Six Poets by Alan Bennett

poet can counterfeit. He can put on a personality and impersonate just as a novelist can. And the ‘I’ that writes is never quite the same as the ‘I’ written. Kingsley Amis, who knew Larkin well, says that some of Larkin’s poems were bythe man he knew, but others were by someone else entirely. The ‘I’ is always the eye. It is not always
I
.
    This next poem was possibly occasioned by the marriage of an ex-girlfriend; it’s certainly very different from the last one.

Maiden Name
    Marrying left your maiden name disused.
    Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,
    Your voice, and all your variants of grace;
    For since you were so thankfully confused
    By law with someone else, you cannot be
    Semantically the same as that young beauty:
    It was of her that these two words were used.
    Now it’s a phrase applicable to no one,
    Lying just where you left it, scattered through
    Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two,
    Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon –
    Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly
    Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.
    No, it means you. Or, since you’re past and gone,
    It means what we feel now about you then:
    How beautiful you were, and near, and young,
    So vivid, you might still be there among
    Those first few days, unfingermarked again.
    So your old name shelters our faithfulness,
    Instead of losing shape and meaning less
    With your depreciating luggage laden.

    Larkin went to Oxford at the start of the war, then became a librarian, working in various places before landing up at Hull University, where he remained for the rest of his life as librarian of the Brynmor Jones Library. The library had been endowed by Sir Brynmor Jones, who once came there on a visit. Meeting him in the library, Larkin said, was like being in St Pancras Station and coming across St Pancras.
    The library was to Larkin as textual criticism was to Housman: something at which he excelled but which made no demands on his other life. But he cared about it.
    New eyes each year
    Find old books here,
    And new books, too,
    Old eyes renew;
    So youth and age
    Like ink and page
    In this house join,
    Minting new coin.
    This next poem is about a return visit to Oxford, and in the background, as so often in Larkin (and Hardy), is the railway.

Dockery and Son
    â€˜Dockery was junior to you,
    Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’
    Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do
    You keep in touch with –’ Or remember how
    Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
    We used to stand before that desk, to give
    â€˜Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?
    I try the door of where I used to live:
    Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
    A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
    Canal and clouds and colleges subside
    Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
    Anyone up today must have been born
    In ’43, when I was twenty-one.
    If he was younger, did he get this son
    At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn
    High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
    With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
    How much … How little … Yawning, I suppose
    I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
    And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
    And ate an awful pie, and walked along
    The platform to its end to see the ranged
    Joining and parting lines reflect a strong
    Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
    No house or land still seemed quite natural.
    Only a numbness registered the shock
    Of finding out how much had gone of life,
    How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
    Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
    Of what he wanted, and been capable
    Of … No, that’s not the difference: rather, how
    Convinced he was he should be added to!
    Why did he think adding meant increase?
    To me it was dilution. Where do these
    Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
    We think