made his pitch – “It’s the sound that you want” – and Dylan agreed and then didn’t: “Yeah, it’s the sound and the words. Words don’t interfere with it. They – they – punctuate it. You know, they give it purpose. [Pause].”
“They – they – punctuate it”: this is itself dramatic punctuation, though perfectly colloquial (and Dylan went on to say “Chekhov is my favorite writer”).36 Words: “they give it purpose. [Pause]”, the train of thought being that punctuation, a system of pointing, gives point.
Not just the beauty but the force will be necessarily in the details, incarnate in a way of putting it. So that any general praises of Dylan’s art are sure to miss what matters most about it: that it is not general, but highly and deeply individual, particular. This, while valuing human commonalty – “Of joy in widest commonalty spread”, in Wordsworth’s line. Joy, and grief, too.
Larkin, reviewing jazz in 1965, took it on himself to nick a Dylan album. (Hope I’m not out of line.)
I’m afraid I poached Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” (CBS) out of curiosity and found myself well rewarded. Dylan’s cawing, derisive voice is probably well suited to his material – I say probably because much of it was unintelligible to me – and his guitar adapts itself to rock (“Highway 61”) and ballad (“Queen Jane”) admirably. There is a marathon “Desolation Row” which has an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words.37
“Half-baked” is overdone. But “well rewarded” pays some dues.
A poem of Larkin’s has the phrase “Love Songs” in its title and is about songs, while itself proceeding not as a song but as a poem. For when you see the poem on the page, you can see that it is in three stanzas, and you could not at once hear – though you might know – such a thing when in the presence of a song. Larkin, we have already heard, thought that “poetry readings grew up on a false analogy with music”: “false because people can read words, whereas they can’t read music”. But this poem of his contemplates someone who used to be able to read music and play it on the piano, and who can still, in age, look at the sheet music and re-learn how it is done.
LOVE SONGS IN AGE
She kept her songs, they took so little space,
The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,
And coloured, by her daughter –
So they had waited, till in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood
Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
That hidden freshness sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,
The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.
A widow comes across the love songs that she had played on the piano when she was young; how painfully they remind her of the large promises once made by time and even more by love. 38
That sentence exercises a summary injustice. It is not much more than perfunctory gossip, whereas Larkin’s three sentences are a poem. The poet makes these dry bones live – or rather, since he is not a witch-doctor and the poem is not a zombie, he makes us care that these bones lived. “An ordinary sorrow of man’s life”: that is how Wordsworth spoke of his lonely sufferer (in widowhood, likewise?) in her ruined cottage. Larkin, too, redeems the ordinary.
His is not a poem simply about life’s disappointments, but about realizing these disappointments. He reminds us that to realize is to make real. Here are three sentences that shrink as life cannot but shrink. From 106 words to 30 to 23. The first sentence has all the amplitude of the remembered past into which it moves. It has world enough and time, with lovingly remembered details calmly patterned (“One bleached . . . One marked . . . One mended”), a world “set in order”. It flows on, and its own words remark on what they are re-living – they “spread out”, they manifest a sense of “time laid up in store”. The first sentence can take its time – time is not doing the taking.
But from this leisure the second sentence dwindles. It begins with “But”, unlikely to be a reassuring start here, and instead of what is lovingly recalled, we have love itself. Instead of the actually loved, in its inevitable imperfection (the unmentioned husband, the mentioned daughter), there is the daunting abstraction, love. Its brilliance is a “glare”, too bright to be ignored, somehow pitiless in its “sailing above”. And if love “broke out” in those songs, here, too, there is something of an ominous suggestion. Light breaks out, but so do wars and plagues. Love, too, can break hearts, or cannot but break hearts if we think of all that the abstraction love promised.
Then the further shrinkage into the last sentence, briefer, bleaker. Instead of the abstraction of the middle sentence, which was large and metaphorical and aerial, we reach a stony abstraction – no metaphors, no details, no grand words like “incipience”. Simply pain generalized, compacted into the plainest words in the language. Earlier the poem had opened its mouth and sung; in the end it bites its lip.
From copious memories recalling what promised to be a copious future, through high hopes, down to severe humbling. From a romantic compound, “spring-woken”, through a laconically dry one, “much-mentioned”, down to uncompounded plainness. From “a tidy fit”, through the promise to “set unchangeably in order”, down to “pile them back”.
Yet this is poetry, not prose, so it exists not only as sentences but as lines and stanzas. Larkin is a master of all such patterning. The pattern does not impose itself upon the sense, it releases and enforces the sense. See how he uses line-endings and stanza-endings – “see how”, because this is much more possible than “hear how”. Larkin’s point about “the disappearance of stanza shape” when you hear a poem read aloud can be extended to include our being able to see the valuable counterpointing of stanza shape and, say, sentence shape. A song’s stanzas are less concerned to stand, more to move.
Love Songs in Age has no stanza that is self-contained. There is a marked visual pause in passing from the first to the second stanza:
So they had waited, till in widowhood
She
