[Ann Drysdale]

No - they were from Inverness. It was the Ball at Kirriemuir they came down for. Don't ask - just trust me.

[Jim Burrows]

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.

[Maryann Corbett]

Jim, by isolating that stanza of "At Grass" you've made me notice something. The inversion that places "come" at the end of the last line is part of a pattern of verb phrases at the ends of lines and clauses--not every verb, no, but most of them in the stanza:

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.

I think that's part of the reason we feel it as right when it arrives.

[James Thomas]

Not to offend, but isn't "prophesies" a noun? But what exactly are curious stop-watch prophesies? Things being said about the horses by betters, handicappers, bystanders...? Some of my favorite Larkin,
They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
they don't mean to, but they do...
and I forget the rest, but isn't that first line an inversion of some sort?

[Jim Burrows]

"prophesies" is a verb. The subject is "curious stop watch". The stopwatch stands for the person holding it, and for the human interest in them generally. To "prophesy" here would be to make odds and bet. This would be a form of metonymy or synecdoche, I guess. I never can keep them straight.

[Maryann Corbett]

Gene, I think you're confusing two words: the noun prophecy (pronounced PRAH-feh-see) and the verb prophesy (PRAH-feh-sigh), which means to utter a prophecy. Larkin's using the verb in this poem.

He's saying that there are no stopwatches here prophesying--no stopwatches around to time the horses and help predict a winner. All his details are specific ways of making the general statement that this scene is very different from a race.

Oops. Cross-posted with Jim, who got here first.

[Elisheva Goud]

Hi Alicia,
Thank you very much for this thread, it is as interesting as it is necessary, especially for eratosphere (if I may be so bold...). I am a new member and keep coming across inversion criticisms within metric and non-metric poems alike. The lines containing the inversions are often the strongest lines, in my opinion, and when they are edited out the poem suffers. Appropriate usage of this literary device should not be eradicated!
E

[Rick Mullin]

The thing about the Larkin "sentence" is, perhaps foremost, that it does not seem--is not, really--grammatically incorrect. The ending on the verb and other nearly, but not quite, quaint arrangements of the parts of speech are true to the subject of the horses "at grass". Is it archaic or "poemy"? No. It's great poetry. I don't want to know anything about how this kind of thing is done. There is no formula. I'd scoff at any that is presented. It is largely a matter of taste and something that comes without thinking about it.

[Allen Tice]

Originally Posted by Svein Olav Nyberg

It should rather be to follow Strunk & White 's dictum that, within the larger syntactical unit, the most important word, phrase and sentence should always come last. ( rule 22 )

------------------
Svein Olav (The poet formerly known as Solan )

There's something to that. And a lot to this:

Originally Posted by Henry Quince

Ernest Dowson in the short piece below uses a particular and rather colloquial type of inversion, if that’s the right word, in the first line of each of the two quatrains. This is the type of construction frequently heard in sentences like “He was an odd fellow, my old Uncle Godfey.” The early pronoun is a kind of placeholder for the subject, which is then spelt out after the predicate. The subject gains extra emphasis by being mentioned twice, once in its full form at the end of the phrase or sentence where it reverberates in the mind.

Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
....Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
....We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
....Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
....Within a dream.



[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited May 30, 2005).]