High Windows

Abstract

Of High Windows, Andrew Motion has written: ‘The book changed Larkin’s life more decisively than any of his previous collections. The Less Deceived made his name; The Whitsun Weddings made him famous; High Windows turned him into a national monument’.¹ But in order to construct that monument, Larkin’s eager public had to overlook or explain away the most disturbing aspects of High Windows. Where The Less Deceived was tormented by questions of love and The Whitsun Weddings by loneliness and death, High Windows is charged with anger. Forces which in The Whitsun Weddings were held delicately in tension can be seen disintegrating in High Windows. Poems celebrating continuity and communal ritual remain, and there is a tender regard for futile human gestures of compassion (the ‘wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers’ of ‘The Building’). But the collection also lays bare feelings of fury and rancour which show Larkin’s lyrical impulse being threatened by its twin: a mocking philistinism. This is most obviously apparent in the taunting coarseness of Larkin’s language in many poems. It seems that at times High Windows wants to say again, with the fury of disappointment, that ‘books’ and all they represent really are ‘a load of crap’.