Death, disconnection, and ... unicorns

Stark. Savage. Unremittingly dark. Morose. Depressing.

Such language might be used to describe Philip Larkin, the self-disavowed Poet Laureate of death. And it would hit the spot.

Ne'er a glimpse of daylight might be glimpsed between the slate-grey chill clouds of Larkin's poetry. A man who derived his inspiration not from Wordsworthian daffodils but from the deprivation of his life and all that he saw around him.

A description of the man's work, left there, might be worthy, but ultimately unsatisfying. It would make the grade, demonstrate an effort, yet ultimately would betray a paucity of understanding and appreciation of the man and of his voice.

Critically acclaimed not just for his existential angst, but most notably also for his agonising ambiguity, Larkin's work possesses many and multiple layers of meaning.

His late and well-known swan-song, 'Aubade', like much of his earlier work, opened a window into the inner core of a man tormented by hopeless hope; the object of his adoration staying just out of reach of his questing fingers, made inaccessible by his lack of self-belief.

Some of his best-known work spoke just as much by what it did not say, as by what the voice of the narrator left on the page.

In 'Ambulances', the raw words Larkin left for posterity seem to admit to no other meaning than the obvious singular thread of death and disconnection. The author's purpose may just as well be left as unequivocal as it appears.

Yet can the possibility be admitted that Larkin's clarity purposefully invites a response from the reader?

Read in context with other work of his on similar themes, the poem's surface-level lack of Larkin's characteristic ambiguity is jarring.

By making a statement, Larkin is asking an unvoiced question.

Ubiquitous, obvious, yet unreachable, Larkin's harbingers of death remind all and sundry of their mortality. Confronted in the midst of their daily lives, a glimpse of the harsh and bleak reality of the end of a life forcefully and unerringly conveys a message of imminent annihilation to them. In peripheral awareness during daily life, for that brief time the full horror of extinction is exposed. Made disconnected and fading into the distance, they mourn in death the loss of the essential connection that everyday life provides. One dead and gone can no longer be reached, but leaves a long-lasting reminder of our turn. Leaving a pall or stain on our lives that reduces us.

Typical of Larkin, that final sentence: "/And dulls to distance all we are" throws the whole bleak cavalcade, monstrous regiment after regiment, into reverse. The inevitability of death, that 'solving emptiness', the loosening of the ties of love. That existential fear and disconnection: 'dulls' 'all we are'!

Larkin's depiction of how the calling card of annihilation reaches us all in the end, of the stark staring horror of being reminded of mortality, and of how death shuts away and disconnects, seems now more like a statement that he invited to be challenged. To, somehow, do better than he did himself.

This is the same poet, after all, who had also written:

If I can keep against all argument / Such image of a snow-white unicorn, / Then as I pray it may for sanctuary / Descend at last to me, / And put into my hand its golden horn

Though Larkin's verse then descends into a dark pit of self-hatred and self-destructive tendencies, his ultimately futile wish 'against all argument' for personal salvation could not be clearer. It is also an unsuspected characteristic of the wider body of his work.

As a further example, in 'Going', Larkin manages to juxtapose dusk with bedsheets in just a few short lines. The kind of 'evening' not seen before 'that lights no lamps' seems seductively comforting at first. But when drawn up like a bedsheet, it 'brings no comfort'. The poet's voice first appeals to vanished old certainties, then rhetorically asks what his hands cannot feel, what loads his hands down.

His meaning is clear: on the advance of his own feeling of mortality, he cannot when he wishes to find and connect to that part of him that would allow himself to be loved. So his doom must overtake him.

He is entrapped by his own lack of self-belief. He lies, stricken, on the bed that he has made for himself.

The theme of John Donne's famous poem, 'No Man Is an Island', is the same as that of 'Ambulances'. We involved through living in the lives of all others; death disconnects from the community, and diminishes us all.

So how might the love and connectedness that Larkin sought, hopelessly, for be found by someone who set so little store in his own capability and that of others? No better example, perhaps, than the high priest of logical positivism and materialist philosophy, Bertrand Russell.

In his hugely influential "A Free Man's Worship", he wrote: "no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave". His idea of humanity's essential nature is built "on the firm foundation of unyielding despair". On the scope of human life, he wrote: "we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour".

Yet, this is the same man, who, when confronted by the immediate spectacle of a friend becoming suddenly ill, came face to face with a decidedly different reality:

Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached … At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person. For a time, a sort of mystic illumination possessed me. I felt that I knew the inmost thoughts of every body that I met in the street … I did in actual fact find myself in far closer touch than previously with all my friends, and many of my acquaintances. … Having for years cared only for exactness and analysis, I found myself filled with semi mystical feeling about beauty … and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable.

This kind of love overcame barriers of loneliness to connect Russell with not only the people he knew, but the people he didn't know too.

The self-same kind of love was the object of Larkin's quest: the one that for him would connect him to the sky, answer positively the 'solving emptiness' he felt so tempted by and yet so horrified by the prospect of, heal the full terror of imminent annihilation, and thus allow himself to feel more connected with other people.

Love gives life to the lifeless. Love lights a flame in the heart that is cold. Love brings hope to the hopeless and gladdens the hearts of the sorrowful. In the world of existence, there is indeed no greater power than the power of love.

It was strange, but after that day, I lost my fear of dying or of questioning if there is life after death. I now know that we, our true self, doesn't die, only the physical body does. I understood why we don't want to come back once we feel that amazing Love, but I felt it wasn't my time yet.