‘Livings’: Aesthetic Intimations

Abstract

With the possible exception of ‘Sympathy in White Major’, ‘Livings’ is the poem in High Windows which has caused commentators most difficulty [CP:186–8]. Each individual part1 has its problems. Clive James, for example, writing of the second, says: ‘The narrator’s situation is not made perfectly clear. While wanting to be the reverse, Larkin can on occasion be a difficult poet, and here, I think, is a case of over-refinement leading to obscurity’ [EN:6/1974:68]. However, the most significant difficulty is how the three parts relate to one another. Larkin himself thinks that they have very little in common, and that the sequence was terminated rather than completed: ‘I thought I was going to write a sequence of lives, or livings, little vignettes, but it petered out after three. They haven’t got any connection with one another, or meaning, but are supposed to be exciting in their separate ways’ [SL:653].