In 'Send No Money', this sense of having been cheated is voiced with embittered bluntness. Someone is kept from getting the best out of his life by a false promise of knowledge: while in his youth his mates went to enjoy themselves, the persona kept himself apart, aspiring to wisdom:
Tell me the truth, I said,
Teach me the way things go. (146)
But his sacrifice earned him nothing, and after the initial enthusiasm is vanished it begins to dawn on him that he has been cheated:
Oh thank you, I said, Oh yes please,
And I sat down to wait
Half life is over now…Sod all.
In this way I spent youth
Tracing the trite untransferable
Truss-advertisement, truth. (146)
Larkin thus gives the impression that the reality of life as it presents itself to him falls blatantly short of what he expected. This disillusionment is particularly prominent when it comes to an assessment of what he has, or rather has not, achieved so far in life. More than once Larkin indicates the feeling that his lifetime passes unused. He talks about 'time/ Torn off unused' ('Aubade', 208) and asks: 'Where has it gone, the lifetime?' ('The View', 195). The reader gets the sense that Larkin’s life was unfulfilled; his only outlet to express this emotion is through words. The reader also senses that Larkin felt that the only way to go now is to reach the end, or death, since life did not grant him his wishes and dreams. In ‘Send No Money’, the looming subject of death is not explicitly stated, but alluded to through his subtle construction of mood and emotion.
There is an ultimate predicament covering not just individual aspects, but the totality of Larkin's situation. His dilemma is that he is discontent with life, and at the same time afraid of death. While passages to substantiate his 'Horror of life' ('The Life with a Hole in it', 202) can be found virtually everywhere in Larkin's work, traces of his fear of death occur increasingly in his later volumes, and quite naturally so, because his dilemma is growing ever more severe as his lifetime gradually runs out. A remarkably unveiled expression of Larkin's fear of death can be found in 'Aubade', one of his very last poems:
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die. (208)
The title itself conveys death. “Aubade” means ‘ode to morning’ (death) in French. Larkin's mother, Eva, died on November 17,1977; just over a month later "Aubade" was published. Larkin was 52 that year and had already endured the deaths of his very dear friend Maeve Brennan's mother; Patsy Murphy, a good friend from Larkin's Belfast days; and Robert Lowell, a fellow poet and friend. To each of these deaths, Larkin's response grew increasingly distant. When Eva died at age 91, Larkin went through great pains to repress his grief and maintain a stoic facade, focusing almost entirely on the legal and financial inconveniences of the ordeal.1
In another view, “Aubade” is a traditional medieval love poem deploring the coming of dawn when the speaker must leave his lover, for Larkin has not love: “the love not given,” and deplores the coming of dawn because it brings him closer to death: “Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,” which is slightly unsettling and subversive in the context of the traditional love poem. Larkin is deeply suspicious and almost immobilized in a helpless meditation on the invincibility of death: he cannot stop it: “Death is no different whined at than withstood,” – the onomatopoeic “ee” vowel sound in “whined” reflects a real whine Larkin is having about death. Larkin also includes a parallel landscape vision: “The sky is white as clay with no sun,” where the marshy heavy consonants coupled with the physically heavy and saturated nature of “clay” is yoked unsettlingly with “white” – a simultaneous symbol of purity and death – , yet there is “no sun”. The sky, if it is clay, seems to be pressing down, heavy, claustrophobic. The sense of claustrophobia is further enhanced by Larkin’s evocation of a “rented world”, cluttered with telephones, “locked” offices, postmen, doctors and so on.
He tackles religion by displaying secular suspicion of the consolation religion offers in regard to death. It is “specious stuff” and a “trick”. Larkin emphasizes the trickery element to religion, in “vast moth-eaten musical brocade”, saying religion tries this – presumably the iconicity, music and other elaborate sensory elements evoked by “brocade” that are such powerful tools for invoking emotion in religion – to “pretend we never die”. It is pretence, meaningless for Larkin. “this is what we fear – no sight, no sound, no touch, no taste...” True to his age, Larkin laments the chaos that is loss of belief and certainty, seeking underneath everything some order and certainty, and indeed he ends with a firm, if sad “Work to be done,” and evokes regularity and order with the day to day running of life where “postmen like doctors go from house to house”. Larkin just sees detached postmen or doctors aimlessly going from house to house, conveying that there is no sense of human contact and interaction, or want of it.
For Larkin, a sense of loss seems to be inevitable as life goes on, and his fatalistic - and somewhat bewildering - contention is that the course of one's life is essentially independent of one's actions. However, Larkin does not explicitly point the finger at one person, group or institution, although he comments on parents, society and love as being flawed in other poems. Larkin’s message of his poetry, coupled with the recurring theme of death, is that things just happen to be the way they are, without anyone particularly wanting them to be so - a conclusion that furthermore is very much in line with Larkin's fatalistic frame of mind.
WORKS CITED
1 Larkin history found on (Philip Larkin Society)
Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. London: The Marvell Press, 1988.
