My Santiago

CRANBROOK A LEVELS - ON STUDYING LARKIN

(written at Cranbrook School in Kent)

Walking in, I see faces looking up.

These are Sixth formers, young adults, out of uniform.

The subject – Poetry! The Poet - Larkin!

And before that we taste - fleetingly - of the welsh resonance of Dylan Thomas and Eliot’s intellectual complexities. Yet Larkin is unlike either.

His verse straddles the two; neither fruity and sensuous nor obscure and sinewy; it breaks with tradition. More complex than it looks - a sort of intricate nonchalance- replete with life.

The rhyme, innocuous, non-existent, but on closer inspection rhyming like fingers; from the outer to the inner.

And according to the man in “Toads”, the job cannot be jettisoned because it determines the man; it encapsulates him, providing a rationale for living.

And the slang, so different to ‘poetry’ yet so effective; like stuff your pension