Thanks for the Larkin discussion, Jeff. I'm still hunting for another Larkin poem that I think is relevant background to "Home is So Sad"
Here's another very, very dark Larkin poem, which starts out with noisy complaint and decrescendos to plain hopelessness:
The Life with a Hole in It
When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
But you've always done what you want,
You always get your way
- A perfectly vile and foul
Inversion of all that's been.
What the old ratbags mean
Is I've never done what I don't.
So the shit in the shuttered chateau
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds
Is far off as ever, but so
Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod
(Six kids, and the wife in pod,
And her parents coming to stay)...
Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you'll get. Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Of havings-to, fear, faces.
Days sift down it constantly. Years.
Unlike "Aubade" which has my sympathy even though I don't feel the same terror, I feel resistance toward "Life with a Hole in It." I find myself asking whether he really had the right to this hopelessness, or this much detestation of his lot. It's been true of the poems posted so far--for me, at least--that they pull me in because I'm in sympathy with the feeling expressed. This one does grab me, but in a kind of unwilling fascination.
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