The final paragraphs of the story finally connect Lawrence and his brother as the former stands “at the bow, saying to the a, ‘Thalassa, thalassa,’” a Greek goddess of the a, while the narrator sits on the beach and watches “the naked women,” Helen and Diana, who are characters from Greek and Roman mythology, respectively, “walk out of the a” (486). Cheever leaves his reader with the image of Lawrence, the “Puritan cleric” (469) of the family, eking to shed his “animus in the cold water” of the a (474). It ems Lawrence finally understands the Atlantic mythology to which his family subscribes.—KRISTIN MAIER, Edgewood College
Copyright © 2007 Heldref Publications
KEYWORDS
缩小毛孔最有效的方法Atlantic mythology, John Cheever, classical mythology, “Goodbye, My Brother”
WORK CITED
女性表白日
Cheever, John. “Goodbye, My Brother.” The Oxford Book of Short Stories. Ed. V. S. Pritchett. New York: Oxford UP, 1981. 466–86.
Echoes of Eliot’s THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK in Larkin’s AUBADE
Philip Larkin long eschewed the influence of T. S. Eliot on his ver. One of his most quoted statements has provided sufficient disavowal of Eliot’s impact on his poetry to have generally led commentators away from his possible influence: “As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created univer, and therefore have no belief in ‘tradition’ or a common myth kitty [. . .] (qtd. in Poets of the Nineteen-Fifties 78).1 Notwith-standing the rendering of “tradition” in scare quotes, surely meant to criticize Eliot’s particular understanding of the term as literary influence in his minal essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Larkin’s poetry itlf abounds in this type of tradition, despite a continuing critical strain that views him as a writer who disdained modernist literary predecessors and thus was relatively uninfluenced by them.2 Whereas Auden, Hardy, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Betjeman were acknowledged exemplars in Larkin’s introduction to the 1965 reissue of The North Ship,3 Eliot is mentioned only in passing with them and others as one of “the principal poets of the day” (“Introduction to The North Ship” 28). Yet rearch has begun to show Eliot’s sway over Larkin’s poetry.
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Raphael Ingelbein’s recent essay, for example, demonstrates how Eliot’s quence The Four Quartets had a significant impact on Larkin’s poems writ-ten during and soon after World War II (130
–43). The question of influence from Eliot to Larkin may turn out to be chiastic: whereas Eliot’s late poetry such as The Four Quartets has proven influential for Larkin’s early poetry, his early poems em to have influenced some of Larkin’s late poems, particu-larly in their grim realism expresd through startling images.
种树图片Terry Whalen’s asssment of Larkin as “a late Imagist poet” ts the con-text for the prent note’s elucidation of a key image in Larkin’s well-known poem “Aubade.”4 One of the few poems by Eliot that has been briefly argued as an influence on Larkin’s poetry is his 1917 work, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”5Surprisingly, however, no commentator has recognized the influence of one of the poem’s most famous images—that of an “evening [. . .] spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table” (The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 3; henceforth CPP)—on the central image for death in Larkin’s “Aubade.” Eliot’s etherized evening rves as the backdrop for his paralyzed, neurotic figure of J. Alfred Prufrock, a sort of modern-day Hamlet, and prents urban modernity generally as a site of indecision and dehumanization. Despite his long years spent living in the English city of Hull and the enjoyment of the isolation that the city’s off-cen-ter locale gave him, Larkin shared Eliot’s views of the city, eing it as a site of impersonality and paration. Larkin’s perception of the paralyzing effects of the urban is heightened when it is expresd through
medical images, as in “Ambulances”: “They come to rest at any kerb: / All streets in time are visited” (Philip Larkin: Collected Poems 132; henceforth PL: CP).
By the time of the publication of “Aubade” in the Times Literary Supple-ment on 23 December 1977, Larkin’s ver had lost its characteristic vocal bal-ance between the wistful and romantic and the cynical and ironic. “Aubade” instead wallows in cynicism and even shades toward nihilism, especially in its envisioning of death as an expan of nothingness and blankness. Gone is the hopeful limitless expan of “the deep blue air that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless” that is featured in the striking conclusion of “High Windows” (PL: CP 165). The abnce of color abounds in Larkin’s picture of death in “Aubade.” In particular, death is imaged in line 30 as “[t]he anaesthet-ic from which none come round” (PL: CP 208). In this line, Larkin has clearly borrowed from Eliot’s vision of the evening “Like a patient etherized upon a table” in “Prufrock.” Confirmation of his employing the synonymic noun anesthetic for Eliot’s adjectival etherized, occurs in Larkin’s oblique allusion to Eliot’s famous line in a 1978 essay on Andrew Marvell, written a year after he finished “Aubade,” the opening of which focus largely on Eliot’s establishment of Marvell’s reputation in the early twentieth century. There, Larkin wryly recalls that “Eliot’s growing influence [. . .] was enough to bring
大三元镜头
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Marvell to the attention of the young critics, and in the space of a remarkably few years he became one of the favourite subjects on their discting tables” (“The Changing Face of Andrew Marvell” 247; emphasis added). Larkin was undoubtedly thinking of etherized patients, bodies extended, being operated on, and thus ud the image from Eliot’s “Prufrock” as an ironic comment on critics’ rigorous analysis of Marvell after Eliot’s reclamation of the meta-physical poet’s reputation.
Larkin’s line about anesthetic, in the context of the poem’s vision of the “uncaring / Intricate rented world” as a vast, impersonal city with workers headed off to “locked-up offices” (PL: CP 209) shares Eliot’s fear of urban life as a site of impersonality that leads to a sort of intellectual death. Yet the specifically medical connotation of Larkin’s line departs from Eliot’s construction of the earthly world, symbolized by the city, as deadening and develops an image of the afterlife as a site of numbness.
This medical image, coupled with the famously clinical last line of “Aubade”—“Postmen like doctors go from hou to hou” (PL: CP 210)—suggests our inexorable trajectory toward death just as surely as postmen deliver the mail, a paradoxically personal conclusion for a poem about death as the ultimate state of impersonality. And yet this final image is finally one of utter desolation and par
ation, unlike Eliot’s concluding image of com-munal drowning at the end of “Prufrock”: “We have lingered in the chambers of the a [. . .] / Till human voices wake us, and we drown” (CPP 7). Like the absorbent ambulance in Larkin’s “Ambulances” that “dulls to distance all we are” (PL: CP 133) and who patients are delivered to death, Larkin’s post-men deliver images of blankness that prefigure death as a state of numbness. Eliot’s deadened, dark evening has been elided and replaced by the contrast-ing focus of Larkin’s anti-aubade on bright morning as leading us one step clor to numbing death. Larkin es death as a permanent state of blinding, innsate nothingness, leading the narrator to realize, “The mind blanks at the glare” (PL: CP 208).
—RICHARD RANKIN RUSSELL, Baylor University
Copyright © 2007 Heldref Publications
KEYWORDS
关于猴子的成语
“Aubade,” T. S. Eliot, Philip Larkin, literary influences, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
NOTES
1. See also Larkin’s review, “The Blending of Betjeman,” for his claim that “it was Eliot who gave the
modernist poetic movement its charter in the ntence, ‘Poets in our civilization, as it exists at prent, must be difficult’” (129; emphasis in original).
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2. Larkin explicitly contributed to this view of his poetry in other striking statements. For example, in a 1964 interview with Ian Hamilton, he claimed that modernist poems like Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Joyce’s novel Ulyss had led to “a view of poetry which is almost mecha-nistic, that every poem must include all previous poems, in the same way that a Ford Zephyr has somewhere in it a Ford T Model” (qtd. in Motion 19). See Salem K. Hassan’s conclusion for an example of a critic being taken in by Larkin’s disavowal of poetic allusions and ancestors. Has-san claims that Larkin, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and the early D. J. Enright “denounce any reference to mythology, philosophy and to other poets” (190). On the other hand, Bruce Martin compellingly and correctly links his exploration of Larkin’s affinities with the humanistic quotid-ian strain in Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce by claiming that “Larkin’s quarrel, then, is more with the doctrinaire theorists and imitators of Modernism than with the modern writers themlves” (147).
3. The introduction to The North Ship (27–30). See 29–30 for extended comments on Yeats and Hardy.
4. Whalen further argues that Larkin’s much-publicized comments about “the inevitable obscurity” of much modernist poetry “have distracted his readers from a different and specifically Imagist aesthetic which is at the core of his own poetic practice” (94, 95).
5. Steve Clark argues, for example, that the tone of Larkin’s “Ignorance,” from The Whitsun Weddings, with its rhyme on “‘decisions / imprecisions,’ suggests a Prufrockian lineage for the persona” (104). And Stan Smith argues that “Larkin may find Modernism distasteful, but when he has to deal with a real, contingent world, his respon is Eliot’s. In the rancorous lampoon of a poem such as ‘Posterity’ he assumes a Prufrockian, lf-deprecating irony [. . .]” (185). WORKS CITED
Clark, Steve. “‘Get Out as Early as You Can’: Larkin’s Sexual Politics.” Philip Larkin. Ed. Ste-phen Regan. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. 94–134.克利斯朵夫
Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950. New York: Harcourt, 1971.
———. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1961 rpt. of 1932 ed. 13–22.
Enright, D. J. Poets of the Nineteen-Fifties. Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1955.怎么哄对象
Hassan, Salem K. Philip Larkin and His Contemporaries. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988. Ingelbein, Raphael. “The Us of Symbolism: Larkin and Eliot.” New Larkins for the Old: Criti-cal Essays. Ed. James Booth. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. 130–43.
Larkin, Philip. “The Blending of Betjeman.” Required Writing 129–33.
———. “The Changing Face of Andrew Marvell.” Required Writing 245–53.
———. “Introduction to The North Ship.” Required Writing 27–30.
———. Philip Larkin: Collected Poems. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. New York: Noonday, 1989.———. Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces. New York: Farrar, 1984.
Martin, Bruce. Philip Larkin. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
美容室特殊服务3Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin. London: Methuen, 1982.
Smith, Stan. “Margins of Tolerance: Respons to Post-war Decline.” Philip Larkin. Ed. Stephen Regan. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. 178–86.
Whalen, Terry. Philip Larkin and English Poetry. Basingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan, 1990.
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