… He was a man always breaking disappointedly away from a realm whose human and material compensations were not merely inadequate but somehow personally humiliating to him. Many of his great poems follow the same emotional trajectory – creeping intimacy with another human being, or with a particular geographical location, and then a quick appalled exit. His eyes lifted, in poem after poem, from the blandishments of the social world, the seductions of other people and of the simple stuff of bounded, grounded, earthly life (marriage, children, travel, money…), to “sun-comprehending… high windows,” “long french windows,” “a strong / Unhindered moon,” “arrogant eternity.”

There was always a pane of glass that compelled him, a higher clearer region from whose vantage point sublunary life was

[F]athers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres …

That arrogant eternity was in part about Larkin’s version of artistic transcendence: His poetic vocation made him literally and figuratively immaterial – both indifferent to (contemptuous of) money (money lies about the purchasability of meaning and happiness), and happy to be anonymous, “unhindered” by a world that wanted to make him poet laureate (he turned down the offer). Religious transcendence, like money, was a lie, but unlike money it was a rather pretty one, in a shabby/chic way:

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die.

And even a past-it church can impress:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

Religion’s robe is tattered, but it’s still a robe.

His sense of his sordid life as transcended by his art served Larkin only for a few years; middle age, for him, meant the poetic grappling with the end of his poetic energy, so that the “brightness and the plain/ Far-reaching singleness” of the unhindered moon’s “wide stare” gradually became

a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young…

His inability to maintain his “arrogant” social “singleness” gradually informs him that

Only the young can be alone freely.
The time is shorter now for company,
And sitting by a lamp more often brings
Not peace, but other things.
Beyond the light stand failure and remorse…

In place of his awareness of himself as an unassailable self-sufficient aesthetic self flying by the nets of marriage and children —

Why did [Dockery] think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution.

*********************************

Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

— he now has a mind that “blanks at the glare” given off not by the high windows of eternity but by the frank and simple fear of crashing up against death:

[I]t stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.

The world more and more is a sort of menacing, automated, sepulcher:

[T]elephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

It’s the same mood evoked in Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel:

A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn.

The phones ring, the lights burn, the world churns on. It has no need of us, and is for all its intricate workings uncaring. We after all are passing through – for us, it’s a rented world, a hotel world (the hotel offers “headed paper, made for writing home / (If home existed) letters of exile”) – and the world has its permanent work of worlding to do. That’s the true self-sufficiency – the world as such. The spinning top. Larkin was more than ordinarily aware of his own peripherality, his Kafkan alienation, his coming invisibility, his faint impress on a world about to white him out. He was remarkably generous with his curiosity, anxiety, and despair about his existential condition, and was even able to make this condition sing.