High Windows

“High Windows” feels prosaic and largely unsuccessful as a poem. The poet proceeds from an expression of frustration at the sexual inhibitions and prohibitions of his generation compared to the ‘fucking-freedoms’ of the 1960’s then reflects, adjusts, and self-counters that the generation prior to his may have held a similarly jealous perspective at his own generation’s enjoyment of diminished religious constraints. The poem then abruptly converts and concludes in an attractively ambivalent, reaching image of high windows and a vague blue eternity. “High Windows”, overall, feels porous in poetics and content.

Not everyone sees the poem this way. One of Larkin’s major biographer’s, James Booth, comments on Larkin’s use of “symbolism in tension with a less deceived demotic realism” but the way the poem “in a sudden, unanticipated shift of tone . . . leaps from . . . self-argumentative bluster to the purest poetic epiphany…” (Booth, 306).

Similarly, Salem K. Hassan in his book, Larkin and His Contemporaries, expresses unreserved admiration for the poem and its key elements:

“All in all, ‘High Windows’, a beautiful piece of verse as it is, owes much of its effect to the integration of both colloquial and sublime language…” (Hassan, 122).

Despite these interpretations, one could argue that most of the language in “High Windows” remains unleavened prose, especially when compared to the plain language of Larkin’s other more successful poems, which achieves a resonance beyond the literal words. Larkin’s poetic observations on life, love, or sex typically smartly disturb and perhaps persuade the reader, but the observations in the opening half of “High Windows” seem shallow and dull:

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he’s fucking her and she’s

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives –

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly.

These lines express a genuine sentiment legitimately indicting the past artifice of social “bonds and gestures” fabricated to achieve sexual ends. But the verse is flat, and its conversational language lies unelectric, does not migrate. And this represents half the poem.

The voice of the poem continues with a pedestrian, self-adjusting counterpoint:

…I wonder if

Anyone 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 hide

What you think of the priest. He

And his lot will all go down the long slide

Like free bloody birds.

This is a relevant response to the concerns of the opening verse and softens the contrast of a single generation looking back at their prior generation. It recognizes the same inaccurate, backwards-looking generational conclusion that “…his lot will all go down the long slide/Like free bloody birds.” None of us goes down the long slide like free bloody birds – despite generationally evolving freedoms. But this recognition is still obvious and not liberated beyond its language or modest level of thought.

Compare these four “High Windows” stanzas with the first-person language and poetics in Larkin’s “Dockery and Son”. From a casual aside, the poem’s speaker learns that a student, who was his junior at university, now has a son there. The speaker has been pondering this and concludes:

…embodying

For Dockery a son, for me nothing,

Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.

Life is first boredom, then fear.

Whether or not we use it, it goes,

And leaves what something hidden from us chose,

And age, and then the only end of age. (44-48)

The concerns expressed here are in similar simple, declarative language, yet it is compressed and vibrates beyond its vocabulary. For example:

“embodying/For Dockery a son, for me nothing/Nothing” – Dockery’s life has indeed ‘embodied’ a son (another body) which is an interestingly clinical way of presenting what is often invoked with a romantic shine (life beyond death, the family name goes on), but here it is blunt as a piece of inventory. More telling, “son” and “nothing” are essentially made equal as we learn both exact the same “harsh patronage”. Further, the repetition of “nothing” adds a poetic value as though the speaker is firmly acknowledging, internalizing a philosophic emptiness, not shying away or euphemizing it. Because of this, the aphoristic “Life is first boredom, then fear.” does not whine but comes to us with the stiff logic of a gravestone. Finally, a choice is made by the poet to write in atypical sequence: “and then the only end of age” instead of the more expected ‘and then only the end of age’. Once again, an objective inventorying: ‘death’ is the only end of age, there is nothing else – which is surprisingly cauterizing and more powerful.

Compare the ramifying accomplishment of “Dockery and Son” with the banal concerns of the opening four (of five) stanzas of “High Windows”.

In its final stanza, “High Windows” does get more interesting with the introduction of “the thought of 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.

The imagery is tantalizing: “The sun-comprehending glass,/And beyond it, the deep blue air” feels aspirational while the final words of the poem “that shows/Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless” interestingly undercut the preceding image suggesting an endless nowhere of nothing. The abutment of the sun-comprehending image with the eternal view of nothing shoves the reader around as we contemplate both purpose and purposelessness in the same sentence. One might wonder if this expresses Larkin’s commitment to poetry within a life that lacked any other concerted purpose.

“High Windows” feels not fully realized as a poem. It was written at a time, toward the end of his writing life, when composing poems had become more difficult and inspiration less frequent. While it contains elements typical of his concerns – sexual frustration, a general disdain for religion – these ideas are carried limply and, until we arrive at the fifth and final stanza, we find only muffled poetics.