Interesting topic.
Almanacked, their names live; they
Have slipped their names, and stand at ease,
Or gallop for what must be joy,
And not a fieldglass sees them home,
Or curious stop-watch prophesies:
Only the groom, and the groom's boy,
With bridles in the evening come.
In that last stanza of "At Grass", a lot depends on pacing. What if the preceding lines were slightly different, and the poem ended like this:
"…only the groom
With bridles in the evening comes."
Or what if Larkin had simply omitted the commas around "and the groom's boy", or even the ones surrounding "and stand at ease"― which would be correct. There's a pause or full stop at the end of every line in the final stanza, as well as a few thrown in mid-line, so that the sense of the "holding off" of that final verb goes back well into the poem, deepening the effect. That's one reason it works so well.
Also, Larkin's sensibility is not anachronistic. In addition to everything else it is, his work is a response to modernism, not a denial of it.
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