Page 70 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 7: Major Literary Terms-VII

earth nor all ye need to know.” He thus briskly separates the realms that Keats held in ambiguous Notes
balance. Larkin often discouraged all sorts of comparative readings, yet ‘The Whitsun Weddings’
may be viewed as a searching revaluation of the Keatsian odes. Keats’s stanzas are autonomous
and focus on different aspects of the urn sequentially, while their invocatory openings except the
second stanza convey a sense of starting afresh every time. The Keatsian stanzas in ‘The Whitsun
Weddings’ differ from those in Ode on a Grecian Urn both rhythmically and thematically. Instead
of varied sestets, Larkin’s evenly rhymed stanzas with the a b a b c d e c d e pattern as well as the
enjambement take on the reader unstopping like the narrator’s journey by the train. Keats held
beauty as timeless. Larkin’s poem is rooted in a specific time and is also aware of its flow: “That
Whitsun, I was late getting away.” Paradoxical to the Romantic sensuousness, our organs are here
smothered by hot cushions, blinding windscreens and stinking fish-docks. Later the noise of “whoops
and skirls” irritates our auditory perception, strikingly in contrast to the “unheard melodies” of
Romantic literature. And above all, Larkin’s view of marriage as a “happy funeral” and a “religious
wounding” strongly destabilises the Romantic creed of “More happy love! More happy, happy
love!”
In ‘High Windows’, too, Larkin is not romanticising the amorous attitude of young people like
Keats. He prefers to simply narrate it, as if it is nothing ceremonial, and uses colloquial words from
day to day sex life:
”When I see a couple of kids
And guess he is fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm”.
In fact, it is difficult to find a complex syntax or an unusual word in Larkin’s poetry. His pen-
picture of English suburbs with “industrial froth” and “acres of dismantled cars”, and the occasional
portraits of the verdurous countryside in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ are quite familiar to the common
English reader. ‘The Explosion’ is also very colloquial and picturesque in its depiction of humdrum
mortals like the miners. The outward structure of ‘Water’ and ‘Days’ are almost like nursery rhymes,
however subtle philosophy they may convey inwardly. Larkin thus breaks the barrier between the
poet and the general reader, as Amis observes in ‘A Bookshop Idyll.’ ”Life as it appears from day to
day” thus comes again and again in Larkin’s poetry. He is neither existentialist nor romantic; from
a neutral point he writes what he says in a plain language for the non-specialist recipient, which is
the ultimate credo of the Movement poetry.

Self Assessment

State the following sentences are True or False:
1. A war poet is a poet writing in the time of and on the subject of war.
2. Many poems by British war poets were published in magazine.
3. Nikolay Semenovich Tikhonov volunteered for the military at the out break of world war I.
4. The term movement was coined by J.D. Scott in 1954.
5. Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1950 and 1990.

7.3 Modernist Poetry

Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist
literature in the English language, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors,
including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting
the dates. It is usually said to have begun with the French Symbolist movement and it artificially

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