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POETRY POST: Philip Larkin’s ‘Here’

8th October 2015 By Rebecca Mascull

rebeccamascull:

An occasional blog post on my favourite poems, starting with ‘HERE’ by Philip Larkin.

HERE

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows

And traffic all night north; swerving through fields

Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,

And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields

Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude

Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,

And the widening river’s slow presence,

The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

Gathers to the surprise of a large town;

Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster

Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,

And residents from raw estates, brought down

The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,

Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires –

Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies, 

Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers – 

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling

Where only salesmen and relations come 

Within a terminate and fishy-smelling

Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,

Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;

And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges

Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges

Isolate villages, where removed lives

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands

Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,

Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,

Luminously-peopled air ascends;

And past the poppies bluish neutral distance

Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach

Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence;

Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

There is a train journey here, a swaying observer watching the changing landscape. It might be Hull, but could stand for anywhere similar – the jumble and clutter of the central stanzas are spiky and uncomfortable to read, perhaps even a little snobby – but maybe many of us have cast a tired eye over Saturday shopping and longed to escape town at that moment, and escape all those jostling people, to quiet, to space.

I’ve driven into Hull many times. I know those shining sands, that wide river’s ‘slow presence’. It’s beautiful. When you cross the Humber Bridge, it’s best to be a passenger, as you long to gaze out of your window down the long view of the river stretching away impossibly broad, There is an indefinable need to leave that car, that bridge and soar away downstream to…somewhere. 

But what makes Larkin’s final vision so perfect is that he knows this is not possible, that there is no one ‘Here’, and that’s what makes it so lovely – ‘leaves unnoticed thicken’, ‘Hidden weeds flower’, ‘neglected waters quicken’ – these are separate from and utterly disengaged from us. The air is inhabited only by light. Unlike people, it is ‘untalkative’ and as much as we yearn, it is perpetually beyond us, beyond our understanding, ‘out of reach’. 

It’s not easy to explain how much this poem means to me. The final stanza is something I read over and over, to see if I can ever fathom how it works, how on earth he did it, that magic. Sometimes I just read it to prepare myself for a day’s writing, to put myself in that place, of ‘unfenced existence’, where every writer wants to be. 

To celebrate #NationalPoetryDay, here’s a blog post I did on one of my favourite poems of all time – Here by Philip Larkin.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: National Poetry Day, Philip Larkin

 

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