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| Iain Bamforth |
Larkin's originality is palpable,' asserts Martin Amis in his introduction to his selection of the poet's work forthcoming from Faber this month, and published in the 19 August edition of the Financial Times as 'The Larkin Puzzle'.
Philip Larkin's famous poem 'Water' (The Whitsun Weddings, 1964) starts off in favour of Baptist total immersion and then goes all hydro-mystical: 'My liturgy would employ / Images of sousing, / A furious devout drench…' But where is the originality? Rather than providing a new, simplified, Basic English version of the religious impulse, Larkin's poem swells the course of the mainstream.
Water is the classic symbol of the religious drive for purity, especially — but certainly not only — in the irrigational culture of the first Mesopotamian civilisations: the solar, 'any-angled light' (that other primal religious symbol) is what pours through the stained-glass windows and refracts all over the congregations of most Gothic cathedrals. As with the mainstream, Larkin's worshippers are delivered from anything that might attach to the grossly impure body: the Platonic intellect of Larkin's auxiliary religion is left contemplating its two uncontaminated articles of faith.
It was precisely with the image of Larkin's prismatic monstrance — surely something like the famous Duralex tumbler — that Heinrich Heine summed up Protestantism a century before him. 'A harmless religion, as clean as a glass of water, but it doesn't do you any good either.' Heine's one-liner on Catholicism's appeal to the whole sensorium neglected by Protestants was even bold enough to hint that God had been decomposing a long time before Nietzsche wrote his famous entry in The Joyful Science — 'I see no pleasure in a religion in which our dear God, God help us, is dead, and it smells of incense just like at a funeral.' And he was mordant enough about his inherited Judaism too: 'I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Gives you nothing but scorn and shame. I tell you, it’s no religion at all, just a lot of hard luck.'
Perhaps the oddest thing about Larkin's poem is that a poet could ever see himself 'called in' to construct a religion as if he were an engineer or even PR consultant.
Who would be underwriting the commission exactly?
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| The Crossing Fee |
'Young steers,' Larkin reminds us dolefully, 'become old cattle from that day.'
Iain Bamforth grew up in Glasgow and graduated from its medical school. He has pursued a peripatetic career as a hospital doctor, general practitioner, translator, lecturer in comparative literature, and latterly public health consultant in several developing countries, principally in Asia. His four books of poetry will be joined by The Crossing Fee, a new Carcanet title, in 2013. Several of his wide-ranging essays and reviews can be read on his website: www.iainbamforth.com.