Indexer
Philip Larkin was born in Coventry in 1922 and died in Hull in 1985. He worked in university libraries for most of his adult life, holding the post of chief librarian at the University of Hull from 1955. He also wrote poetry of a very high quality and is generally acknowledged as being one of Britain’s greatest poets of the 20th century.
He had a complex personality and outlook on life, in which self-deprecation, pessimism and mockery combined with more positive and hopeful attitudes. In a 1972 radio interview he stated that “Somebody once said that the great thing is not to be different from other people but to be different from yourself”, and many “different people” can be discerned in Larkin’s poems, sometimes even within the same poem.
The poem
“High Windows” is a case in point. It is the title poem of his third (and final) collection, published in 1974. He wrote relatively little poetry after this time, certainly not enough for another collection, and so the poems in this book can be seen as being as close to the “definitive” Larkin as is possible, given that it is not easy to arrive at a consensus as to what that definition might be.
The poem comprises five four-line stanzas in which there is rhyming of a sort; the first two stanzas rhyme (or half-rhyme) the second and fourth lines, but the other three have an ABAB pattern. However, the rhyming is almost casual (with a number of half-rhymes such as “back/dark” and “glass/endless”) and is not relied upon to provide the poem’s structure.
In terms of grammar, the poem consists of four sentences of varying lengths, split between the stanzas such that the final lines of each of the first four stanzas are continuous with the first lines of the next. The poem therefore reads like a single thought process, starting with a bold (and possibly shocking) statement and ending with something much more profound. It runs as follows:
When I see a couple of kidsAnd guess he’s f**king her and she’sTaking pills or wearing a diaphragm,I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives –Bonds and gestures pushed to one sideLike an outdated combine harvester,And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder ifAnyone looked at me, forty years back,And thought, That’ll be the life;No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hideWhat you think of the priest. HeAnd his lot will all go down the long slideLike free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:The sun-comprehending glass,And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
(As originally printed, the words from “That’ll be the life” to “free bloody birds” are in italics)
Discussion
The poem was written in 1967, when Larkin was 45 years old and in charge of a large university library. He was therefore surrounded at his place of work by large numbers of students in their late teens and early twenties, at the height of the “swinging sixties” when young people had learned to express themselves fearlessly and not to be embarrassed by their sexual feelings for each other.
Larkin could hardly fail to be aware of the “bonds and gestures pushed to one side”, but the paradise in question is not that of the young couple but the dream of “everyone old”, himself included. He regrets that he could not have behaved in this way when he was younger, due to the unavailability of modern birth control methods, and he envies the modern generation their sexual liberation. He uses the image of a fairground “long slide” to picture the one-way ride to endless happiness that this is bringing “everyone young”.
Larkin then throws the thought process backwards to imagine what the generation before his would have thought of his own prospect of liberation from constraint. However, this is expressed not in sexual but religious terms. It is release from fear of eternal damnation and offending the priesthood that he sees as their abiding desire, expressed in terms of envy of the next generation who will have the liberty that is denied to them.
The image of the long slide is used again as the means to achieve freedom. Once on the slide the desired outcome is inevitable, and Larkin reverses the traditional image of sliding downwards to perdition by emphasising that freedom must lie at its base, as does happiness for the generation that Larkin envies.
However, the final stanza brings all this to a halt in a rather startling way. The natural conclusion to the two scenarios that Larkin has offered would be the suggestion that every generation, going back to time immemorial, has thrown off the shackles of its parents and found liberty by sliding away from its constraints. But the image that Larkin has of his own situation is that the promise of godless and hell-less freedom has not been achieved. Instead, his thoughts turn to the “high windows” of a church or cathedral where he is still on the inside with the sunlight shining down on him. The promised freedom has therefore been an illusion.
The poem ends with a despairing recognition that there is no ultimate freedom. The young couple might hope for endless happiness, but what is endless is the “deep blue air” that “shows nothing, and is nowhere”. It is the windows that are “sun-comprehending” and not people with their mortal longings.
By making “High Windows” the title poem of his collection, Larkin makes the point that the individual can never have what he or she ultimately wants, because they can never know what that is. Just as freedom from religion is not the answer, neither is 1960s “free love” and, Larkin implies, the same will apply to every imagined desire of future generations.
