Poem for the Times: 'MCMXIV'

PGS' Head of English, Ms Burden, recommends Philip Larkin's poem, 'MCMXIV':

Larkin’s poem about the start of the Great War breaking out is both eerily similar and frighteningly dissimilar from today. The poignancy is there – the idea that some marriages will last just a little while longer and the concept of leaving things “tidy” as we all move from physical spaces to electronic ones – but the “August bank holiday lark” attitude seen recently in the UK is both misplaced and very dangerous. The poem makes me consider what has changed in British society since 1914 and the extent to which the greater emphasis on independence and the self is a good thing in a crisis.

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisenments
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring:
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silecne;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word - the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

                            Philip Larkin