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.
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