disappointments. He reminds us that to realize is to make real. Here are three sentences that shrink as life cannot but shrink. From 106 words to 30 to 23. The first sentence has all the amplitude of the remembered past into which it moves. It has world enough and time, with lovingly remembered details calmly patterned (“One bleached . . . One marked . . . One mended”), a world “set in order”. It flows on, and its own words remark on what they are re-living – they “spread out”, they manifest a sense of “time laid up in store”. The first sentence can take its time – time is not doing the taking.
But from this leisure the second sentence dwindles. It begins with “But”, unlikely to be a reassuring start here, and instead of what is lovingly recalled, we have love itself. Instead of the actually loved, in its inevitable imperfection (the unmentioned husband, the mentioned daughter), there is the daunting abstraction, love. Its brilliance is a “glare”, too bright to be ignored, somehow pitiless in its “sailing above”. And if love “broke out” in those songs, here, too, there is something of an ominous suggestion. Light breaks out, but so do wars and plagues. Love, too, can break hearts, or cannot but break hearts if we think of all that the abstraction love promised.
Then the further shrinkage into the last sentence, briefer, bleaker. Instead of the abstraction of the middle sentence, which was large and metaphorical and aerial, we reach a stony abstraction – no metaphors, no details, no grand words like “incipience”. Simply pain generalized, compacted into the plainest words in the language. Earlier the poem had opened its mouth and sung; in the end it bites its lip.
From copious memories recalling what promised to be a copious future, through high hopes, down to severe humbling. From a romantic compound, “spring-woken”, through a laconically dry one, “much-mentioned”, down to uncompounded plainness. From “a tidy fit”, through the promise to “set unchangeably in order”, down to “pile them back”.
Yet this is poetry, not prose, so it exists not only as sentences but as lines and stanzas. Larkin is a master of all such patterning. The pattern does not impose itself upon the sense, it releases and enforces the sense. See how he uses line-endings and stanza-endings – “see how”, because this is much more possible than “hear how”. Larkin’s point about “the disappearance of stanza shape” when you hear a poem read aloud can be extended to include our being able to see the valuable counterpointing of stanza shape and, say, sentence shape. A song’s stanzas are less concerned to stand, more to move.
Love Songs in Age has no stanza that is self-contained. There is a marked visual pause in passing from the first to the second stanza:
So they had waited, till in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood
Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
(“Sprawling hyphenated”, because the sheet-music sets the words, subdivided and stretched out, below the musical notes, so Larkin can remind us of the different systems of punctuation that are poetical and sheet-musical.) The visual pause after “stood” is all the more effective because in the first six lines of the poem the lines have been placidly end-stopped, tidily congruous, the units of sense at one with (rather than played against) the units of rhythm and rhyme.
Then, with “stood”, a powerful pause enforces itself – the poem pauses, rapt, just as the widow pauses here, rapt into memory. Swelling in the second stanza is a change from the equable line-endings of the first. Instead of such a complete unit as “The covers pleased her”, there is the line “Had ushered in”, which has to move on from its predecessor and to usher in its successor. The ebullience of this middle stanza spreads out over its line-endings, the clauses proliferate and spill over (“. . . in / . . . wherein”). And then, at the very end of the stanza, a sudden drastic check:
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,
The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
With a harsh gracelessness, the second sentence is imperatively beginning, tugging across the cadences (and, duly, demanding a pause). If the opening of this second sentence, “But”, is threateningly ungraceful, how much more is the third: “So” thrust out with grim emphasis, cutting across the order that immediately precedes it, insisting doggedly on the truth:
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.
The point of running one stanza into the next is more than to create pregnant pauses, more even than to imitate the musical interweaving of love songs. It is to create the austere finality of the conclusion. Only once in this poem does a full stop coincide with the end of a line or with the end of a stanza. This establishes the fullness of this stop, the assurance that Larkin has concluded his poem and not just run out of things to say. The same authoritative finality is alive in the rhyme scheme. Larkin’s pattern (abacbdcdd) allows of a clinching couplet only at the end of a stanza. He then prevents any such clinching at the end of the first two stanzas by having very strong enjambment, spilling across the line-endings. The result is that the very last couplet is the first in the poem to release what we have been waiting for, the decisive authority of a couplet, rhyme sealing rhyme in a final settlement. But also with a rhythmical catch in the throat, a brief stumble before “lamely”: “Was hard, without lamely admitting how” is aline that cannot move briskly, has to feel lamed, because of the speed-bump between “without” and “lamely”. And then an inexorable ending, here and now: “and could not now”. The poem focuses time, much as time focuses itself for us in the dentist’s chair into a concentrated “now”.
The conclusive couplet isn’t the only subtly meaningful rhyming. The gentle disyllabic, or double, rhymes of the first stanza (pleased her / seized her, water / daughter) create softer cadences, all the more so because of the -er association among themselves. It is against this softer light that the glare of the last stanza stands out, its rhymes bleak. Only one rhyme in the poem is inexact, and with good reason: chord / word. That the words of life do not quite fit its music is one of the things that the poem knows.
Love Songs in Age is far more than a five-finger exercise in the manner of the poet whom Larkin most admired, Thomas Hardy. Like the best of Hardy, the best of Larkin lives in the context of an imagined life. The widow’s story is there, between the poem’s lines, treated obliquely and unsentimentally. The appeal is to experiences already understood (“That hidden freshness”, “That certainty”, “That much-mentioned brilliance”). “She kept her songs, they took so little space” – how much of an everyday sadness is here, of possessions sold off, a home relinquished, the life lived in what Larkin elsewhere calls (in Mr Bleaney) a “hired box”. The songs, she kept – the piano, she could not (though this, too, has to be glimpsed between the lines, especially in “stood / / Relearning . . .”). Self-possession is bound to be so much involved with possessions.
Yet the end of the poem makes a point rather different from the expected. It doesn’t say that she cried or wanted to cry, but that it was hard to cry without admitting how huge the failure of love had been in comparison with any triumphs of love. Not hard to cry, heaven knows, but hard to cry without dissolving, hard to admit any cause for grief without admitting too shatteringly much. “Admitting”: in its unostentatious truth-telling, it is a perfect Larkin word. Not that memory is merely unkind. When we look back across the whole poem, we realize that it was not only in the literal physical sense that “She kept her songs”. Meantime, the poem at least has set something unchangeably in order.
Such, at any rate, is my reading of the poem. To hear the poem read aloud, even by the poet himself, is a different story. Yet the story turns upon the same sad pertinent fact: that the only rhyme that is not a true rhyme, the only