Although Britain had emerged from World War Two as victorious, the cost of this victory became increasingly apparent in the years that followed. Labour’s success in the 1945 General Election resulted in a series of social and political reforms which tapped into a national desire for change, with the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948 and widespread nationalisation of industry. However, these changes were not sufficient to combat the devastating economic and ideological effects of World War Two. As Mark Jackson summarises,
When the Second World War ended in 1945, British people, like those of many other nations, were struggling to reconcile themselves to the appalling consequences of war: over 450,000 British soldiers and civilians had been killed and many more severely wounded; families and communities had been destroyed; cities and homes had been reduced to rubble; and welfare services were struggling to cope with the burden of physical and psychological illness, not only amongst members of the armed forces but also amongst civilian populations.
As Jackson suggests, in these immediate post-war years, the national outlook of England was dominated by a profound sense of disillusionment and despair.
Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived (1955) is fundamentally concerned with these conditions of post-war society. For example, the title, a subversion of Ophelia’s declaration in Hamlet that ‘I was the more deceived’ (III. i. 120) immediately suggests a determination to resist illusion in this difficult post-war period; ‘an attitude of wary suspiciousness and worldly scepticism’, as Andrew Swarbrick notes. An important aspect of this ‘worldly scepticism’ and Larkin’s suspicious approach to post-war society is the poet’s continued engagement with Romanticism. Throughout these poems, Larkin uses Romantic imagery as a vehicle to press against the social and political conditions of post-war England, subverting these often idealistic concepts of transformation and transcendence to explore a cultural condition of disillusionment and despair.
Michael O’Neill has evidenced the way in which the Romantic metaphor of air enables ‘twentieth century poets to enter into sustaining dialogue with the great Romantic poets’ especially regarding the issues of transformation and transcendence. Instead of an affirmative vision of these tropes, the Romantic metaphor of air in Larkin’s ‘Triple Time’ (1954) becomes a symbol of ‘worldly scepticism’ as the speaker bemoans
This empty street, this sky to blandness scoured,
This air, a little indistinct with autumn
Like a reflection, constitute the present —
A time traditionally soured,
A time unrecommended by event. (1-5).
Though Larkin’s engagement with the metaphor of air is shadowed by Percy B. Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1820), each of these poets use this symbol in very different ways. Whereas Shelley’s idealistic ‘wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being’ (1) is an agent of transformative process and change, Larkin’s ‘air, a little indistinct with autumn’ subverts this metaphor to become a symbol of his speaker’s own disenchantment with post-war England. This change from the driving rhythms of Shelley’s alliterative line to Larkin’s limp syntax of indifference especially enacts this deflation of Romantic ideals and the resulting sense of ‘worldly scepticism’. The jarring repetition of ‘time’ and Larkin’s selection of ‘bells’, which ironically fails to chime with the corresponding rhyme of ‘else’ (6), also articulates this disillusionment regarding a ‘time traditionally soured, | A time unrecommended by event’.
‘Wires’ (1953) is also primarily concerned with this national outlook and has been repeatedly labelled as an allegory for the social and political conditions of post-war society. Larkin’s speaker describes how
The widest prairies have electric fences,
For though old cattle know they must not stray
Young steers are always scenting purer water
Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires
Leads them to blunder up against the wires
Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter.
Young steers become old cattle from that day,
Electric limits to their widest senses. (1-8).
The continued rationing and economic restrictions which dominated the late 1940s and early 1950s are easy to locate within the form and imagery of the poem. Larkin’s ABCD DCBA rhyme scheme is particularly suggestive of enclosure and the enjambment between the first and second stanza, which offers the hope of finding purer waters ‘Beyond the wires’, only ‘Leads them to blunder up against the wires’ once more. Although ‘Wires’ is not itself engaged with the themes and tropes of Romanticism, this sense of relentless frustration at a lack of freedom and restriction prefigures the distinctly Romantic desire to transcend these social conditions in ‘Here’ (1961), from The Whitsun Weddings (1964).
Though published almost a decade later, The Whitsun Weddings is also concerned with these challenging conditions of post-war society, as England struggled to come to terms with the full-ranging political and social effects of World War Two. Since the publication of The Less Deceived, the restrictions and rationing explored in ‘Wires’ had been lifted and the country’s economy had shown significant signs of recovery. However, despite this newfound relative “affluence” for some, a different set of problems began to emerge during this period. For example, with an unprecedented rise in immigration, urbanisation and growing concerns over the topic of political consensus, the issues of cultural cohesion, integration and social inequality were widespread in post-war society, as evidenced throughout The Whitsun Weddings. This issue of class tensions and a sense of what Jason Harding refers to as the ‘social alienation’ of the period, is also reflected in the wider literature of this era such as in the works of “The Angry Young Men”, a group of writers with which Larkin has literary and personal links.
Philip Larkin’s ‘Here’ is clearly situated within the post-war context of this collection, as the poem opens with a journey through this landscape
Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude. (1-5).
Following this opening verbal participle, the first sections of ‘Here’ are dominated by its restless syntax, the repeated conjunctions and a resulting sense of overwhelming enumeration. Larkin repeats these techniques throughout the poem in order to consolidate this effect. For example, the syndetic listing of the numerous aspects of post-war society is complemented by the breathless enjambment in the poem’s third stanza, which describes
A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives. (17-21).
Michael O’Neill has argued that the concept of ‘difference’ and the poet’s ‘troubled recognition of this’ is central to Larkin’s poetic method in The Whitsun Weddings. In ‘Here’, this ‘troubled recognition’ of ‘difference’ is evident in the speaker’s exhausting attempts to summarise and reconcile the disparate nature of post-war society with its ‘cut-price crowd’, ‘meadows’ and ‘industrial shadows’. In doing so, Larkin gives expression to the growing concerns over these issues of cultural cohesion and social inequality.
These concerns are shadowed by Larkin’s reference to ‘the slave museum’ which subtly raises issues of freedom and prosperity, linking back to the themes of The Less Deceived and ‘Wires’, in particular. This issue is particularly pertinent to the ‘residents from raw estates’ (12) and that ‘cut-price crowd’, the presumably working-class individuals of the poem. At the linguistic level, Larkin’s use of consonance creates a sense of uniformity and repetition associated with these individuals, which perhaps gestures towards the monotonous realities of working-class life and this issue of restrictive freedoms. Equally, this jarring repetition of sound may also represent a dismissive view of this class, suggesting their exclusion and resulting sense of ‘social alienation’, as voiced in the literature of “The Angry Young Men”. Either way, as the collection’s opening poem, ‘Here’ offers a troubling snapshot of the progression of post-war society, even into the 1950s and 60s, and gestures towards the difficulty of Larkin’s task in gathering and reconciling these differences in The Whitsun Weddings. Moreover, these issues of freedom, suggested by the reference to ‘the slave museum’, create an alarming parallel with a poem such as ‘Wires’ and raises further questions surrounding ideas of progression, development and disillusionment in post-war society.
With its central concerns of liberty and transformation, it is unsurprising that the final movements of ‘Here’ turn to Romanticism and this notion of transcendence. In these closing lines, Larkin’s speaker asserts that
[…] Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach. (25-32).
The ‘Luminously-peopled air’ and ‘bluish neutral distance’ of sea and sky, subtly registers these notions of transcendence, linking to Michael O’Neill’s Romantic metaphor of air. Larkin’s acceleration of language and syntax in these closing lines therefore lifts readers ‘beyond’ these troubling conditions of post-war society and momentarily into the exhilarating realm of transcendence. However, unlike Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s view of individual transcendence, the language and syntax of Larkin’s closing lines in ‘Here’ are of integration and community. For example, O’Neill explains how ‘cutting across all these differences’ explored throughout the poem is the repeated use of ‘here’, a word which has an odd, slightly disconcerting effect in the poem; it implies that everywhere is ‘here’ for somebody, a recognition that blurs any clear-cut sense of distinctions between localities.
Larkin’s repetition of the emphatic ‘Here’ in this realm of transcendence therefore carries with it, these disparate communities and individuals of post-war England into this glorious ‘unfenced existence’. Andrew Swarbrick’s notion of the ‘accumulative syntax’ explored throughout the poem can also be considered in relation to this ‘accumulative’ transcendental vision. This ‘existence’, which so explicitly recalls the ‘electric fences’ and hopeless attempts to move ‘Beyond’ the ‘Wires’, articulates the speaker’s communal desire for a society in which such restrictions, inequalities and differences are no longer present. Larkin therefore engages with, and extends, this Romantic legacy, in his communal vision of transcendence ‘beyond’ the restrictive conditions of post-war society.
Unfortunately, this ongoing sense of ‘worldly scepticism’ means that, despite the pause created by the colon of ‘unfenced existence:’, this vision of transcendence cannot be truthfully sustained. As such, the broken syntax of this final line ‘Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach’ painfully enacts the speaker’s failing grip on this transcendental, communal vision and the inevitable return to reality. Stephen Regan explains how
Given that there can be no final or permanent sense of release, the ultimate direction of the poem is not forward (since it can only gesture towards transcendence) but back, with renewed awareness of the extremes of isolation, into the communities it left behind.
This failure of transcendence not only heightens this longing but, as Regan suggests, it also illuminates the pathos of this return to a desperate society struggling with issues of cultural cohesion and faltering progression. In ‘Here’ therefore, Larkin presses against the themes and tropes of Romanticism in order to deepen the understanding of, and sense of sympathy for, this post-war society of disillusionment and despair.
The 1960s and early 70s, the period with which High Windows is concerned, is often characterised by a return to ‘idealism’ and hope. Technological advances, newfound sexual liberation and the emergence of the first generation free from conscription has led to an array of idealising, cultural narratives concerning the 1960s, in particular. For instance, depictions of the “Swinging Sixties” are often marked by the radiance of music, fashion and youthful exuberance.
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