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.

Looking at the collection today, it seems amazing that anyone should have offered to publish it without a cheque in advance and a certain amount of bullying. This, however, was not how I saw it at the time. As February turned to March, and March to April, my anticipation of the promised six copies curdled through exasperation to fury and finally to indifference; my astonishment to find now, on looking up the records, that in fact they arrived almost exactly nine months after despatch of typescript (on 31st July 1945) shows how completely I subsequently came to believe my own fantasy of eighteen months or even two years. I inspected them sulkily.

It may not have been the best introduction to publication: my Oxford friend, Bruce Montgomery, was writing Edmund Crispin novels for Gollancz, while Routledge had taken up Keyes and Heath-Stubbs. Still, I was on the same list as Dylan Thomas, Roy Fuller, Nicholas Moore and other luminaries, and the book was nicely enough produced, with hardly any misprints; above all, it was indubitably there, an ambition tangibly satisfied. Yet was it? Then, as now, I could never contemplate it without a twinge, faint or powerful, of shame compounded with disappointment. Some of this was caused by the contents but not all: I felt in some ways cheated. I can’t exactly say how. It was a pity they had ever mentioned February.

ii

Looking back, I find in the poems not one abandoned self but several – the ex-schoolboy, for whom Auden was the only alternative to ‘old-fashioned’ poetry; the undergraduate, whose work a friend affably characterized as ‘Dylan Thomas, but you’ve a sentimentality that’s all your own’; and the immediately post-Oxford self, isolated in Shropshire with a complete Yeats stolen from the local girls’ school. This search for a style was merely one aspect of a general immaturity. It might be pleaded that the war years were a bad time to start writing poetry, but in fact the principal poets of the day – Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Betjeman – were all speaking out loud and clear, and there was no reason to become entangled in the undergrowth of Poetry Quarterly and Poetry London except by a failure of judgment. Nor were my contemporaries similarly afflicted. I remember looking through an issue of The Cherwell, one day in Blackwell’s, and coming across John Heath-Stubbs’s ‘Leporello’: I was profoundly bewildered. I had never heard of Leporello, and what sort of poetry was this – who was he copying? And his friend Sidney Keyes was no more comforting: he could talk to history as some people talk to porters, and the mention of names like Schiller and Rilke and Gilles de Retz made me wish I were reading something more demanding than English Language and Literature. He had most remarkable brown and piercing eyes: I met him one day in Turl Street, when there was snow on the ground, and he was wearing a Russian-style fur hat. He stopped, so I suppose we must have known each other to talk to – that is, if we had had anything to say. As far as I remember, we hadn’t.

The predominance of Yeats in this volume deserves some explanation. In 1943 the English Club was visited by Vernon Watkins, then stationed at an Air Force camp nearby; impassioned and imperative, he swamped us with Yeats until, despite the fact that he had not nearly come to the end of his typescript, the chairman had forcibly to apply the closure. As a final gesture Vernon distributed the volumes he had been quoting from among those of us who were nearest to him, and disappeared, exalted, into the black-out. I had been tremendously impressed by the evening and in the following weeks made it my business to collect his books up again – many of them were limited Cuala Press editions, and later Yeats was scarce at that time – and take them to him at Bradwell, where he was staying with some people called Blackburn who kept a goat. This time Vernon read me Lorca.

As a result I spent the next three years trying to write like Yeats, not because I liked his personality or understood his ideas but out of infatuation with his music (to use the word I think Vernon used). In fairness to myself it must be admitted that it is a particularly potent music, pervasive as garlic, and has ruined many a better talent. Others found it boring. I remember Bruce Montgomery snapping, as I droned for the third or fourth time that evening When such as I cast off remorse, So great a sweetness flows into the breast …, ‘It’s not his job to cast off remorse, but to earn forgiveness.’ But then Bruce had known Charles Williams. Every night after supper before opening my large dark green manuscript book I used to limber up by turning the pages of the 1933 plum-coloured Macmillan edition, which stopped at ‘Words for Music Perhaps’, and which meant in fact that I never absorbed the harsher last poems. This may be discernible in what I wrote.

When reaction came, it was undramatic, complete and permanent. In early 1946 I had some new digs in which the bedroom faced east, so that the sun woke me inconveniently early. I used to read. One book I had at my bedside was the little blue Chosen Poems of Thomas Hardy: Hardy I knew as a novelist, but as regards his verse I shared Lytton Strachey’s verdict that ‘the gloom is not even relieved by a little elegance of diction’. This opinion did not last long; if I were asked to date its disappearance, I should guess it was the morning I first read ‘Thoughts of Phena At News of Her Death’. Many years later, Vernon surprised me by saying that Dylan Thomas had admired Hardy above all poets of this century. ‘He thought Yeats was the greatest by miles’, he said. ‘But Hardy was his favourite.’

iii

‘F/Sgt. Watkins, V’ was the book’s kindest and almost only critic. Writing from the Sergeants’ Mess, he was generously encouraging (did I recall his Yeats anecdote: ‘Always I encourage, always’?), reserving for only one or two pieces his sharpest term of condemnation, ‘not a final statement’. ‘Yesterday’, he added, ‘I destroyed about two thousand poems that mean nothing to me now.’ Despite this hint, although with considerable hesitation, the book is now republished, as there seems to be still some demand for it. I have corrected two misprints and one solecism. As a coda I have added a poem, written a year or so later, which, though not noticeably better than the rest, shows the Celtic fever abated and the patient sleeping soundly.

P. L.

October 1965.

I

All catches alight

(To Bruce Montgomery)

All catches alight

At the spread of spring:

Birds crazed with flight

Branches that fling

Leaves up to the light—

Every one thing,

Shape, colour and voice,

Cries out, Rejoice!

A drum taps: a wintry drum.

Gull, grass and girl

In air, earth and bed

Join the long whirl

Of all the resurrected,

Gather up and hurl

Far out beyond the dead

What life they can control—

All runs back to the whole.

A drum taps: a wintry drum.

What beasts now hesitate

Clothed in cloudless air,

In whom desire stands straight?

What ploughman halts his pair

To kick a broken plate

Or coin turned up by the share?

What lovers worry much

That a ghost bids them touch?

A drum taps: a wintry drum.

Let the wheel spin out,

Till all created things

With shout and answering shout

Cast off rememberings;

Let it all come about

Till centuries of springs

And all their buried men

Stand on the earth again.

A drum taps: a wintry drum.

II

This was your place of birth

This was your place of birth, this daytime palace,

This miracle of glass, whose every hall

The light as music fills, and on your face

Shines petal-soft; sunbeams are prodigal

To show you pausing at a picture’s edge

To puzzle out the name, or with a hand

Resting a second on a random page—

The clouds cast moving shadows on the land.

Are you prepared for what the night will bring?

The stranger who will never show his face,

But asks admittance; will you greet your doom

As final; set him loaves and wine; knowing

The game is finished when he plays his ace,

And overturn the table and go into the next room?

III

The moon is full tonight

The moon is full tonight

And hurts the eyes,

It is so definite and bright.

What if it has drawn up

All quietness and certitude of worth

Wherewith to fill its cup,

Or mint a second moon, a paradise?—

For they are gone from earth.

IV

Dawn

To wake, and hear a cock

Out of the distance crying,

To pull the curtains back

And see the clouds flying—

How strange it is

For the heart to be loveless, and as cold as these.

V

Conscript

(for James Ballard Sutton)

The ego’s county he inherited

From those who tended it like farmers; had

All knowledge that the study merited,

The requisite contempt of good and bad;

But one Spring day his land was violated;

A bunch of horsemen curtly asked his name,

Their leader in a different dialect stated

A war was on for which he was to blame,

And he must help them. The assent he gave

Was founded on desire for self-effacement

In order not to lose his birthright; brave,

For nothing would be easier than replacement,

Which would not give him time to follow further

The details of his own defeat and murder.

VI

Kick up the fire

Kick up the fire, and let the flames break loose

To drive the shadows back;

Prolong the talk on this or that excuse,

Till the night comes to rest

While some high bell is beating two o’clock.

Yet when the guest

Has stepped into the windy street, and gone,

Who can confront

The instantaneous grief of being alone?

Or watch the sad increase

Across the mind of this prolific plant,

Dumb idleness?

VII

The horns of the morning

The horns of the morning

Are blowing, are shining,

The meadows are bright

With the coldest dew;

The dawn reassembles.

Like the clash of gold cymbals

The sky spreads its vans out

The sun hangs in view.

Here, where no love is,

All that was hopeless

And kept me from sleeping

Is frail and unsure;

For never so brilliant,

Neither so silent

Nor so unearthly, has

Earth grown before.

VIII

Winter

In the field, two horses,

Two swans on the river,

While a wind blows over

A waste of thistles

Crowded like men;

And now again

My thoughts are children

With uneasy faces

That awake and rise

Beneath running skies

From buried places.

For the line of a swan

Diagonal on water

Is the cold of winter,

And each horse like a passion

Long since defeated

Lowers its head,

And oh, they invade

My cloaked-up mind

Till memory unlooses

Its brooch of faces—

Streams far behind.

Then the whole heath whistles

In the leaping wind,

And shrivelled men stand

Crowding like thistles

To one fruitless place;

Yet still the miracles

Exhume in each face

Strong silken seed,

That to the static

Gold winter sun throws back

Endless and cloudless pride.

IX

Climbing the hill within the deafening wind

Climbing the hill within the deafening wind

The blood unfurled itself, was proudly borne

High over meadows where white horses stood;

Up the steep woods it echoed like a horn

Till at the summit under shining trees

It cried: Submission is the only good;

Let me become an instrument sharply stringed

For all things to strike music as they please.

How to recall such music, when the street

Darkens? Among the rain and stone places

I find only an ancient sadness falling,

Only hurrying and troubled faces,

The walking of girls’ vulnerable feet,

The heart in its own endless silence kneeling.

X

Within the dream you said

Within the dream you said:

Let us kiss then,

In this room, in this bed,

But when all’s done

We must not meet again.

Hearing this last word,

There was no lambing-night,

No gale-driven bird

Nor frost-encircled root

As cold as my heart.

XI

Night-Music

At one the wind rose,

And with it the noise

Of the black poplars.

Long since had the living

By a thin twine

Been led into their dreams

Where lanterns shine

Under a still veil

Of falling streams;

Long since had the dead

Become untroubled

In the light soil.

There were no mouths

To drink of the wind,