The North Ship

PHILIP LARKIN

The North Ship

To
S.L. and E.E.L.
in gratitude

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

I. ‘All catches alight’

II. ‘This was your place of birth’

III. ‘The moon is full tonight’

IV. Dawn

V. Conscript

VI. ‘Kick up the fire’

VII. ‘The horns of the morning’

VIII. Winter

IX. ‘Climbing the hill within the deafening wind’

X. ‘Within the dream you said’

XI. Night-Music

XII. ‘Like the train’s beat’

XIII. ‘I put my mouth’

XIV. Nursery Tale

XV. The Dancer

XVI. ‘The bottle is drunk out by one’

XVII. ‘To write one song, I said’

XVIII. ‘If grief could burn out’

XIX. Ugly Sister

XXI. ‘I see a girl dragged by the wrists’

XXII. ‘I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land’

XXII. ‘One man walking a deserted platform’

XXIII. ‘If hands could free you, heart’

XXIV. ‘Love, we must part now: do not let it be’

XXV. ‘Morning has spread again’

XXVI. ‘This is the first thing’

XXVII. ‘Heaviest of flowers, the head’

XXVIII. ‘Is it for now or for always’

XXIX. ‘Pour away that youth’

XXX. ‘So through that unripe day you bore your head’

XXXI. The North Ship

XXXII. ‘Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair’

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

THE NORTH SHIP would probably not have been published if the late William Bell, then an undergraduate at Merton College, had not set about making up a collection which he eventually called Poetry From Oxford in Wartime. Oxford poetry was reputedly in the ascendant again following the scarlet and yellow Eight Oxford Poets in 1941 (Keith Douglas, Sidney Keyes, John Heath-Stubbs, Drummond Allison, et al.), and Bell no doubt thought it was time for another round-up. When his anthology came out in 1944 it had Allison, Heath-Stubbs and Roy Porter from the earlier collection, and the new names of Bell himself, Francis King, myself, Christopher Middleton and David Wright. How many of the second group had been in hard covers before I don’t know: certainly I hadn’t.

Before it appeared, however, the proprietor of the small but then well-known house that was producing the book wrote to some of its contributors enquiring if they would care to submit collections of their own work. The letter I received was on good-quality paper and signed with an illegible broad-nibbed squiggle: I was enormously flattered, and typed out some thirty pieces on my father’s old portable Underwood. The publisher seemed to like them, saying that he could undertake publication early next year ‘and perhaps have the book ready in February’. Since this was already the end of November, my excitement ran high, but I must (with memories of The Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book) have parried with some enquiry about terms, for another letter a month later (two days before Christmas) assured me that no agreement was necessary.