Dockery and Son Analysis

Dockery and Son Analysis

2003-12-08

 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.

Gillian Steinberg

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:

“Well, it just shows

How much… How little… Yawning, I suppose

I fell asleep…”

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:

“how

Convinced he [Dockery] was he should be added to!

Why did he think adding meant increase?

To me it was dilution.”

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~~~~~~~