[ Home ] [ Annus mirabilis ] [ An Arundel Tomb ] [ Coming ] [ Deceptions ] [ The Explosion by Philip Larkin ] [ Going, going ] [ High Windows ] [ Homage to a government ] [ Larkinalia ] [ Love songs in age ] [ The North Ship ] [ Wedding-Wind ]

You have reached iGreens.org.uk.  In December 2006 we moved to iGreens.org with faster servers and discussion boards.  Click here to follow us.  

Unnumbered broadside signed by Larkin.  There are believed to be about 1000 copies.   

Larkin began the poem after watching a television documentary on the mining industry during Christmas 1969.  It was completed in January 1970 and published by the Poem-of-the-Month Club later that year.  In 1974 it was collected in High Windows.

The community Larkin describes was real then.  A human community based on the family, and at one with the environment.  One of Burke's little platoons, not a government-funded community centre or a coercive trade union.  

The metre is the same as Longfellow's Hiawatha.   In 1993 Andrew Motion wrote:

"Larkin later claimed that he hadn't realised while writing the poem that he was using Longfellow's rhythms; in fact they are forcefully maintained until the final line, when their abandonment creates an apt sense of pathos, tilting the poem away from a world in which incident is pre-eminent to one in which emotion matters most.  

This is one of Larkin's greatest narrative poems.

Click here to read a typed version.

[ Home ] [ Up ]

You have reached iGreens.org.uk.  In December 2006 we moved to iGreens.org with faster servers and discussion boards.  Click here to follow us.  

Send mail to enquiries@igreens.org.uk  with questions or comments about this web site.
Last modified: September 20, 2006