Dockery and Son
Philip Larkin
‘Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean.
‘His son’s here now.’
Death-suited, visitant, I nod.
‘And do
You keep in touch with—’ Or
remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted,
and still half-tight
We used to stand before that
desk, to give
‘Our version’ of ‘these
incidents last night’?
I try the door of where I used
to live:
Locked. The lawn spreads
dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch
my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges
subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery,
good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been
born
In ’43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get
this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he
that withdrawn
High-collared
public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was
killed? Well, it just shows
How much ... How little ...
Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the
fumes
And furnace-glares of
Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and
walked along
The platform to its end to see
the ranged
Joining and parting lines
reflect a strong
Unhindered moon. To have no
son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed
quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the
shock
Of finding out how much had
gone of life,
How widely from the others.
Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have
taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been
capable
Of ... No, that’s not the
difference: rather, how
Convinced he was he should be
added to!
Why did he think adding meant
increase?
To me it was dilution. Where
do these
Innate assumptions come from?
Not from what
We think truest, or most want
to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like
doors. They’re more a style
Our lives bring with them:
habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all
we’ve got
And how we got it; looked back
on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and
close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me
nothing,
Nothing with all a son’s harsh
patronage.
Life is first boredom, then
fear.
Whether or not we use it, it
goes,
And leaves what something
hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end
of age.
Philip Larkin, “Dockery and Son” from Collected Poems. Used by
permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the
Estate of Phillip Larkin.
Source: Collected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2001)
Source: Collected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2001)
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