[David Anthony]

Cut Grass

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

They die in the hours
Of young-leafed June,
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.

(Y'all probably know this one already, but I only saw it yesterday.)

Regards,
David

[A. E. Stallings]

That's a lovely one, David, and reminds us that Larkin has a very pure strain of lyric as well as his more famous colloquial pessimistic mode ("This Be the Verse," for example).

Perhaps this has been featured here before, but it does seem appropriate for March (and in fact, the date on it is March 3, 1956):


First Sight

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

[David Anthony]

I like that a lot much, Alicia: very Larkin.
One of the things that struck me about "Cut Grass" is that it doesn't sound Larkin at all: no side, no cynicism, just a wistful, simple, yearning grace.
I think he had a premonition of his own (relatively) early death, and was mourning that.
Regards,
David

[Margaret Moore]

His piece on retired race horses - At Grass - Jan. 1950 - is worth tracking down, if you don't know it. Here are the last two stanzas:

Do memories plague their ears like flies?
They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows.
Summer by summer all stole away,
The starting-gates, the crowds and cries -
All but the unmolesting meadows.
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.

Margaret.

[A. E. Stallings]

That's a breathtakingly beautiful cross-stanza enjambment, Margaret--the way the horses really do slip free. Lovely. And the bridling of night. Ah.

By the way, meant to comment about "Cut Grass"--it just goes to show you that yes, a masterful poet CAN rime breath and death and get away with it.

[Clive Watkins]

Hello, all!

"At Grass" is the final poem in Larkin’s second book The Less Deceived (1955), and a lovely poem it is. Interestingly, "An Arundel Tomb", the final poem in his next book, The Whitsun Weddings (1964) is written in the same metre and makes use of the same enjambment, thus:

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came….

Even the rhymes are the same - "away / they"!

Both poems demonstrate well Larkin’s expressive management of syntax against metrical lines, something I have commented on before in other connexions and which has perhaps some tangential relevance for Chris’s intriguing thread, "Hemingway and the Unpopularity of Verse", over on "General Discussion" at the moment.

It is also of interest, perhaps, that, though the subject matter of the two poems is different (retired race-horses, mediaeval effigies in Chichester Cathedral), they follow the same "poetic plot".

On a different note, I have always found the ending of "An Arundel Tomb" very moving. The following verses run on from those quoted above:

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history ,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Clive Watkins


[This message has been edited by Clive Watkins (edited March 06, 2002).]

[Gloria Mitchell]

Just wanted to thank everyone for reminding me what wonderful stuff Larkin did, and to offer another Larkin spring poem (this one for May, not March):

THE TREES

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die, too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

[Michael Juster]

Larkin kickstarted me into writing formal verse 12 years ago, and I have always loved "Cut Grass". I should haven't been surprised, though, to learn years later that the poor conflicted man disliked this little gem of his, particularly the Queen Anne's lace reference.

[Len Krisak]

Just to get it out front right away,
I think Larkin is fabulous.

Now...can anyone put us on to the essay
someone wrote a few years ago violently
attacking Larkin for, among other things,
using "bridle" in "At Grass" when it should
have been some other word? (The same essay
laced into the man for some alleged confusion
about "casts" or some such word in another Larkin
poem using theatrical metaphors.)

Clive--I have to ask. With a beautiful name like
that, where is Upper Cumberworth?

[Michael Juster]

Len: You're not thinking of the Jonathan Fenton tirade, are you? Mike