Enjoy some Larkin!

I am terrible at finding the painting I was intending to post about tonight (currently it's at "green dress prominent, other drab people near walls, dancing, may include the name of a dance in the title"; help me, people!), so here is some Philip Larkin.

Fiction and the Reading Public

Give me a thrill, says the reader,

Give me a kick;

I don't care how you succeed, or

What subject you pick.

Choose something you know all about

That'll sound like real life:

Your childhood, your Dad pegging out,

How you sleep with your wife.

But that's not sufficient, unless

You make me feel good -

Whatever you're 'trying to express'

Let it be understood

That 'somehow' God plaits up the threads,

Makes 'all for the best',

That we may lie quiet in our beds

And not be 'depressed'.

For I call the tune in this racket:

I pay your screw,

Write reviews and the bull on the jacket -

So stop looking blue

And start serving up your sensations

Before it's too late;

Just please me for two generations -

You'll be 'truly great'.

I think this poem is lovely. One of the things that makes Larkin a great poet is his willingness always to use the word that has the right meaning, the one that sounds right (and when the two don't converge, the poem changes): the reader pays "your screw" and writes the "bull on the jacket."

The members of the "reading public" are satisfied by pleasantries, yes, and also by the second-order pleasure of seeing coherence and logical consistency: tales that wrap themselves up neatly without loose ends, compositions that neatly return to the key they started in. It's actually the latter that is most necessary for the "reading public" (or else they'd reject Shakespeare's tragedies and Friday the Thirteenth alike).

Larkin doesn't take liberties with his precisely chosen language to provide either of those. Sometimes the realities of the human experience are jagged, rough, disconnected; sometimes they stray off, never to return to center: Larkin's poetry captures that harshness when it's appropriate. Read some.