High Windows

Sean O’Brien writing in the TLS – Larkin and the City:

Nowhere is also the destination to which “High Windows” aspires. Written in 1967, this feels like the last word on a subject. One might object that the poem says nothing of the city, but we all know the local address of these high windows:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

In an earlier era, as I suggested above, Larkin might have been writing a religious poem, but by this point the transcendent dimension exists in the power of imagination to complete its own fulfilment, in an image of absence and extinction: “the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless”. Closing the poem on a diminuendo, on a weak off-rhyme with “glass”, this is at once accepting and exultant, sorrowing and erotic – precisely the kind of Frenchified aesthetic complexity against which we might think Larkin had long set his face, had it not so clearly lain within his powers to achieve it so memorably in an upper room overlooking Pearson Park. As Neil Young wrote: “Everybody knows this is nowhere”; but how many people really know what to do with it as Larkin does?

More information:

Sunday Morning – Louis MacNeice

Evening on Karl Johan by Edvard Munch


Louis MacNeice – Sunday Morning

Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man’s heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate’s great bazaar;
Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,

And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow,
Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast
That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,
That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time
A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.

But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire
Open its eight bells out, skulls’ mouths which will not tire
To tell how there is no music or movement which secures
Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.

via artofeurope.com

My life had stood

My life had stood by Emily Dickinson

My life had stood 

My life had stood–a Loaded Gun–
In Corners–till a Day
The Owner passed–identified–
And carried Me away–

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods–
And now We hunt the Doe–
And every time I speak for Him–
The Mountains straight reply–

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow–
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through–

And when at Night–Our good Day done–
I guard My Master’s Head–
‘Tis better than the Eider-Duck’s
Deep Pillow–to have shared–

To foe of His–I’m deadly foe–
None stir the second time–
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye–
Or an emphatic Thumb–

Though I than He–may longer live
He longer must–than I–
For I have but the power to kill,
Without–the power to die–

Emily Dickinson

Buffalo Bill’s defunct

ee cummings

Poem:

Buffalo Bill's
        defunct
               who used to
               ride a watersmooth-silver
                                        stallion
        and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                         Jesus
        he was a handsome man
                             and what i want to know is
        how do you like your blueeyed boy
        Mister Death

Commentary

Is it just that Buffalo Bill is dead, or is it that he is outdated? Certainly, he outlived the golden years of the Wild West – he died in 1917 (he was born in 1846). There is also the slight ambiguity as to whether it is Jesus or Buffalo Bill that is a handsome man. Indirectly we begin to wonder what Mister Death would have to say about the death of Jesus.

‘Jesus he was a handsome man and what I want to know is…’

the ‘and’ puts us off kilter – it has the rhetorical jerkiness of a child.
Why, we must ask ourselves, is Buffalo Bill Death’s bue-eyed boy? Because he was a renowned killer? Buffalos, most famously, but men (and pigeons?), too?

Because he was a fine scalp for Mister Death, packing so much life into his 71 years?
Quite apart from the formal inventiveness and arresting language, the poem’s trio of protagonists are potent symbolically – somehow alluding to freedom, mortality, potency and defeat.

More prairie allusiveness from Kafka:

The Wish to be a Red Indian

If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.

Archives