An Obstinate Insistence

Hard on the heels of the previous post, but only loosely related, a pretty remarkable passage from Heaney:

Finally, to come to Larkin, where what accrues in the language is not ‘a golden and stinking blaze,’ not the rank and fermenting composts of philology and history, but the bright senses of words work clean in literate conversation. In Larkin’s language as in his vision of water, ‘any angled light… congregate[s] endlessly.’ There is a gap in Larkin between the perceiver and the thing perceived, a refusal to melt through long perspectives, an obstinate insistence that the poet is neither a race memory nor a myth-kitty nor a mason, but a real man in a real place. [“Englands of the Mind,” in The Broadview Anthology of English Literature, p. 830]

What leapt to mind more or less immediately was the passage half-way through Larkin's "Sad Steps" [via The Poetry Foundation]:

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.

It's that "no," hanging on the edge of that line, that was stuck in my head for months when I first read it -- but to return to what Heaney was talking about, that "no" also signals the "obstinate insistence" in Larkin's poetry that this is a "real man in a real place." Which is, I suppose, probably not so different to what I was sketching out here and here.