In the poem Dockery and Son Philip
Larkin steps back and takes a look at his life, and his achievements, mainly
running along the theme of his obvious lack of offspring. Throughout this poem
Larkin presents the contrast of this Man Dockery and the obvious presence of
his son against Larkin’s lack thereof. Throughout the poem he also attempts to
move in other directions, as if to give the reader the impression that this is
not something that he wishes to discuss in detail.
Larkin also explores in this poem the concept behind pre-programmed idealism of
how one’s life should be lived, he presents Dockery, a man who has supposedly
taken stock of his life and based it against the common goals set out by modern
society, to study, get a job, find a partner and have a child, to pass on one’s
legacy to this child, and die once having fulfilled this. Larkin presents
himself though as one that apparently decided against this; though states this
with a subtle element of self-doubt and with an obvious air of emptiness in
regard to his own life. Larkin presents the idea that Dockery has succeeded,
where as he himself has failed, and took too long to realise this.
In the first stanza the main theme is introduced, Larkin learns that Dockery
has bore a child. From this Larkin changes the subject to something he feels
more light-hearted, something distracting, of how he used to stand at the same
desk attempting to explain his drunken rampages of the night before during the
morning after. The poem continues into the second stanza, here Larkin continues
the idea of escaping this new reality, but displays that his mind cannot ignore
this fact, when he mentions he is ‘ignored’, as he has no one to care for him,
no wife and no children, whereas Dockery obviously does. Further into the
second stanza Larkin stops shying away from this affair and once again
approaches it, with a sudden element of surprise “But Dockery, good Lord”, as
the realisation begins to hit him as he thinks in more detail.
Towards the end of the second and into the third stanza Larkin explores the
idea more prominently, thinking of his memories of Dockery, and thinking of how
early he must have begun these procedures to have a son already studying at the
university he attended. Towards the middle of the third stanza Larkin almost
begins to build upon these facts and make overviews of his life, but instead
takes the reader away once again. However this parting from the theme once
again contains its subtle links, as Larkin mentions the “Joining and parting
lines”, which I believe to be a metaphor to how life can seem so detached from
its past, but every so often differing factors will once again meet, sometimes
by chance and sometimes by careful planning, as the rails are an image of
construction by man, this also being a possible link back to the idea of
Dockery planning the future of his life’s construction. The awful Pie in this
stanza is something I believe to further represent the areas of his life that are
unsatisfactory, the pie representing the lack of quality in his life, that
perhaps children could have brought unto him.
Moving into the forth stanza is a large emotional leap in this poem, as the
full-force of realisation, of regret and possibly of disappointment begins to
settle heavily upon Larkin’s shoulders. Larkin takes an account of his life to
date; “no son, no wife, / No house or land” and begins the cycle of regret “the
shock / Of finding out how much had gone of life”. Larkin here suggests that he
almost feels that despite his arguments towards what he has done, the arguments
that he has chosen his fate, how popular culture did not affect his decisions,
he still feels a certain emptiness.
Moving through with the forth into the fifth stanza, Larkin begins to focus on
why Dockery has achieved this feat, and compares to himself, changing the
directions of the patterns of his though, “he must have taken stock / Of what
he wanted, and been capable / Of… No”. This self-contradiction and obvious element
of confusion displays vividly the element of ambiguity in Larkin’s mind, he is
unsure what to think, whether, metaphorically speaking to listen to his heart
or his mind. Into the fifth he begins, for his own ego and feelings of
self-worth, he begins to undermine Dockery’s ambitions and question their
presence and necessity, “Why did he think adding meant to increase? / To me it
was dilution.” He then begins to blatantly attack these plans that people make,
based upon what came before them, and what they are told to do and believe and
gives us, the readers, the image of these ideals, once in place to be
inescapable, as the exits are “Warp tight-shut” and all other imaginative
creations are removed leaving the ideals as “all we’ve got”.
Into the sixth stanza Larkin begins to once again look at the results of the
life he has followed, and compares life’s course to that of a sand storm, fast
flowing, uncontrolled and sometimes destructive. “For Dockery a son, for me
nothing” another element of failure is introduced here, as the word ‘nothing’
obviously expresses his sense of lack of achievement, he has disappointed
himself. Larkin at the end of this poem reaches the end of the tether of his
self-despair, stating simply that life is there to make use of, but is often
not to it’s full potential, providing his own life as an example of waste, a
terribly depressing image, but one that Larkin has expressed to be one he holds
dear to himself. Larkin finishes with a chilling image of what could only come
from a man feeling unfulfilled, “And age, and then the only end of age.” Larkin
here of course referring to death, here he is displaying the only course
remaining for his future. He has realised that in his youth he did not seize
the opportunity before him, that this opportunity through his age is no-longer
available and has realised, though not come to terms with the idea that all
that is left is to rot and die.
November
2008. Chosen by Gillian
Steinberg.
Larkin minced no
words in his discussions of children. He condemns them as ‘awful’ and expresses
his gratitude that ‘I’ve never lived in hideous contact with them… The nearer
you are to being born, the worse you are’ (FR 48). In his interview with the Observer
he calls them ‘selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar little brutes’ (RW 48). He makes
sure we know the feeling is not a new one: ‘I hated everybody when I was a
child, or I thought I did. When I grew up, I realized that what I hated was
children’ (FR 47).
This is obviously
a man who didn’t have much desire for parenthood. And yet, in this poem, he
speaks to me as the mother of two young sons and a person who doesn’t find
children awful (at least, not most of the time). This poem uncomfortably
confronts my assumptions about reproducing: have I increased or diluted myself?
And it helps me, happily, to find myself more closely aligned with Dockery than
with the speaker.
I like the speaker
here because he’s willing to say what he thinks, as he thinks it, and he might
be right. I like hearing that having children doesn’t have to be what everyone
does; and, of course, it is selfish in its own way. And I appreciate that he
credits Dockery (and therefore, by association, me) with having thought so
thoroughly about whether we ‘should be added to.’
I can see why the
speaker’s made his choice, but I’m glad I’ve made mine. ‘Whether or not we use
it, it goes…’ Certainly Dockery (and therefore, by association, I) will finish
up in the same place as the speaker in the end, but maybe he has used his life;
and maybe I’ve used mine.
I’d guess that
most people don’t think of ‘Dockery and Son’ as a feel-good sort of poem, but
its process of thinking through this big question, and the places that thinking
takes the speaker, takes me to some useful places too.
A Comparative Analysis of Larkin's 'Dockery and Son'
“Dockery and Son” was written by the
English poet Philip Larkin, and is part of his highly celebrated collection The Whitsun Weddings. The poem is an
interior monologue, and follows a very similar structure to that of his poem
“Church Going”: it starts with mundane detail and transmogrifies into a
profound reflection on the state of Larkin’s life, or indeed life itself.
“Dockery and Son” is an autobiographical poem, and it is an account of his
visit to his old Oxford College and his subsequent journey home. It follows a
basic ABABCDCD rhyme scheme, and is written in iambic pentameter; there are
occasional lines that do not follow the same metre (“Locked. The lawn spreads
dazzlingly wide.”) and this manipulation allows the poem to be read in a
languid, meditative way. The reader is immediately struck by the title of the
poem, “Dockery and Son”, which suggests business and commerce, a particularly
melancholy outlook on life. This theme, and indeed the theme of life and death,
is central to the poem.
The first stanza begins with the
Dean addressing Larkin in direct speech. This is a technique also seen in
Larkin’s poem “Mr Bleaney”, in which the landlady addresses Larkin himself; the
use of direct speech dramatizes the poem and engages us into dialogue which
meanders into his own thought pattern. The word “junior” in the first line
implies that age will be a recurring theme in the poem, and indeed this is
supported by the reference to “his son” in the second line. Larkin uses the
phrases “keep in touch with”, “used to” and “remember” to emphasize the time
that has passed since he was at college, and the irretrievable nature of the
past. He ends the stanza with a colon, and the second stanza begins with the
word “Locked”. This use of enjambment gives the reader a certain expectancy
that is suddenly deflated with the first word. This emphatic placement also
highlights the fact that Larkin’s past is lost forever, and that he is
therefore unable to relive it. This technique is also seen in “Church Going”
when Larkin writes: “Or will he be my representative, / Bored, uninformed…” The
emphatic placement of this word at the start of the stanza helps to stress his
boredom.
In the second stanza of “Dockery and
Son”, Larkin gives us a number of pastoral and picturesque images (“The lawn
spreads dazzlingly wide.” and “Canal and clouds and colleges subside.”) This
sudden burst of imagery from Larkin is also seen in his poem “The Whitsun
Weddings”, which also takes place on a train, allowing him to reflect and
observe. He writes: “The river’s level drifting breadth began.” This method
helps the poem to seem more immediate, and it makes the reader feel as if they
too are on the train, passing by these occasional bucolic glimpses of nature;
they can also be seen as relief from his intense pattern of thought. The
languid tempo of the line “Canal and clouds and colleges subside,” created by
Larkin’s use of alliteration and polysyndeton again supports the poem’s
meditative tone. Words like “known” and “subside” suggest age and passing of
time, and this nostalgia for the past is also seen in his poem “MCMXIV”;
Larkin’s use of Roman numerals in the title immediately indicates not only grandeur
but also age. Larkin refers to himself as “ignored”, and this implies that he
feels cut off and separated from society. This is also seen in his poem
“Ambulances”, when he employs the word “unreachable”, suggesting detachment
from the outside. He then begins to compare himself to Dockery, just as he
compares himself to Mr Bleaney.
In the third stanza, Larkin, in the
middle of his languid, meditative state, falls asleep on the train, and he
writes:
How
much… How little… Yawning, I suppose
Before he falls asleep, Larkin sees
beautiful, pastoral sights; when he wakes up, however, he is presented with
“the fumes / and furnace-glares of Sheffield,” where he eats “an awful pie”.
This antithesis of beautiful landscape and grotty industrialised sights suggest
that Larkin, in falling asleep, missed out on the best parts of the journey.
This train journey could indeed be a metaphor for his life, which would imply
that Larkin lived his earlier and most valuable years in a disconnected state;
he could be lamenting the time that he has lost, and this is emphasized by his
use of ellipsis. Larkin then describes “the ranged / joining and parting
lines.” He uses symbolism to compare his life to Dockery’s. The lines of the
track represent the journey of life, and the number of diverging directions one
can take.
In the fourth stanza, Larkin makes
use of enjambment again, and indeed the words “Unhindered moon” serve to
accentuate the fact that time cannot be stopped or slowed down. This is
supported by the words: “how much had gone of life.” He then continues to
compare himself to Dockery, writing: “To have no son, no wife, / No house or
land still seemed quite natural.” This idea of having nothing is also seen in
“Mr Bleaney” when Larkin writes: “And at his age having no more to show / than
one hired box…” In comparing himself to Dockery, Larkin believes that he has
done nothing with his life, and registers this idea of waste with “only a
numbness”. He has noticed the huge lacuna in his life, and regrets that he
hasn’t experienced the typical stages of human existence. Larkin uses the
phrase “taken stock”, which again reinforces the idea that life is like a
business or an enterprise, a rather depressing idea typical of Larkin. However,
he then realises that he has not wasted his life, and he writes: “No, that’s
not the difference…” This change of thought pattern is also seen in his poem
“Toads” (and indeed “Toads Revisited”) when he writes, following a full stop: “Ah,
were I courageous enough…”
In the fifth stanza, Larkin then
realises that he himself is in a better position than Dockery, and indeed he
writes:
Convinced
he [Dockery] was he should be added to!
Why
did he think adding meant increase?
Larkin has an extremely offensive
stance against the idea of family; he never got married, nor did he have any
children. He strongly agreed with Cryril Connolly’s famous quotation: “There is
no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” Larkin’s use of
direct questions (“Why did he think adding meant increase?” and “Where do these
/ innate assumptions come from?”) is also seen in “Church Going”, and it
creates a sense of surprise, and adds to the force of his words. Larkin then
goes on to explain that we do not have children because it is what we “want to
do” or because it is what “we think truest”, but rather because it is normal,
and then becomes a habit. This again emphasizes his isolation from society
(like in “Mr Bleaney”), but this theme is also seen in his poem “Toads”, in
which he explains that nobody wants to work, but that they do it for stability
and because it is the norm. This time, however, Larkin is ironically avoiding
stability and the norm by not conforming to orthodox stereotypes and
expectations.
In the final stanza, Larkin concludes his meditative reflections. His
repetition of “nothing” again emphasizes his lack of a family, and indeed
repetition for emphasis is used in a number of his poems. For example in “MCMXIV”
Larkin repeats the word “never” to support the main theme of the poem, just as
he does in “Dockery and Son”. He then writes: “Life is first boredom, then
fear.” This is one of Larkin’s many aphorisms, and indeed it encompasses the
main theme of the poem. He concludes with the somewhat melancholy thought that
death (or indeed “the only end of age”) is inevitable, and that there is
nothing we can do to prevent it. He also accentuates the fact that this is the
same for everybody, whatever they do with their lives (“Whether or not we use
it…”) The final stanza, in a way, makes the preceding stanzas seem rather
trivial in that the events of life are of no importance, because we all die
anyway. The tension of life and death is prominent throughout the poem, and he
uses various words and phrases (“Death-suited”, “With Cartwright who was
killed?” and “gone of life”) to stress the tension. Death is also the main
theme in his poem “Ambulances”, and indeed he uses various words and phrases
(including “come to rest” and “loss”) to remind the reader of its
inevitability. Larkin seems to be far more concerned about his death than what
he has done with his life, and this sudden change of thought is similar to the
one seen in “Faith Healing”, when the women are hit with a sudden sense of
realisation and emptiness. The poem, like so many other Larkin poems, is an
account of a personal experience that has been made into a universal
contemplation of life. The final lines of the poem evoke pathos in the reader,
and we feel sympathetic for Larkin, and indeed the sad, transient nature of
humanity. Larkin once said in a letter to Monica Jones: “I feel the only thing
you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you’re an artist, by
children if you’re not.” This seems to summarise the overall impression that
the poem leaves on the reader.
Dockery and Son”
is a portrait of how a chance remark brings about an awareness in the hearer of
the emptiness of his life. A simple comment from the Dean about a schoolmate of
the persona’s having a son now at their college spurs a meditation about how
unlived the persona’s own life has been.
It is usually the
chance remark or observation that elicits such a contemplation. The speaker was
adventurous as a student; then called before the Dean, still “half-tight” in
the morning after the previous night’s exploits, he now stands before himself,
trying to explain not what he did but what he did not do. Dockery himself is an
abstraction, even to the speaker: “Was he that withdrawn// High-collared
public-schoolboy, sharing rooms/ With Cartwright who was killed?” He remembers
the dead but is unclear as to the living.
The speaker does
say that to have “no son, no wife,/ No house or land still seemed quite
natural,” but the fact that others who were his juniors do have these things
makes him realize the emptiness of time. In other words, it is only when
comparing himself with others that the speaker realizes how little he has done.
It is important to realize that this is not envy; the speaker does not desire
Dockery’s son, but he does see nothing in his own life that could be the envy
of others. He has diverged “widely from the others.”
Philip Larkin’s
professional life was twofold as that of a poet and that of an ordinary
librarian; only nothing about Larkin was ever really ordinary. This may
be, at least in part, due to, as he once confessed to his friend Norman Iles,
the fact that he saw himself as an “outsider” while others supposed
him to be “very establishment and convention”. It was Larkin’s
quintessentially English humour, his farouche temper, wry wit and scholastic
intellect that came auspiciously together making him into one of the most
eminent English writers of the post war period. Larkin’s poetry is
characterised by his personal idiosyncrasies, major existential concerns and an
acerbic fusion of lyricism and discontent. Speaking about poetry, Larkin once
said that his intention had always been to write in a mode defined by “plain
language, absence of posturings, sense of proportion, humour, abandonment of
dithyrambic ideal – and…a fuller and more sensitive response to life as it
appears from day to day.” The quotidian, its banality as well as its
wonder, is indeed a running theme in Larkin’s work much of which is quietly
heretical due to Larkin’s outright rejection of both tradition and new literary
movements, especially modernism which he thought an “aberration” that “blighted
all the arts.”
In trying to
explain the fundamental purpose of poetry, Larkin once said that “to write
a poem was to construct a verbal device that would preserve an experience
indefinitely producing it in whoever read the poem”. This I would say is
perhaps one of the most precise definitions and one that invariably applies to
Larkin’s own body of work, which resonates and remains with the reader because
it is candid without being indiscreet, ironic without being satirical and
illuminating without being haughty or condescending. And, everything Larkin
wrote contains the human element; confessional admissions and admonitions set
out on the page. In the course of his writing career, which began in the 1930s
and lasted until the 1970s, Larking produced four slender volumes of poetry –
The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun
Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974) – with prolonged periods
of stasis in between. A meagre offering from someone who had laboured in
the profession for over 40 years; only Larking had written more than initially
thought and in 1988, three years after his death, Larkin’s friend and literary
co-executor, Anthony Thwait, brought out Collected Poems which
contained a cache of 22 juvenilia poems and 61 mature verses Larking had
withheld from public view. It is impossible to speculate about his motives
behind the decision, but to merely say that Larkin always was and still remains
an enigma. A complex and a contradictory man at odds with his public persona,
selfish yet altruistic, loving yet self-allegedly unable to love, a reluctant
philanderer, predatory yet timorous, devoted yet disloyal, gracious yet
impudent, funny but lugubrious. A complicated man. And a private one, who
saw life “as an affair of solitude diversified by company” rather than
“an affair of company diversified by solitude.” And yet, Larkin
enjoyed both his friends and his women despite cultivating a persona of a
miserabilist eremite, who refused to live the literary life rejecting fame and
all it demanded. He did, however, have a small demimonde, corresponded
obsessively by epistolary means and presided over a small dragoon of staff at
the Hull University Library where he worked for over 30 years.
Interestingly,
Larkin seems to have thought of himself primarily as a librarian with a
side-line in poetry rather than the other way around. In a rare interview with The
Paris Review, speaking about his professional life he explained: “My
job as University librarian is a full-time one, five days a week, 45 weeks a
year. When I came to Hull, I had 11 staff; now there are over a hundred of one
sort and another. We built one new library in 1960 and another in 1970, so that
my first 15 years were busy.” And later when asked about writing,
Larkin said: “Anything I say about writing poems is bound to be
retrospective, because in fact I’ve written very little since High Windows, or
since 1974, whichever way you like to put it. But when I did write them, well,
it was in the evenings, after work, after washing up…It was a routine like any
other.” It seems as though Larkin always downplayed his achievements
preferring to think of himself as a failure, preferring failure in general,
which also happens to be a common theme within his work. Not only that, a
characteristically glum atmosphere pervades his poems, a vast majority of which
revolve around loneliness and dejection, disappointments, loss and the
terrifying yet inevitable rowing towards death. Larkin thus gives the
impression that the reality of life as it presents itself to him falls short of
what he expected. This disillusionment is particularly prominent when it comes
to an assessment of what he has, or rather has not, achieved. Frequently,
Larkin indicates feeling as if life is merely passing him by. In Aubade
he says: “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.” He
feels similarly in Continuing to Live, which opens on a rather sombre
note: “Continuing to live – that is, repeat/A habit formed to get
necessaries/Is nearly always losing, or going without/ It varies.”
And in The View, when in the last stanza Larkin asks
rhetorically: “Where has it gone, the lifetime?/ Search me. What’s left is
drear/Unchilded and unwifed/ I’m Able to view that clear/So final. And so
near.” Larkin’s confrontation of these themes head-on is quite
admirable, his ability to do so with flair and a sense of humour makes it
enviable. Even in Continuing To Live when talking about “loss of
interest, hair and enterprise” Larkin is still fully aware of the
seriousness of the situation which he surmise in Dockery And Son by
saying: “Life is first boredom, then fear/Whether or not we use it, it
goes.”
But of course not
all of Larkin’s work is defined by this downhearted and pessimistic tone of
voice. A great many of his poems are more upbeat albeit all uniformly with
cynical connotations. A lot of these are sententious and document Larkin’s
difficulties with women and the notion of love. Larkin’s amatory hardships were
fairly well known, so much so that it formed the basis for one of Lawrence
Durrell’s most famous one liners, when Durrell declared: “It’s unthinkable
not to love – you’d have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you’d have to be Philip
Larkin.” As wise as Durrell was I think in this particular instance,
however, he was sacrificing the man for the sake of a witticism because albeit
Larkin struggled with love and declared himself “too selfish” for it
he did love and do so very generously. In Monika Jones’ case, who Larkin
met in 1947 while working together at Leicester University, that love last for
over 30 years. In one of his most demonstrative expressions of affection,
Larking dedicated The Less Deceived to her. The collection contains
several of Larkin’s best known poems including Church Going (“A
serious house on serious earth it is/In whose blent air all our compulsions
meet/Are recognized, and robed as destinies”), Deceptions (“Slums,
years, have buried you. I would not dare/Console you if I could.
What can be said/Except that suffering is exact, but where/Desire takes
charge, readings will grow erratic?/For you would hardly care/That you were
less deceived, out on that bed/Than he was, stumbling up the breathless
stair/To burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic”) and An Arundel Tomb,
which most clearly represents Larkin’s romantic side even if it is despoiled by
sceptic preoccupations of a logician. The concluding line of An Arundel Tomb (“What
will survive of us is love”) is one of the most conspicuously affirmative
in Larkin’s canon. And yet upon closer inspection the poem’s conclusion about
the endurance of love, so uplifting in itself, is introduced as a very faint
presentiment an “almost-instinct” that is not quite reliable because
it is only “almost true”. The “stone fidelity” of the couple
sculpted on the tomb is finally dismissed as something “they hardly meant”
and the confident first impression is thus renounced as some sort of
misunderstanding, or indeed a lie, when Larkin determines that “time has
transfigured them into untruth”.
Larkin’s
preoccupation with adverse themes is less abstract when considered with the
fact that he started out his professional life as a fledgling writer, with two
novels behind him by the age of 25, but later abandoned his aspirations
comprehensively discouraged by Kingsley Amis’ success with Lucky Jim (1954),
which took some of its inspiration from their friendship. In 1982 he told The
Paris Review: “I wanted to ‘be a novelist’ in a way I never wanted to
‘be a poet,’ yes. Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more
enjoyable than poems.” It seems that from the very start the act of
writing poetry was for Larkin tinctured with failure, which makes his poetic success
all the more extraordinary. Talking about the subject most prevalent in his
work, Larkin once said: “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for
Wordsworth.” A bloody good thing too as it seems to have made him into the
poet he was. And no other could talk of death so intensely yet tentatively as
Larkin does in Next, Please when in the closing stanza he says: “Only
one ship is seeking us, a black/Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back/ A huge
and bridles silence. In her wake/ No waters breed or break.” No other
could capture the essence of intimacy more strikinglythan he did in Talking
In Bed: “Talking in bed ought to be easiest/Lying together there goes back so
far/An emblem of two people being honest… It becomes still more difficult to
find/Words at once true and kind/Or not untrue and not unkind.” No other
could be at once more funny and morose, “Sexual intercourse began/In
nineteen sixty-three/(which was rather late for me) -/Between the end of the
Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP.” (Annus Mirabilis). No other
could be more flippant: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not
mean to, but they do/They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra,
just for you.” (This Be The Verse). Or more heart-wrenching
than Larking is in Home is so Sad when he says: “Home is so sad.
It stays as it was left/Shaped to the comfort of the last to go/As if to win
them back. Instead, bereft/Of anyone to please, it withers so/Having no heart
to put aside the theft/And turn again to what it started as,/A joyous shot at
how things ought to be,/Long fallen wide. You can see how it was/Look at the
pictures and the cutlery/The music in the piano stool. That vase.” In
short, no one could be Philip Larkin except Philip Larkin who was a great poet
and a bloody good bum.
~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~
