Discuss the presentation of disappointment in the poems of Larkin and Duffy.
By Margaret
Both Larkin and Duffy use the theme of disappointment in some of their poems. In this essay, I will be looking at the way these two poets present this theme in four of their poems: ‘The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team’ and ‘Room’ by Carol Ann Duffy, and ‘Home is so Sad’ and ‘Mr. Bleaney’ by Philip Larkin.
The first pair of poems I will be looking at is Duffy’s ‘The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team’ and Larkin’s ‘Home is so Sad’. As well as centring on the theme of disappointment, these two poems focus specifically on how our remembrance of our past can disappoint us. Often, we remember things to be better and more exciting than they actually were, causing the type of bitter nostalgia that plays a key role in both poems.
Duffy’s poem begins on a high: ‘I lived in a kind of fizzing hope’. The past tense here sets up the poem as a memory, something that is no longer true. This attitude persists throughout the first three stanzas, with Duffy using language such as ‘I whooped’, ‘no hands, famous’, ‘Try me. Come on’ to create an atmosphere of childish exhilaration and perceived invincibility.
In contrast, Larkin’s poem immediately uses darker, bleaker tones to set up the theme of disappointment: ‘Home is so sad… it withers so’. It seems that Larkin remembers his home as fresher and brighter than he sees it now. Duffy does not bring this theme in until her last stanza: ‘I want it back… The one with all the answers’. The persona of her poem wishes he could be as confident and eager as he once was, but he is bored by his ‘stale wife’ and ‘thick kids’.
Larkin, too, uses the idea of longing for that which we can only now remember: ‘turn again to what it started as,/A joyous shot at how things ought to be’. In this case, Larkin in likely referring to his early family life, engaging our concept of a happy, inspired couple who set out to start a home together. However, this poem states that that ‘joyous shot’ was ‘Long fallen wide’ in Larkin’s case. Unlike Duffy’s poem, which uses a fictional persona, ‘Home is so Sad’ seems to be more autobiographical, written about ten years after the death of Larkin’s father. His poem alludes to ‘the last to go’, and ‘the theft’ which it cannot ‘put aside’, personifying the house as someone who misses his father, perhaps using similar language than that which he might also have used to describe his mother.
Duffy presents a similar idea of clinging to the past, particularly when the present is disappointing:‘dominus domine dominum’, ‘My country’. Duffy’s persona cannot move on from what he perceives as his ‘peak days’, just as Larkin’s ‘Home… stays as it was left’. Perhaps this idea of ‘the good old days’ in Duffy’s poem could be linked with the cultural climate of 1960’s Britain. Experimental images like the Teenager and social liberation were popular at the time, especially in the aftermath of Macmillan’s ‘You’ve never had it so good’ in the 1950’s. It may be that Duffy’s persona connects the remembrance of this era with his ‘fizzing’ childhood, leading to his present, adult life seeming dull and meaningless.
Larkin uses a significant lack of cultural context in his poem, perhaps to give it a more universal appeal. Instead of using obvious, upbeat language to describe his past, as Duffy does, Larkin’s poem contains tones of frustration and annoyance, even sarcasm. ‘You can see how it was:/Look at the pictures and the cutlery’. This poem uses detached language to address the reader directly, presenting an image of a Larkin gesturing disdainfully around the house. His disappointment is subtle, yet it gives a distinct tint to his words. We notice ‘The music’ hidden away ‘in the piano stool’ and ‘That vase’ which holds neither flowers nor sentiment for Larkin.
Duffy echoes the concept of disappointment in emptiness in the last stanza of her poem: ‘Name the Prime Minister of Rhodesia./… How many florins in a pound?’ he asks, trying desperately to recreate that ‘clever smell’, that feeling of ‘[mounting his bike] running in one jump’. But his knowledge is useless now and he finds little interest in his Top of the Form days among the people in his present life. He describes his past self as ‘a child who went missing on the way home from school’, considering the idea that his image as ‘The captain’ is still smiling on a poster somewhere, while his real life is as dead as the missing child. Duffy uses more cultural context here, likely referencing the Moors Murders which made a big impression on the public and media in the 1960’s. Again, the presence of this context is key in understanding how the persona views his childhood. Just like how the real world has changed so much since that time, his life has also shifted dramatically. In his case, this shift has left him feeling bitter and disappointed.
In comparison, Larkin lets these bitter feelings pervade his whole poem (though it is considerably shorter than Duffy’s): ‘bereft/Of anyone to please, it withers so’, ‘how things ought to be’. However, it seems that Larkin, who is effectively the persona, has experienced this disappointment for some time now and does not resent it in the same way that Duffy’s persona does. The lines ‘[it turns] again to what it started as,/A joyous shot…/Long fallen wide’ present a more mature, resigned disappointment, an emotion that has lingered in Larkin’s life for some time. We know that Larkin considered his childhood dull and often found his mother annoying and these ideas shape this poem Perhaps the reader understands Larkin’s frustration only for the first time, but it is apparent that Larkin has harboured this bitterness for a while: ‘It stays as it was left,/Shaped to the comfort of the last to go’. These seem to be practised thoughts, rather than the more narrative arc that Duffy gives us.
Duffy’s poem ‘Room’ and Larkin’s poem ‘Mr Bleaney’ also present the theme of disappointment, although in slightly different ways than the previous poems. This pair of poems focuses on disappointment in the way we live and the question of whether that really reflects who we are. More specifically, both poets channel their questions and feelings into the setting of a ‘Room’.
Larkin’s poem initially appears to be about the previous tenant of the persona’s room in a boarding house, called Mr Bleaney. The first five stanzas centre around the life of this voiceless character: ‘“This was Mr Bleaney’s room”’, ‘“Mr Bleaney took/My bit of garden properly in hand”’, ‘I know his habits’. The poem has a bored, detached tone as Larkin describes Mr Bleaney’s life, almost giving us the impression that he has nothing better to talk about, or indeed think about.
‘Room’ uses a similar feeling of indifference, though the poem focuses more on Duffy herself, rather than a character to whom she compares herself: ‘One chair to sit in’, ‘No curtains yet’, ‘One second-hand bed’. Although she seems to be simply describing the items, or lack thereof, in her room, it almost seems as though she is thinking of her life so far. ‘One chair to sit in’ could easily be ‘one room at a boarding house to sleep in’, ‘No curtains yet’, ‘no big break yet’ and ‘One second-hand bed’ could be ‘One useless job’. This idea is not beyond doubt, but the Duffy’s description of the ‘Room’ does seem to remind her of the disappointment in her own life. We know that many of Duffy’s writings tend to focus on ordinary life and this poem indeed fits into that.
The last two stanzas of Larkin’s poem are most similar to ‘Room’, shifting from discussing Mr Bleaney’s life to Larkin musing on his own life: ‘if he stood and watched the frigid wind/Tousling the clouds…/Telling himself that this was home’. We do not know whether this is something Mr Bleaney did in his time, but it is clear that Larkin is now talking about himself. This is characteristic of Larkin’s poetry, as well as the ‘thwarted lives and spoiled desires’ theme which others have commented on running through many of his works. The theme of disappointment in this poem is clear, particularly in the last stanza: ‘at his age having no more to show/Than one hired box’. Larkin is disappointed in himself and wonders whether he really is a failure, after he has found himself living in this bleak place.
The theme of disappointment in Duffy’s poem is rather more subtle: ‘Hard silence’, ‘Then what’, ‘the giftless moon’. Indeed, we see themes of emptiness and meaninglessness in this poem before we read into the disappointment. In fact, I would say that ‘Room’ is actually enhanced, regarding meaning, when read alongside Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’. Since the two poems are so similar in terms of setting and descriptions (‘In a cold, black window, a face’, ‘clouds the colour of smokers’ lungs’ (‘Room’) and ‘If he stood and watched the frigid wind/Tousling the clouds’ (‘Mr Bleaney’), the clearer presentation of disappointment in Larkin’s poem allows the same theme to become more explicit in Duffy’s.
Furthermore, both poems raise the question of how our identity and lifestyle are connected: Larkin says ‘[does] how we live [measure] our own nature’? ‘at his age having no more to show/Than one hired box should make him pretty sure/He warranted no better’. In other words, can our nature be told from our lifestyle and achievements? Duffy mentions the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ and describes ‘The roofs of terraced houses stretch[ing] from here to how many months’. An unmistakeable tone of hopelessness and dissatisfaction presides here, showing us that Duffy too asks the question: am I any more than my life? Or does my life say everything about me?
This is a concept that both poems struggle with. However, instead of ending with some type of moral solution or more hopeful perspective as we might expect, both poets choose to end on a rather flat note: ‘I don’t know’ and ‘£90 pw’. This reflects both poets’ atheistic beliefs; how can there be another way of life than constant frustration, weariness and disappointment, if there is no God? We could not expect anything else from poets with such cold, empty beliefs. In this light, it is no surprise that Duffy describes ‘the giftless moon and a cat pissing on a wall’ in the same line, no wonder that Larkin considers both ‘our own nature’ and ‘the four aways’ in one poem. In an atheist’s world, there is no meaning in truth, no truth in beauty and no beauty in the world at all.
In essence, both poems focus on the more acute aspects of disappointment and the questions that surround it. The contrasting imagery of the dramatic (‘to remind of a death’, ‘without shaking off the dread’) with the mundane (‘One second-hand bed’, ‘Flowered curtains, thin and frayed’) imparts to the reader the same sense of nihilistic disappointment that the poets evidently feel. Mr Bleaney’s hollow, pathetic life ‘plugging at the four-aways’ and the ‘greasy dusk’ and ‘Hard silence’ of Duffy’s room serve as microcosms for the much bigger question: does life really mean anything?
In conclusion, the theme of disappointment is presented in two different ways in these four poems: disappointment in the aftermath of our past, and disappointment in the reality of our present. All four personas feel that their life does not live up to the expectations and lacks real meaning or purpose. They are disappointed in themselves and in their environment and question whether they truly deserve the miserable life they have. As I stated previously, this theme fits in well with Larkin and Duffy’s personal values, or lack thereof. Is it our fault if we are disappointed in our lives? Are our lives only disappointing because they reflect ‘our own nature’? Such are the questions asked by these poets- questions which remain resignedly unanswered.
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