The poem
At once whatever happened starts receding. Panting, and back on board, we line the rail With trousers ripped, light wallets, and lips bleeding.
Yes, gone, thank God! Remembering each detail We toss for half the night, but find next day All's kodak-distant. Easily, then (though pale),
'Perspective brings significance,' we say, Unhooding our photometers, and, snap! What can't be printed can be thrown away.
Later, it's just a latitude: the map Points out how unavoidable it was: 'Such coastal bedding always means mishap.'
Curses? The dark? Struggling? Where's the source Of these yarns now (except in nightmares, of course)?
Philipp Larkins belongs to a new movement in Poetry. He writes about present day situations. In this poem he talks about horrible experiences that we try to repress. We distance ourselves like looking on a picture, we explain it rationally but we can not cope. These dreadful experinces only show up in our nighmares. As for Larkin he probably refered to the postwar period where people tried to get back to normality. For me it refers to any painful event in one's life that we can not manage.
I think he is referring to any one moment of our life - the shocking ones are the mose obvious. The very moment an event that has an impact on us is over, it starts to become history. It moves inexorably further away from us in time and changes as we remould it in our minds. We choose to remember what we want to, and forget the rest. We think this is helping us to see the event more clearly, but really it is only a…
Read the whole commentI think he is referring to any one moment of our life - the shocking ones are the mose obvious. The very moment an event that has an impact on us is over, it starts to become history. It moves inexorably further away from us in time and changes as we remould it in our minds. We choose to remember what we want to, and forget the rest. We think this is helping us to see the event more clearly, but really it is only a way of fooling ourselves - we can kid ourselves that a boring day was wonderful, a terrible experience was just inevitable bad luck etc etc, and we invent reasons and excuses to back up our illusions. But, perhaps underneath all our reasonable explanations of what happened, the truth remains hidden inside us, and comes out to haunt us only in our nightmares...
Hi. I am very happy here. I think that I will stand here for a long time.