a book
High Windows
Philip Larkin · 2014 · 48 pages
Larkin's final collection of poems shows, as does all his best work, his ability to adapt contemporary speech rhythms and everyday vocabulary to subtle metrical patterns and poetic forms. Many of the poems in the collection, which includes some of his best-known pieces ('The Old Fools', 'This Be the Verse', 'The Explosion', and the title poem) show the preoccupation with death and transience that is so typical of the poet.
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
from 'High Windows'
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Zadie Smith
“All of Larkin delights me, but this is a good book to start with. Larkin didn’t have great range, but the area he chose is so important it doesn’t matter. His deal is making you understand that death is a total and permanent annihilation. Not the nicest news a poet can give you, but still worth knowing. He likes you to believe that the thought of death prompts nothing else in him but despair. That’s not entirely true. Larkin was scared of infinity, but he was also capable of making infinity beautiful. ‘Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.’ And what a genius he was with compound phrases. Sun-comprehending!”↗