I’d done it before
(and doubtless I’ll do it again,
sooner or later)
woke up with a head on the pillow beside me -whose? –
what did it matter?
Good- looking, of course, dark hair, rather matted;
the reddish beard several shades lighter;
with very deep lines around the eyes,
from pain, I’d guess, maybe laughter;
and a beautiful crimson mouth that obviously knew
how to flatter…
which I kissed…
Colder than pewter.
Strange. What was his name? Peter?
Simon? Andrew? John? J knew I’d feel better
for tea, dry toast, no butter,
so rang for the maid.
And, indeed, her innocent clatter
of cups and plates,
her clearing of clutter,
her regional patter,
were just what needed –
hungover and wrecked as J was from a night on the batter.
Never again!
I needed to clean up my act,
get fitter,
cut out the booze and the fags and the sex.
Yes. And as for the latter,
it was time to turf out the blighter,
the beater or biter,
who’d come like a lamb to the slaughter
to Salome’s bed.
In tile mirror, I saw my eyes glitter.
I flung back the sticky red sheets,
and there, like I said -and ain’t life a bitch –
was his head on a platter.
I do not like this poem, or perhaps it is the ‘Salome’ constructed here by Carol Ann Duffy whom I loathe. Salome here is a woman ‘assembled ‘ by an escalating list of cliche, unable to recognise her own part in history, failing through her stylised superficiality to appreciate the saint in her bed!
Once again,with Duffy’s use of the dramatic monologue, we have a cynical weary voice delivering up a character . yet, unlike Browning in ‘My last Duchess’ or ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, or Duffy in poems such as
‘Mrs Lazarus’ and ‘Medusa’, there is nothing or rather ‘no one’ to discover here. We are visiting a used hotel room (or metaphorical equivalent), and finding the inhabitant has left a long, long time ago. Are we actually visiting a voice differentiated from any other I wonder?
Of course, the ‘postmodern ‘preoccupation with appearance, the sexual promiscuity and the alcoholic haze, are all amply reinforced by the collection of cliches littered throughout the poem.
We arrive, as the Salome of biblical history dictates that we must, finally at the famous ‘platter’ where St John the Baptist’s Head is displayed.
But I am not sure that this poetic journey accomplishes much else? I do not feel anything in reading the poem. It is as sterile as her cliche as just as uninteresting. Even the tone seems monontous and dull. This again is the intention I am sure, as the sounds are very repetitive and ‘dull’, but am I ‘bovvered’? I fear not.
There is no pathos, no revelation and certainly none of the brilliant and unexpected sympathy we may feel for grief stricken speakers such as ‘Demeter ‘in The World’s wife.
Salome the poem suggests, does not deserve the attention that history and writers like Oscar wilde, have given her. She may be a victim, or she may be predatory, or both. She is incarcerated in her linguistic prison, a soulless place, where poetry and humanity must die.
A poem about ignorance and the redundancy of language.
Ironically as this was on AQA GCSE, students have enjoyed I know.!
But then, so what I feel?
So what indeed!
Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985)
Philip Larkin, an eminent writer in postwar Great Britain, was commonly referred to as “England’s other Poet Laureate” until his death in 1985. Indeed, when the position of laureate became vacant in 1984, many poets and critics favored Larkin’s appointment, but the shy, provincial author preferred to avoid the limelight. An “artist of the first rank” in the words of Southern Review contributor John Press, Larkin achieved acclaim on the strength of an extremely small body of work—just over one hundred pages of poetry in four slender volumes that appeared at almost decade-long intervals. These collections, especially The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows, present “a poetry from which even people who distrust poetry, most people, can take comfort and delight,” according to X. J. Kennedy in the New Criterion. Larkin employed the traditional tools of poetry—rhyme, stanza, and meter—to explore the often uncomfortable or terrifying experiences thrust upon common people in the modern age. As Alan Brownjohn notes in Philip Larkin, the poet produced without fanfare “the most technically brilliant and resonantly beautiful, profoundly disturbing yet appealing and approachable, body of verse of any English poet in the last twenty-five years.”
Despite his wide popularity, Larkin “shied from publicity, rarely consented to interviews or readings, cultivated his image as right-wing curmudgeon and grew depressed at his fame,” according to J. D. McClatchy in the New York Times Book Review. To support himself, he worked as a professional librarian for more than forty years, writing in his spare time. In that manner he authored two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, two collections of criticism, All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961-1968 and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982, and all of his verse. Phoenix contributor Alun R. Jones suggests that, as a wage earner at the remote University of Hull, Larkin “avoided the literary, the metropolitan, the group label, and embraced the nonliterary, the provincial, and the purely personal.” In Nine Contemporary Poets: A Critical Introduction, Peter R. King likewise commends “the scrupulous awareness of a man who refuses to be taken in by inflated notions of either art or life.” From his base in Hull, Larkin composed poetry that both reflects the dreariness of postwar provincial England and voices “most articulately and poignantly the spiritual desolation of a world in which men have shed the last rags of religious faith that once lent meaning and hope to human lives,” according to Press. McClatchy notes Larkin wrote “in clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and remorse of age, about stunted lives and spoiled desires.” Critics feel that this localization of focus and the colloquial language used to describe settings and emotions endear Larkin to his readers. Agenda reviewer George Dekker notes that no living poet “can equal Larkin on his own ground of the familiar English lyric, drastically and poignantly limited in its sense of any life beyond, before or after, life today in England.”
Throughout his life, England was Larkin’s emotional territory to an eccentric degree. The poet distrusted travel abroad and professed ignorance of foreign literature, including most modern American poetry. He also tried to avoid the cliches of his own culture, such as the tendency to read portent into an artist’s childhood. In his poetry and essays, Larkin remembered his early years as “unspent” and “boring,” as he grew up the son of a city treasurer in Coventry. Poor eyesight and stuttering plagued Larkin as a youth; he retreated into solitude, read widely, and began to write poetry as a nightly routine. In 1940 he enrolled at Oxford, beginning “a vital stage in his personal and literary development,” according to Bruce K. Martin in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. At Oxford Larkin studied English literature and cultivated the friendship of those who shared his special interests, including Kingsley Amis and John Wain. He graduated with first class honors in 1943, and, having to account for himself with the wartime Ministry of Labor, he took a position as librarian in the small Shropshire town of Wellington. While there he wrote both of his novels as well as The North Ship, his first volume of poetry. After working at several other university libraries, Larkin moved to Hull in 1955 and began a thirty-year association with the library at the University of Hull. He is still admired for his expansion and modernization of that facility.