Peter Levine's analysis of 'Aubade'.

http://peterlevine.ws/?p=8870Larkin’s “Aubade” begins:

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.

It doesn’t need annotation, except that an “aubade” is a song or poem spoken by a man to his forbidden lover at daybreak, when he must flee her bed. (Yet there’s only one person in this bed.)

Also, it might be relevant that the man who published this poem was a 55-year-old Englishman, single, reputed to be grouchy and alcoholic; an academic librarian in the Northern industrial city of Hull who would publish just a few more poems before his early death. Knowing that information, we might be tempted to place the “room [that] takes shape” as “light strengthens” in Yorkshire in 1977–rather than, say, Boston in 2012. In fact, we may think we can identify the room as the one behind the upstairs window in this building, which was Philip Larkin’s home:

I was a small American boy in England around that time. My family lived in a series of furnished, rented homes and stayed in bed-and-breakfast hotels and friends’ houses, so I recall many English bourgeois homes in those years. I can picture the “curtain-edges” and room “plain as a wardrobe” that are named in the poem and can supply other details left unmentioned: the thickly-painted electrical wires stapled to big baseboards, the framed prints of village life, the hinged windows, and the aroma of cigarettes, mothballs, and rising damp.

But look: this isn’t really the statement of a “half-drunk” middle-aged Englishman, talking to us from his bed as dawn breaks on an overcast day in 1977. He would have no means to communicate his morbid thoughts to a global audience 35 years hence. What we are actually reading is a poem, very carefully constructed over many hours or perhaps months and published in the Times Literary Supplement. Fear didn’t really make “all thought impossible,” because the author conveyed subtle thoughts in intricate verse. Despite the overwhelming volume of poems published in journals like the TLS, this one remains a staple of anthologies and seminars not because it reports the early-morning panic of a middle-aged bachelor, but because of its form.

The poem is written in a consistently natural, vernacular voice, yet it fits neatly in five 10-line stanzas with the rhyme scheme ABABCCDEED. The A, B, and C lines are of ten syllables each: regular iambic pentameter. The D lines of each stanza have 9 syllables, and the E lines are of irregular length to emphasize a phrase that occupies a whole line in each stanza: “Of dying, and being dead,” “Not to be anywhere,” “Nothing to love or link with,” “Lets no one off the grave,” and “Work has to be done.”

Reading those five lines in order reveals that work is of almost equal weight to death in the poem, which begins “I work all day,” and ends with postmen going from house to house. The real Philip Larkin worked as a senior university administrator, so he may have had one of those “locked-up office[s]” where “telephones crouch, getting ready to ring.” The telephone is an instrument of human connection–potentially a tool “to love or link with”–but for a bureaucratic worker, it mostly threatens chores, complaints, and orders.

Yet the real Philip Larkin also worked as a poet. Unlike the narrator of the poem, the author had a gift, an audience, and a life mission. It cost him labor and care to write and publish verse that used familiar forms to report common experiences. When he refers in “Aubade” to “what we know,  / Have always known, know that we can’t escape,” he is addressing a group, a “we.” He is building a community to which he will also belong. Although the telephone and the postman convey the messages of an “uncaring / Intricate rented world,” the poem demonstrates care and demands sympathy.

The narrator mixes two rhetorical modes: confessional (“I … get half-drunk at night”) and didactic. Sometimes he sounds like an atheist preacher, insisting that religion is just “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.” But this isn’t a sermon or a treatise about the fear of death in a godless universe. It matters that “brocade” rhymes with “afraid,” and “die” with “try.” (Notice the contrasting senses of each pair.) The depressed doctrines of a grouchy old man would hardly matter, but it took skill and hope to turn those thoughts into an intricate and coherent poem.

John Walford's poetry analysis of 'Aubade'

http://www.humanities360.com/index.php/poetry-analysis-aubade-by-philip-larkin-8338/

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was undoubtedly one of the greatest English poets of the late 20th century. He is generally regarded as a pessimist, who tackled issues of loneliness, old age and death head-on and offered few words of comfort. However, this is probably an over-simplification in that Larkin was, above all, a realist who offered an uncompromising and honest view of the world as he saw it, tough-mindedly and without self-delusion.

Aubade was written in 1977 and was Larkin’s last major poem. An aubade is traditionally a song or poem that greets the dawn, and usually has a love theme involving lovers parting as dawn breaks. However, Larkin appears to use the term ironically, as his poem, although it heralds the dawn, hardly does so in a welcoming  or joyous tone, and there is certainly no hint that this is a love poem in a traditional sense.

Aubade comprises five ten-line stanzas with an ABABCCDEED rhyme scheme, which is a standard stanza form that has been used down the centuries.

The first stanza sets the scene of the poet lying awake in bed at four in the morning, having worked all the previous day and then gone to bed half-drunk. Once awake in the dark, he is alone with his thoughts as he waits for dawn to arrive, and he thinks about “what’s really always there”. In his case, it is the prospect of dying, which is “a whole day nearer now”.

Although Larkin was only 55 when he wrote Aubade, and he had another eight years to live, he was drinking heavily and was well on the way to becoming an alcoholic. According to A N Wilson, Larkin:  “wrote his poetry when he was sober and he wrote his letters with at least half a bottle of cheap whisky coursing through his veins”. This accounts for why he wrote so little poetry in the last decade of his life. He also saw the age of 50 as a turning point after which life had nothing to offer. A third cause for melancholy was the death of his mother, which was either imminent or recent at the time when he was writing Aubade (which took a considerable time).

As Larkin sits in bed, “unresting death” is “making all thought impossible but how / And where and when I shall myself die.” He immediately admits that this is an “arid interrogation” but “the dread of dying … Flashes afresh to hold and horrify”.

It is clear that this sensation is not just a passing trick of the mind but something that absorbs him completely. The second stanza opens with “The mind blanks at the glare”; it is as though he is experiencing a vision of what is to come. He explains that he does not feel remorse for things done or undone (he uses the telling image of a date-a-page calendar in “time / Torn off unused”) , but his horror comes from the prospect of simply ceasing to exist:

“But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.”

The third stanza dismisses the platitudes of religion (“That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.”) and philosophy with its “specious stuff that says ‘No rational being  / Can fear a thing it will not feel’”. Instead, Larkin explains that this fear is “a special way of being afraid” and, by saying “this is what we fear”, expands the fear to go beyond himself and include the reader in what he now holds to be generally applicable:

“ … no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.”

The fourth stanza takes the reader out of the immediate environment of the dark bedroom to make more general statements. Larkin refers to the prospect of death as being “just on the edge of vision, / A small unfocused blur”. The current reviewer suffers from occasional migraines that announce themselves in exactly this way, which make him wonder whether Larkin suffered similarly; just as one knows that the full-blooded migraine is just around the corner and cannot be avoided, so is Larkin reminded that death is inevitable (“Most things may never happen: this one will”). Not only that, but such intimations of mortality come as “a standing chill / That slows each impulse down to indecision”. His daily life (and by extension that of his readers) is damaged by the constant reminders.

It suddenly becomes apparent that Larkin is a deeply troubled man, because he confesses that the realisation of death’s certainty:

“…rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink.”

That “we” is disturbing, because the reader is now included as sharing Larkin’s mental state as well as his fear of death. It is also interesting to note that Larkin is only stable when in company or drunk; without one he needs the other.

He now makes three very sober and revealing statements:

“… Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.”

In other words, one’s attitude towards impending death makes no difference one way or the other. The only purpose behind a stoical attitude is to make other people feel better and cannot affect oneself, so there is no point in making the effort. Is this selfishness, or an awareness of reality?

The final stanza brings the reader back to the bedroom as “Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape”.  However, the simile “plain as a wardrobe” is used to refer not to the room’s contents but the idée fixe of the poem, namely “what we know, / Have always known, know that we can’t escape, / Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.” There can be little doubt about which “side” this is, as acceptance will be forced on the poet and, by implication, ourselves.

Just as death is inevitable, so are the trappings and events of “the uncaring, intricate rented world”. Larkin writes that “telephones crouch, getting ready to ring”, which is a neat play on words (as in crouch/spring) that introduces a surprising note of humour towards the end of the poem.

The poem began with “I work all day” and the penultimate line is “Work has to be done”.  The second half of the last stanza has nothing to say about the theme of the poem, unless the closing line (“Postmen like doctors go from house to house”) is a veiled reference to doctors who visit the very sick and elderly at home and postmen who bring bad news of family deaths in their postbag.  The cycle is complete, and the reader can assume that a fresh day’s work and evening drinking will bring another sleepless early morning with its fears and rationalising about death.

The point was made earlier that a medieval aubade was often a song sung as lovers departed at dawn. Could it be that Larkin’s obsession with death is such that death is in fact the lover who departs as the day approaches? Is his relationship with death a true “love-hate” one in that he fears it intensely but cannot live without the thought of its inevitability?  Is the knowledge that he must die the one thing that persuades him to get up and carry on living? It seems that the “rages” must alternate with the “indecision”, otherwise his everyday life would grind to a halt.

A N Wilson (who knew the poet) described Aubade as “Philip Larkin’s almost perfect poem”. Its quality lies in the careful craftsmanship with which the words and phrases are put together, with every word performing exactly the role that Larkin intended. However, Wilson objected to Larkin’s tendency to tell the reader what to think, and this is why Aubade is only “almost perfect”. Larkin’s use of “we” to include the reader as an accomplice to his thoughts is evidence of this, as is his dismissal of world-views (or should that be “heaven-views”?) to which he does not subscribe. A devout Christian would no doubt come away from this poem with a different impression than would an atheist, and perhaps the same could be said of a teenager, with their whole life ahead of them, as opposed to a pensioner with most of it behind them.

AN Wilson's Critical Understanding of 'Aubade'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/anwilson/3554550/Philip-Larkins-almost-perfect-poem.html

If I had to name one poem, written in England in my lifetime, of unquestionable greatness, it would be Philip Larkin's "Aubade".

It was published in the Times Literary Supplement on December 23, 1977. Thereafter, although he wrote some - a very few - haunting short poems - we all remember the poignant one about the hedgehog caught in the mower - silence descended. He died in 1985, aged 63.

"Aubade" is a song of dawn. Larkin's poem is about waking at 4am and staring around his bedroom, and seeing "what's really always there:/ Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,/ Making all thought impossible but how/ And where and when I shall myself die."

On one level it is an intensely individual poem, written by a selfish alcoholic bachelor ("I work all day and get half drunk at night" - hence the early waking). But on another level, this poem is universal.

Whether we go to bed drunk or sober, whether we are religious believers or not, whether we wake alone or with another head on the pillow beside us, there is this other presence, awaiting us day by day ("It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,/ Have always known, know that we can't escape,/ Yet can't accept").

My taste in poetry has evolved since the days when I knew Philip Larkin personally. "My kind of poetry" now tends to be more mythological. By that, I do not mean poetry that alludes to gods or fauns, but one that either creates, or draws upon, a mythology of shared reference outside immediate experience.

Among Larkin's contemporaries, I find myself turning more and more to Geoffrey Hill. Hill, for example, in "An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England", "rejoices in old hymns of servitude,/ haunting the sacred well, the hidden shrine".

Or crazy, but gripping Ted Hughes, with his Crow mythology "sees everything in the universe".

Larkin claimed that the "myth kitty" was empty. Thomas Hardy was his muse, and his verses boiled down to perfectly executed still lifes, or snapshots of an ever-diminishing, ever-more limited set of experiences - wanting, and not wanting, to go to drinks with the Warlock-Williamses.

I have come to dislike the laddish comedy of Jake Balokowsky, Dockery and Son, and so forth. The more I read Larkin, the more he seemed like one of the uncles "shouting smut" in his poem "The Whitsun Weddings".

But the chief quality from which I felt estranged was his need to tell the reader what to think. "Life is first boredom, then fear." Well, speak for yourself, matey. Or, at best, "discuss".

Keats's objection to poems which had designs on us expands, when one is in this mood of revulsion against Larkin's manner, into a simple feeling that the sermon or the "think piece" in a newspaper is the proper vehicle for telling us what to think.

The more vatic practitioners - Heath-Stubbs, Hughes, Hill, all of whom he despised - take us into a new world, or show us our own, without delivering so many injunctions.

In the third verse of "Aubade", I am once again reminded of what troubles me in Larkin's poetry. "This is a special way of being afraid/ No trick dispels"… Fine. And the rest of the strophe is matchlessly expressed. But it is perfectly crafted opinion.

His picture of religion as "That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/ Created to pretend we never die" is so good - as music - that one remembers it almost every time one enters a church. But the rest of the verse, in which he itemises just what it is that we dread about extinction, for me - at any rate - spoils it. It lacks the bleakness, and brilliance, as the full-throttle death fears end and day begins.

"Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape./ It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,/ Have always known, know that we can't escape"… And the truly wonderful - "The sky is white as clay, with no sun./ Work has to be done./ Postmen like doctors go from house to house".

My taste for the "vatic", the "mythological", has demoted Larkin in my mind to the status of superb minor chamber music. But if anyone wanted to know what was the creed, what was the central fear, and what was the bedroom and the suburban drive like for Mr Average in our times, then you would only have to read him "Aubade".

Michigan State University analysis: The Inevitable Nothingness

https://www.msu.edu/course/eng/362/johnsen/limited/perezessay2.html

Poetry offers us the unique opportunity to capture a moment in time. From there, we can take this moment, flip it over and around in our hands to look at it from all sides and angles. Using words to evoke visions and emotions in the reader, and rhyme to structure and engage, we transform this moment from a small piece of time to a lasting impression set into our minds. Poets also can take their own personal thoughts, experiences, and questions and write them in such a way as to make them comprehensible and relevant to millions of others. Philip Larkin does just this in his poem Aubade by reflecting on the existential agonies that plague a man in the hours before dawn.  Some of the most important questions we can ask about this poem may be; what is death, what is it about death that scares us,* and according to Larkin, how should we cope with this fear? By looking at background information on the poet himself and performing an extensive close-reading and analysis of the words, themes, and structures within Aubade, we can begin to answer these questions, and read the poem with more understanding of the deeper meaning embedded in the brief moment Larkin provides us with.

Philip Larkin is known even today as one of England’s greatest poets. He was born on August 9, 1922, in Coventry, Warwickshire, England. His parents were Sydney and Eva Emily Larkin, and he spent most of his childhood suffering from eye problems and a stutter. It is perhaps because of these early struggles that he turned to writing as a profound means of self-expression and preservation. InAnthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry, Keith Tuma states, “Larkin is the most widely celebrated and arguably the finest poet of the Movement, a group of English poets that emerged in the 1950s and set the terms for much of the poetry of the next several decades” (445). The works of the poets in the Movement is characterized by a departure from the Romanticism of their predecessors such as Alexander Pope and Thomas Chatterton.** Rather than focusing on women, children, and nature as the themes and characters pre-dominant in Romantic literature, the Movement’s poetry tends to be seen as concisely worded, yet deeply meaningful social commentaries; discussing themes like humanity, life, and death. While the language of Romantic poetry is extravagant and overflowing with sentiment, Larkin’s poetry, like others in the Movement, utilizes straightforward and plain language to evoke the same emotional reactions. He is often described as having been an extremely solitary man, almost hermit like in his living styles and arrangements. He never married, but took part in several casual, and often times sexual, relationships with women, and was an athiest. He died shortly after undergoing surgery for throat cancer in 1985 (Contemporary Authors Online). Still immensely popular after his death, Larkin holds a special place in any discussion of popular post-war English poetry. His strongest influences are said to be Yeats early on, and Hardy later in his career and until his death. Larkin’s poetry can be described as being written from an extremely Realist point of view. Quite like Modern poetry, his lyricism is his way of depicting simple and common experiences of the human kind. Like his predecessor and greatest influence, Hardy, his negativism and pessimistic views of life and the world prevail as the stylistic tones of the majority of his poetry (Contemporary Authors Online). Moments of existential awareness and questions of the Self are common themes within his works: “As Motion indicates, the ‘typical structure of his poems’ involves ‘a debate between hope and hopelessness, between fulfillment and disappointment’” (qtd. in Tuma, 445).

Philip Larkin’s Aubade,*** first published in 1977, is a poem that exemplifies Motion’s exact sentiments. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, an aubade is defined as “a song or poem of lovers parting at dawn” (“Aubade”, def 2b). Knowing the definition of the word, a reader of this text may first expect a love poem; of one lover singing another’s praises in a dramatic farewell as the sun rises recounting all the events of the night prior. We are reminded with the first line; however, that Larkin is no romantic: “I work all day, and get half-drunk at night” (line 1). From the beginning, we can tell that this is no ordinary aubade. The narrator has woken up at 4AM, sometime before the sun has risen. Instead of taking this time for quiet and calm thinking about those promises the day may hold, he spends it in agony; haunted by his deepest fear, “Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,” (5). As death is the main topic of the poem, it is crucial to point out exactly how Larkin defines it here:

             the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere, (16-19).

According to Larkin, death is an inescapable and eternal nothingness. From this, readers can surmise that the poet does not believe in any form of afterlife, whether that be heaven, reincarnation, or otherwise.

As the fear of death is a universal and ever-present anxiety, human beings have and will forever continue to develop strategies to deal with the inevitable end we must all reach. In Aubade, Larkin reflects on these coping mechanisms, and explains how they fail to work for the subject of his poem.  Many people look to religion to give meaning to their lives before and after they die. As we know, Larkin is an atheist, and so does not accept religion as an appropriate answer to the hopelessness of death. He acknowledges briefly how religion may act as a comfort for some, but immediately dismisses it as merely an ineffective trick, referring to it as “That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade” (23), a veil woven of alluring lies and unattainable promises of an eternal life after death laid over the eyes of all believers and obstructing clear visions of the wicked truth. Some humans choose to accept the inevitability of death, and put on a brave face. To this method, Larkin says, “Being brave / Lets no one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than withstood” (38-40).

Another strategy humans have developed to cope with death is philosophy. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith attempts to show the folly in being fearful of death by using logic: “It is miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold grave, to be no more thought of in this world….The happiness of the dead, however, most assuredly is affected by none of these circumstances; nor is the thought of these things which can ever disturb the profound security of their repose (p.9). In other words, Smith is saying it is illogical to fear death because surely, the dead do not lament their own ends. To these sentiments Larkin retorts:

And specious stuff that says No rational being

 Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anesthetic from which none come round (25-30).

It is here that we learn the true cause of Larkin’s anxiety. It is not the thought of missing out on doing good and spreading love in the world; “time / Torn off unused” (12-13), nor is the thought of dying without making up for his failures and transgressions what scares the narrator. What scares him most is the loss of all sensory recognitions and self-awareness. To Larkin, the real horror of being dead is the inability to recognize it using lively senses.

            As dawn approaches in the fourth stanza, the narrator’s rambling anxieties begin to subside as he focuses on the commotion of the “intricate rented world” (47). To Larkin, the only way to live with the knowledge of inevitable death is to get lost in routine distractions. From the first stanza we can tell the narrator works every day, drinks when he gets home every night, and has these pre-dawn sessions of existential panic frequently; these are his routine distractions. From the line, “Postmen like doctors go from house to house” (50) we can see how much Larkin emphasizes the importance of routine. Because postmen are known for their unrelenting reliability and their regular schedules, Larkin sees them as healers; saving the masses from the fear of death by providing them with routine distractions. Another way we can see how Larkin is promoting the importance of routine is through the poem’s rhyme scheme. The rhymes, of course, vary, but the general rhyme scheme of the poem is ABABCCDEED. The first stanza is twice as long as the others and the narrator’s slowly rambles on about his anxieties, but as the poem progresses, the stanzas become shorter, and his thoughts more concise and structured. Throughout the poem, the narrator’s thoughts are frantic and hopeless, yet by the fourth and final stanza of Aubade, the narrator has started to become more sensible and his frenzied mind finds solace in the distractions of another day’s work.

            By now, we have answered the three questions about the poem introduced in the beginning of this essay. According to Larkin, death is the total and eternal emptiness. What is most terrifying about this nothingness is the complete loss of self-awareness, and Larkin’s recommended coping mechanism to deal with the anxieties produced from the fear of death is to attempt to get lost in routine distractions.  While this life philosophy may seem to work for the narrator, there is one glaring flaw in its logic. If Larkin considers death to be a loss of self and the senses, then that must mean he defines being alive as being totally and completely**** in control of one’s life and actions. This ever-present fear of an inevitable demise, however, inhibits us from doing just that. Smith says on the dread of death, “It is from this very illusion of the imagination, that the foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us, and that the idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes us miserable while we are alive” (9). In other words, the fear of losing our senses to death disables us from fully using them by “slow[ing] each impulse down to indecision” (Larkin, 33). How many times do we stop ourselves from doing something that may be considered dangerous, no matter how much we want to do it? Letting fear pervade one’s existence allows death to stake claim over that which makes us fully alive, even while we are still breathing. It is perhaps because of this loss of life while living, that this poem can still truly be called an aubade. The narrator in acknowledging his powerlessness and lack of control also acknowledges the loss of his free-will. As the sun rises, he says goodbye to his most honest form of consciousness and greets the dawn with disengaged condescension.

            Through an extensive close-reading analysis of the themes, motifs, and structures within Philip Larkin’s Aubade, we have been able to more deeply understand his thoughts about life, death, and fear. In just 50 lines of verse, he makes bleak and profound observations on human nature and the question of free-will.  By analyzing the poet’s views on life and death, we come away with observations and questions of our own. This poem is just about one man’s thoughts in one moment of one day, and yet, Larkin’s writing evokes strong feelings that all human beings share. And just as human nature compels us to keep ideas of death “just on the edge of vision” (31) at all times, so too does Larkin’s poem create lasting impressions of the power of words on its readers by causing us to question the very nature of our most basic instincts; fear, consciousness, and survival.

 * Also see his poem "The Old Fools"
**these are very distant predecessors. I would substitute Yeats (an early influence on Larkin) and Dylan Thomas as example sof the romanticism he rejected. And he hated Ted Hughes!
*** Go to Norton website to hear "Aubade" but also (romantic) Yeats
**** I don't understand: why does totally and completely" follow?