Larkin is quick to make a link and express a disappointment: I might have been a wise king setting out / Under the Christmas lights but the glittering epiphany he might have prepared for ( forewarned) has turned into an underwhelming London-scape ( journey back Into the heartland of the ordinary) he is just as before ( Still my oId self), on the look-out for his evening drink: ready to knock one back.Ī quoter of Dante, Larkin provides a self-deprecating epiphany: ‘ A nine-to-five man who had seen poetry‘.ĭOD (337): What prompted the poem in the first place was an invitation to contribute to a memorial volume being edited by George Hartley of the Marvell Press. Heaney places Larkin’s post-mortem trek amidst the fatigue and bustle of his lifetime ( rush-hour buses/ Bore the drained and laden through the city) and the unmistakable signs of the Advent period.
Larkin quotes the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno II in which the serenity of evening ( the umber air/ Soothing every creature on the earth now at rest after the daily toils) contrasts with the ordeal and duty of Larkin’s imminent journey: I alone was girding myself. The poem ponders the ‘ truths and mysteries’ of the soul’s post-mortem onward journey and pays a warm hearted, tongue-in-cheek tribute to a popular 20th century poet. He explained the poem’s provenance to DOD (below) and how, to his surprise, the poet’s shade (his dead persona), whom he met in imagination on the streets of London, quoted Dante.
Heaney introduces the first of a number of literary and artistic celebritie s, poet Philip Larkin who had passed away in December 1985.
0 kommentar(er)
