Larkin’s “Sad Steps” and the Augustan Night Piece

Abstract

Unless we are dealing with embedded quotations of unquestionable provenance, there is a sense in which literary allusions are illusions, since, like that most celebrated of illusions, the rainbow, a good few of them are a function of vantage. People located at different points on a rainy landscape are likely to see (a) nothing at all, (b) a partial rainbow, (c) a rainbow in the form of a perfect arc, (d) an inverted secondary rainbow alongside it, or (e)--rarely--a number of supernumerary rainbows within it. By the same token, the literary baggage that individual readers bring to a work will issue in corresponding experiences: no echo at all; the faint suggestion of an echo; an unequivocal echo; an echo that sets off another; and, in some rare instances, an echo that reduplicates itself through a whole literary landscape. Philip Larkin received a thorough grounding in classical English literature as an undergraduate at Oxford, and while the (slightly juvenile) comments he penciled into the St. John's College library Spenser suggest that he received it with some reluctance, his first-class result suggests that he received it even so. His acquaintance with all the major poets of the eighteenth century, and a good few of the second rank to boot, is therefore a matter of public record; whether they echo in Sad Steps to the extent that I shall claim is ultimately a question of where we situate ourselves. Writing to Monica Jones in 1971, Larkin remarked that writer has a book he wants to re-write (Dylan Thomas said his was The Pilgrim's Progress): mine is 'The Seasons' (qtd. in Motion, Writer's Life 415). Such a project might seem at blush to be at odds with the poet's famous critique of allusiveness, his disavowal of the of influence: As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in tradition or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people. (273) This anxiety might be suppressed, of course, but it can never be evaded, for just as Edward Young acknowledges the interinvolvement of the dead and the living--From human mould we reap our daily bread (119)--so too almost every word and permutation of words in the language carries its freight of allusion and adaptation. The very fact that Larkin entertained thoughts of rewriting The Seasons confirms this. Had the project ever been realized, he would probably have repainted Thomson's varnished Claudian landscapes in the manner of Hitchens or Nash, and replaced his magniloquence with reserve, but his source would have remained there as the unnegotiable substrate of the enterprise. As it happens, Larkin did redraft, if not a specific Augustan text, then certainly a form with close connections to the period, and it is to this, the meditative night piece, that I propose to relate Sad Steps. Although the latter's title directs us to a sonnet from Astrophel and Stella, Sidney is only tangentially present in the poem, though in three distinct ways. His and chief purpose is to have furnished a pathetic fallacy that bridges the divide between the earth and the moon. Secondly, he seems also to have prompted the shape of Sad Steps, which takes the form an amplified Italian sonnet with a 12-line first position instead of the customary octave, and, after the volta centered on the negative in line 12, a sestet into which the tercets slot themselves comfortably, having earlier suggested the halt cautiousness of the author's passage--first step, second step, pause; step, second step, pause--to the lavatory and back. Initially he makes this passage in the dark to keep tenuous contact with sleep, but severs it when he parts his bedroom curtains, revealing not the sad steps of Sidney's moon (projected as a Petrarchan lover) but rather the flash of a sprinter--The way the moon dashes through the clouds that blow. …