallels many of the concerns of man’s relationship to the spiritual, Larkin’s role is that of the observer of events. He simply narrates what he sees, but comprehends and narrates the action with the sadness and pathos of one who has become detached from life. This sad, “observational” voice is not only supported by the narrator’s position in the physical situation described in “High Windows,” but it is also further reinforced by the rhyme scheme. Larkin mixes off rhymes, such as “she’s” (line 2) with “paradise” (line 4) and “back” (line 10) with “dark” (line 12), and true rhymes (“hide” in line 13 and “slide” in line 15) with the colloquialism of the nonrhyming end words “kids” and “diaphragm” in lines 1 and 3. The poem opens as if it is searching for some sort of order, as if the voice behind the words is attempting to find some sort of structure—moral or otherwise—in a world that has become dissonant, irregular, and disaffected with the ideals of the past.

This sense of disaffection found in the rhyme scheme is almost lost through the poet’s use of the word “fucking” in line 2 when he views young love in carnal terms. His frankness reduces the innocence of the “couple of kids” not through evidentiary observation, but through surmise. Thus, young love is not viewed from the high window as something that is naive, but as something experientially jaded by the perceptions of a world-weary voice who is measuring the past against the present. The discrepency this measurement or comparison of the past and the present creates is twofold. On one hand, the reader senses that the past is something old and corrupt, a world of double standards in which longing and desire were subordinated to high ideals; on the other hand, there exists the concept of a present world on the verge of hopeful liberation, where “bonds and gestures” are “pushed to one side / Like an outdated combine harvester.” Certainly, the hypocrisy of poetic idealism is something that no longer holds any credence for the persona.

It is well to remember the context out of which Larkin’s best poetry emerged when reflecting on what “High Windows” accomplishes in its technical effects and its argument. Philip Larkin belongs to an aesthetic development in British poetry following World War II that sought to rid poetry of its lack of clarity, frankness, and contact with reality. During World War II, British poetry had become a questionable vehicle for all manner of political, sociological, psychological, and aesthetic conerns. Larkin and many of his contemporaries argued that the works of the Dylan Thomas generation had produced poetry suffering from “the delibitating theory that poetry must be metaphorical.” Such poetry of the 1940s, as Robert Conquest suggested in his introduction to the landmark New Lines anthology of 1956 (which included a selection of Larkin’s work), was little more than metaphor heaped on metaphor, a jungle of jumbled utterance and an unwrought, unpoetic expression that simply posed as poetry. The poets who presented their work in Conquest’s New Lines anthology became known as “The Movement.” They quickly gained widespread popularity for the clarity of their work, for their restored sense of poetic form and lyricism, and for the manner in which they were able to link the tradition of the lyric—last practiced with any force in England by Thomas Hardy—with the expression of realistic daily life and unmetaphorical observation. For poets such as Larkin, the “refusal to abandon a rational structure and comprehensible language, even when the verse is most highly charged with sensuous or emotional intent” was the avenue they sought to restore form and vitality to the dying tradition of English lyricism. Conquest, however, tempered his convictions about a return to “formalist” poetry on the part of The Movement poets when he stressed that their poetry was “not worth much unless it is given the flesh of humanity, irony, passion or sanity.”

The impact of The Movement was far-reaching, embodying the spirit of British arts in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The desire to confront realism, however stark and bleak it might be, attached itself to the outlook of a whole new generation of British dramatists—a group of playwrights who became known as “The Angry Young Men.” Novels such as Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and plays such as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) and Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960) and The Birthday Party (1958) embraced the new aesthetic of the “anti-phoney, anti-wet” attitude of the postwar era. By the mid-1960s, the impact of The Movement and of the work of poets such as Philip Larkin was being felt by a succeeding generation of poets, many of whom were included in A. Alvarez’ anthology The New Poetry (1962), which presented the work of both British and American poets—voices such as Plath, Sexton, and Lowell—who had, by then, either embraced the new British aesthetic or been secunded by it. Alvarez declared in his essay “Beyond the Gentility Principle” that “we are gradually being made to realize that all our lives, even those of the most genteel and enislanded, are influenced profoundly by forces which have nothing to do with gentility, decency or politeness.” By the time Larkin began the composition of “High Windows” in 1965, Alvarez had already moved the aesthetic of British poetry beyond that of mere realism and into the realm of the violent, the psychological, and the sexual.

In the scheme of British poetry, then, “High Windows” stands as a fine poem, which for all its formal tricks—such as the off-rhymes, the shocking use of the word “fucking” in the second line,

“For the persona of “High Windows,” the new distance lies not just between age and youth, or between the high window and the street below, but between the individual and God.”

and the argument that poses as statement of relief that some sort of psychological and sexual liberation has finally taken place—is an afterthought, an expression of nostalgia bordering on a sigh, and a lament for a lost youth. What Larkin feels is the passage of time, measured not just in what the “old dreamed of all their lives,” but in the distance that the voice has, itself, come from the epoch of its own innocence to the distant observation of a new era that is both the fulfillment of age–old dreams and desires for a sexually liberated world and a lament for what has come too late. He sighs,

I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God anymore, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that or having to hide
What you think of the priest.

For the persona of “High Windows,” the new distance lies not just between age and youth, or between the high window and the street below, or even heaven and earth as suggested by the final stanza, but between the individual and God. The idea is that God and an old, cast-off code of morality that once governed the lives of everyday people is now represented by “the deep blue air,” an emptiness that “shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.” The suggestion, although not explicit in the ending of the poem, is that the price of freedom has been bought with an apostate vacuum into which the individual, without benefit of the new liberation, is cast. It is into this vacuum of “nothing” and “nowhere” that many of the finest poems of Larkin’s later life are cast, such as the frightening “Aubade” in which an older man wakes in the night to confront the prospect of his own death in a heavenless universe.

The question of the “long slide” repeated twice in the poem, in lines 8 and 15, raises further theological concerns. Where is the slide going? Is progress a slide away from something—perhaps away from God? Where do our dreams lead us if they lead us to a universe that is Godless and empty? In these terms, the poem is an examination of the weight of faith and of the burden that human desire imposes upon individuals who feel obligated, by belief or by fear, to practice a code of morality that is contrary to their natural inclinations. As in the novels of D. H. Lawrence, the issue of human sexuality in relation to morality and belief is never quite resolved, no matter how hard the individual may try to argue a position for or against the age-old indictments of belief and behavioural codes and the guilt, anxiety, and sadness that often stem from the tug between the hormonal and the theological systems. And, perhaps, as Larkin admits in such poems as “Church Going,” where the persona enters an empty church out of both curiosity and the need to experience the spiritual presence within, the distance between the individual and certainty is too great to comprehend, and all one is left with, as in “High Windows,” is the sense of a gulf, an expanse, and a process that is “endless.”

Source: Bruce Meyer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

R.S. Gwynn

In the following essay, Gwynn examines the structure, themes, and influences of “High Windows,” claiming the poem to be representative of Larkin’s work.

“High Windows,” a lyric of twenty lines which became the title poem of Philip Larkin’s fourth and final collection of verse, appears roughly midway through the Collected Poems, and its position there is paradoxically both emblematic and deceptive. I say emblematic because Larkin consistently steers a middle course between opposites—between freedom and formal restraint, between naked confession and coy diffidence, between desire and the realization of desire. “High Windows” is, in many ways, the poem that best represents Larkin’s entire body of work. Yet its central location in the printed record of Larkin’s poetic career is deceptive; Larkin wrote only a handful of important poems (some would argue only one—“Aubade”) between the 1974 publication of “High Windows” and his death in 1985. It could well be that the poem’s final image, which Larkin describes as something “rather than words,” signaled that he was nearing his personal limits of expression and would henceforth find little new worth saying.

Many of the poets of Larkin’s generation, both British and American, sought a workable compromise between traditional English versification and modernist experiments with free verse or open form. While Larkin continued to write strictly traditional verse throughout his life (the next poem in Collected Poems, “The Trees,” is composed in regular iambic tetrameter quatrains, Tennyson’s stanza from “In Memoriam”), some of his best poems contain elements of both formal and free techniques. “High Windows” is metrically uneven; the lines range in length from seven to twelve syllables and contain anywhere from three to six stresses. While an iambic meter may lurk in the background, only the second line, a tetrameter, and the fifth, a pentameter, display much regularity. Similarly, the poem’s use of rhyme is variable. The first two quatrains rhyme abcb; the final three abab. The types of rhyming sounds range from exact (side / slide) to slant (if / life, back / dark) to so-called light rhymes, in which stressed syllables are made to rhyme with unstressed ones (or vice-versa) as in windows / shows and glass / endless. The loose form is in keeping with the slangy conversational tone of the poem (“And guess he’s fucking her …” “He / And his lot will all go down the long slide / Like free bloody birds.”), and most of the rhymes, even the repeated -ide rhyme, are hidden by heavy enjambments (“And everyone young going down the long slide // To happiness, endlessly.”). The light rhymes in the final stanza seem particularly effective, for they resist closing the poem with a crescendo, thus underscoring the ambivalence contained in the final images. In all, Larkin has written a poem with a considerable amount of formal control which sounds like an open-form poem.

Many poets have celebrated youth, but Larkin is a poet who seems to have passed from childhood to middle age with almost nothing in between. The unfulfilled sexual longings of the adolescent inhabit the body of a middle-aged man who realizes, like a latter-day version of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, that time has passed him by. In “Annus Mirabilis,” a poem from the same period as”High Windows,” Larkin observes:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

Larkin’s biographer Andrew Motion claims that this admission is not literally true (Larkin, unlike most “confessional” poets, is relatively unconcerned with a recitation of “facts”); however, it does capture the sexual confusion which confronted a generation who were reared with old-fashioned attitudes toward sex and saw most of the traditional rules of sexual conduct rendered irrelevant by the new freedoms of the “swinging” 1960s.

So, on one level at least, “High Windows” is a poem about sex, the tensions between freedom and frustration that surface when Larkin enviously observes a pair of young lovers. The matter-of-fact use of “fucking” in the second line displays the banner of the new frankness, Larkin’s belated realization that the old euphemisms for sexual intercourse no longer apply and have been “pushed to one side / Like an outdated combine harvester.” The “Bonds and gestures” that constituted the manners and mores of sexual behavior have been rendered obsolete by the advent of easily obtainable methods of contraception (“Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm”); now that none need fear unwanted pregnancy all restraints are loosed, with “everyone young going down the long slide // To happiness, endlessly.” The simile of a neglected piece of harvesting equipment is doubly appropriate here, since sexual activity in the Age of the Pill does not necessarily have procreation as its end.

But “High Windows,” which Larkin originally titled “The Long Slide,” is ultimately about more than sex; it is a religious poem that connects the matically to earlier Larkin poems like “Church Going” and poses a typical existentialist question: if God is dead and everything is permitted (as Nietzsche claimed) then why is no one particularly happy about it? The religious motif is initiated in line four with “paradise” and becomes predominant in the third and fourth stanzas:

I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds.

Here Larkin claims that his own generation experienced a parallel kind of liberation, not the physical rush of unbridled sexuality but the spiritual emancipation that supposedly followed their rejection of traditional Christianity. Ironically, he invents an older “Anyone” for an equally envious earlier observer, and he uses the same metaphor, “the

“On one level at least, ‘High Windows’ is a poem about sex the tensions between freedom and frustration that surface when Larkin enviously observes a pair of young lovers.”

long slide,” for both generations’ exhilaration at having shed the baggage of the past, as if they have been allowed an “endlessly” extended moment of pleasure in the children’s playground of the world. Still, Larkin leaves unsaid what should be obvious: the “kids” in the first stanza will eventually grow into their own adult disappointments and will doubtless cast covetous eyes on the illusory freedoms of an even younger generation.

But there is irony in Larkin’s choice of simile. “Free bloody birds” do not “go down the long slide”; they soar, or at least they should. The downward motion of the lovers and Larkin’s own “lot” is symbolic, for both are vouchsafed only temporary respite from gravity (i.e. mortality), the ultimate leveler of all life and joy. The slide may be a long one, but it does not continue “endlessly.” In the absence of God and any afterlife and in a world where the physical body has become the measure of all, Larkin feels no freedom at all, only discontent. This vague dissatisfaction, which comes in a manner “rather than words,” leads to the poem’s epiphany:

...the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass.
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

These “high windows” are obviously symbolic, but what kind of windows are they and what do they represent? I have had it suggested to me they embody a death wish, an imagined leap from an upper story into the great nothingness, the ultimate downhill slide, but I do not think that the answer is so simple. Motion quotes Larkin as saying they represent an “ultimate symbol of freedom from … restrictions.” Motion himself indicates that the poem’s conclusion “toys with the idea of vanishing into a wild blue yonder. However improbable an escape into ‘deep blue air’ might be, it offered a temporary release from the struggle to reconcile disparate elements of the everyday.” Motion further observes that many of the poems in High Windows create “a dramatic conflict between a plain idiom and something more nearly Yeatsian, Symbolist, or even Eliotic,” adding that their “final lines are offered as something ‘rather than words’, while remaining words all the same.” Larkin seems to have borrowed from the very beginnings of the modernist experiment, from the French symbolistes, for his conclusion. Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Les Fenetres” (1863) offers a striking parallel:

Ainsi, pris de dégoût de I’homme ... âme dure
Vautré dan le bonheur, où ses seul appétits
Mangent, et qui s’entete ... chercher cette ordure
Pour l’offrir ... la femme allaitant ses petits,
Je fuis et je m’accroche ... toute les croisées
D’où I’on tourne l’épaule ... la vie, béni,
Dans leur verre, lavé d’éternelles rosées,
Que dore le matin chaste de I’Infini,
Je me mire et me vois angel! Et je meurs, et j’aime
—Que la vitre soit I’art, soit le mysticité—
A renaître....

[Just so, disgusted with complacent Man,
Whose appetites devour him, whose sole quest
Is to fetch home what scraps of filth he can
To please the hag with urchins at her breast,
I rush, I cling to all those windows where
One turns his back on life; transformed by light,
Washed by eternal dew and swathed in air,
Reflected in the dawn of the Infinite,
I see myself an angel! die and seem
—Let this be Art! Let it be Mysticism!—
To be reborn....]

Indeed, Larkin’s mention of “the deep blue air” evokes l’azur, the pet symboliste emblem of escape and transcendence. I find it ironic that Larkin has appropriated the symbolism of the previous century’s “free” generation, the symbolist poets whose behavior likewise caused consternation in their time.

What words, finally, can we supply to express the meaning of a poem that wishes to conclude with something “rather than words”? Is Larkin nostalgically thinking of church windows, whose stained-glass panes are indeed “sun-comprehending”? Is there a further religious hint in the inescapable pun between sun and Son? Is the poem’s final desire not for escape but for a retreat into the sureties that religion once offered? At the end of “Church Going” Larkin observes:

someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Surrounded but hardly comforted by an empirical knowledge that “shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless,” this most cynical of poets may not be able to restrain himself from yearning toward the infinite that lies beyond all speech.

Source: R.S. Gwynn, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

Stephen Burt

In the following excerpt, Burt analyzes Larkin’s use of profanity in his poems, specifically in “High Windows.”

When Philip Larkin published High Windows in 1974, what everyone noticed, besides its general excellence, was its profusion of foul language. Larkin himself told John Betjeman that “whenever he looked at his book he found it was full of four-letter words.” It is, too.…

By his own account, Larkin’s language is “performative,” does something to or for his audience: every poem “is an action of some sort,” as Larkin also said [in a 1973 interview with Raymond Gardner in The Guardian]. Moreover, Larkin sees his foul language as related to the language of the time, to the generational shifts in talk and behavior that were especially rapid, exciting and unavoidable in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The rapidfire “fuck” and “crap” with which Larkin begins some poems from this period—especially by contrast with the elevated diction and stately rhythms of the poems’ endings—come across, as [Robert] Crawford (quoting Blake Morrison) has said, as “Larkin’s equivalents of dialect” [in his 1987 article “Larkin’s English” in Oxford Magazine]. But whose dialect?

Sometimes Larkin’s four-letter words invoke all-male or working-class worlds. Sometimes, too … dirty words can be a means of aggression or derogation, solitary grumbles against all of society. As often, however, the dirty words evoke the world of youth. “This Be The Verse” shows the poet negotiating with the feelings, illusions, and speech he attributes to the young. The gap in diction between the beginning and the end of “High Windows,” (or of “This Be The Verse” or “Sad Steps”) is a generation gap [according to Janice Rossen in her book Philip Larkin: His Life’s Work]. As Alan Bennett has said [in his “Instead of a Present” in Larkin at Sixty], the “real Larkin” of the poems was someone “who feels shut out when he sees fifteen-year-olds necking at bus stops,” and one of the ways he reacts in that poem is to move into, and then out from under, their language. Larkin is cultivating, or pretending to have shared, or questioning whether he himself ever did share a solidarity of experience with the common adolescent.

Are kids (and men, and working-class people) more likely than others to use four-letter words (in the form of exclamations, vague approbatory adjectives, generalized derogatory verbs, and so on)? If so, why? What special effects can four-letter words have to make some people enjoy using them and force others to leave the room? Dirty words can obviously, as means of aggression or derogation, demean or devalue their targets. Also, they can be used in order to get attention; they break rules of discourse and establish the speaker’s desire to epate whatever parent surrogates can be found. Dirty words are thus signs of affiliation with other speakers and listeners who have the same “enemies,” who want to offend or drive off a given authority. This makes them signs of disaffiliation from, of not-being-like (because not talking like) that authority. By saying “fuck” in a room or on a record, an utterer invites his or her listeners to ask: Who does this speaker belong with? Who does this speaker emphatically not belong with?

The utterance of “fuck” (and in Britain, “bloody”) can be powerful on the basis of these functions alone—aggression, attention, affiliation, disaffiliation: By using these words the utterer shows on whose side he or she wants to be.…

So “High Windows” and “This Be The Verse” … use dirty words as subcultural indicators, as powerful ways of calling into question who the poet sounds like, who he wants to sound like, and why. But in these poems, Larkin not only appropriates the way kids talk, but also talks about his not being like the kids whose speech he has appropriated. Both poems end in another register entirely, one that is more traditionally “poetic.” The subcultural indicators, then, can only be part of the force. In “High Windows,” the word “fucking” sounds aggressive, like a smear on the girl and maybe also on the boy in the poem. But this aggressive or derogatory effect is reversed when, further into the poem, the word gets reclassified as high praise: “I know this is paradise.” What sounds early on like simple resentment or jealousy modulates into jealous admiration. And since the aggressive qualities of “fucking” set the reader up to expect more derogation, this admiration comes as a neat surprise. The same kind of elevating transition, this sudden

“Larkin’s foul language doesn’t simply foreground his sad, distant, empathetic, and resentful relation to the kids whose speech he echoes.”

shifting upward from the bottom of the poet’s speech register, also occurs, I think, in the movement from the sexist language of “he’s fucking her” to “paradise / Everyone old,” since “Everyone” has to include both genders. It is this inward, self-critical turn away from his own prejudiced impulses and toward self-examination that marks the best of Larkin’s poems from this period. It also distinguishes the Larkin of these poems from the less attractive man who suffers and swears his way through Andrew Motion’s 1993 biography A Writer’s Life.

Yet four-letter words … are not only sites of aggression, affiliation and disaffiliation, but also of ambiguity. Sometimes we can’t even be sure what a particular dirty word means, how figuratively to construe it, whether it’s a compliment or a slap: “She thinks he’s the shit.” …

The dominance of their performative function, their high level of ambiguity, and their large stock of overlapping figurative meanings all contribute to that untranslatability—the sense of thickness or opacity—which words like “fuck” often have, as opposed to words such as “coffee” or “incarnadine.”

Now the effects that I claim some dirty words set in motion (the creation of irresolvable ambiguities, the foregrounding of expression, and the confounding of denotation) ought to sound familiar. These effects have been claimed not only for the phrase “They fuck you up”—or even for its most basic occluded component, “fuck you”—but also for Art In General, or for poetry. “Poetry is what is lost in translation,” said [American poet Robert] Frost, which is what [Kathleen] Raine says of obscenity; the writerly element, the effect that exceeds its meaning and which Barthes wanted in his art, is effectively built into all four-letter words. [Dick] Hebdige argues [in his 1979 book Subculture: TheMeaning of Style] that the offensive postures of first-generation punks “gestured toward a ‘nowhere’ and actively sought to remain silent, illegible.” Isn’t gesturing toward a nowhere, into a silence beyond words, one of Philip Larkin’s favorite ways of ending poems? Aren’t the attention-getting swear-words with which Larkin liked to begin his late poems, in both their opacity and their distracting, disruptive quality, a lot like the gestures offstage and into the endless elsewheres, nothings and anywheres with which Larkin ends some of these same poems? So Larkin’s foul language doesn’t simply foreground his sad, distant, empathetic, and resentful relation to the kids whose speech he echoes. It also foreshadows and reflects the same self-isolating, sadly certain rejection of ordinary language and society that is realized, at the poem’s end, in a negationist gesture out of and away from everything.

“High Windows” closes by looking up to wordless, endless, and radiant nothingness. Of course, the poem is about the end of religion (the windows seem to be those of a church) and the agnostic’s fear of death. But, like other poems from this period, it is also about the relation of the poet and his language to the social and to the private, and about the relation of one generation and its pleasures to the next and theirs. Radiant high windows and high diction on the one hand, fucking and four-letter words on the other. And while these pleasures may at first seem rivalrous or opposed, they turn out to mean, and reveal, the same thing: disrupted and disrupting negativity, resistance to meaning and relation, and—most of all—the common unavailability, for the poet, of two contrasting kinds of consolation and joy. Other people, “High Windows” says, especially young ones, seem to me to have wonderful, satisfying, earthly, social, and sensual rewards, though of course it probably doesn’t often seem that way to them (any more than it seemed to me, when I was young, a great relief to be rid of the fear of God), and those joys will never be available to me: and, second, the rewards that art can offer me, the rewards I am really built and suited for, are even at their best characterized by deferral, remoteness, vacancy. With Larkin, the rewards that art or “thought” can offer the reader or writer who is old or distant or lonely enough to need them always begin in privacy and end in privation. The invisible, endless, wordless “Elsewhere” in those windows is a final figure for two kinds of emptiness or regret—we might call them social and private, or young and old, or bodily and linguistic, or even life and art—for which the shaky ametricality and confrontational diction of the first stanzas, the fucked-up lines about fucking, comprise a first figure.

We say to ourselves “That’ll be the life” far more than we say “This is the life.” And what this indicates (a feeling of deferral, the hope that we might have the right experience later, the sense that someone else might be having it now but we haven’t or can’t) applies to our desires for artistic enlightenment as well as to those for sensual satisfaction. This common experience of the unattainability of whatever we want, or think we want, is one of Larkin’s great subjects. It is also the subject of Andrew Swarbrick’s Out of Reach, by far the best critical book solely about Larkin. Swarbrick argues that even “the most triumphant of Larkin’s poems are about failure and … ultimately prefer silence to words.” The “failures” and “silences” of “High Windows” are then twofold: one is sexual and social, the other is private and abstract. Larkin can’t think about the one without the other. Some deep groove in his head connects an inability to reach or speak to the young with a sense of sexual unfulfillment, and associates both with an almost deconstructive despair at the failure of words (and of art) to mean or cohere.…

Larkin’s confrontational “fucks,” like his gestures to elsewhere and nothing, respond to this loss, to this sense of failure, which is both spiritual (and private) and social (and sexual).

Source: “High Windows and Four-Letter Words: A Note on Philip Larkin,” in Boston Review, Vol. 21, No. 5, November, 1996.

Sources

King, Peter, Nine Contemporary Poets: A Critical Introduction, Methuen, 1979.

Larkin, Philip, Collected Poems, edited by Anthony Thwaite, Farrar, 1989.

Martin, Bruce K., “Philip Larkin,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 27: Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 1945-1960, Detroit: Gale, 1984.

Motion, Andrew, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, Farrar, 1993.

Sullivan, Andrew, “Philip Larkin” from The Harvard Advocate, May, 1968.

Swarbrick, Andrew, Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin, London: Macmillan, 1995 pp. 130-37.

For Further Study

Latre, Guido, Locking Earth to the Sky: A Structuralist Approach to Philip Larkin’s Poetry, Peter Lang Publishing, 1995.

Exploring Larkin’s use of traditional form, Latre discovers many fascinating relationships between his tight poetic structure and everyday language.

Motion, Andrew, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1993.

Motion draws from Larkin’s entire archive of work to make both literary and psychological conclusions regarding the “cranky” and “overwhelmingly humorous” poet.

Tolley, A.T., My Proper Ground: A Study of the Work of Philip Larkin and its Development, Edinburgh University Press, 1991.