Favourite Poems: "Sad Steps" by Philip Larkin

On the night of a full moon, a Philip Larkin poem that has grown and grown on me over the years. I think of this poem every time I see a full moon (although the poem doesn't actually describe the moon as full, which I've somehow just realized). 

I'm not a fan of vulgarity in poetry, but the vulgarity in the first line of this poem earns its place for all sorts of reasons. It's a very earthy beginning for a poem with such an etheral subject, which supplies contrast. It also describes a relatable situation. And it rhymes.

The poem appeals to me partly for autobiographical reasons. For most of my teens I needed glasses but never got them, out of self-consciousness. I couldn't see the moon for many of my formative years. When I finally got glasses and could see it, its brilliance took me aback, and it did indeed seem "laughable and "preposterous", as Larkin puts it-- almost cartoonish.

The central idea of the poem-- the linking of the moon and childhood-- is brilliant. It seems surreal to me both that my childhood is utterly and irretrievably gone, and also that other people are living through childhood right now-- a childhood just as real as mine was. It's the sort of strangeness that can only be evoked by poetry. 

I don't think the poem is perfect. In all honesty, I think the second and third stanzas are poor, aside from the line There's something laughable about this. In fact, the line Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below seems positively awkward and tongue-tripping to me. But what do I know, and who am I to criticize Larkin? It's just my opinion, man.

On the other hand, the fourth stanza is miraculous. Lozenge of love! Medallion of art! is a brilliant evocation of the moon's surreal purity. (It reminds me of Yeats's description of the moon:

So arrogantly pure, a child might think

It can be murdered by a spot of ink.)

But even these lines pale compared to my favourite line in the poem: Oh wolves of memory! I'm not exactly sure what Larkin was trying to convey by that phrase, but to me, it suggests the ruthless and ravening nature of memory, how it penetrates to your very core at a moment you're not expecting it.

"Wolves of memory" is one of those phrases that, in my view, proclaim the genius of the poet. I know I wouldn't be able to come up with such a phrase in a hundred years. Encountering such pure inspiration is both sobering and exhilarating. It's the sort of line that literally gives me goosebumps.

I also like the fact that Larkin spells out the meaning of the poem in the concluding stanzas. He doesn't take refuge in obliqueness, the tactic of most modern and measly poets.

On a more technical line, the shortness and flatness of the line: "One shivers slightly, looking up there" is very effective. It adds variation to the metre, but also transitions from the crescendo in the middle of the poem to the rather more subdued and prosaic ending.

Anyway, here is the text:

Sad Steps

Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate—
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.