death of a poet

I came downstairs this morning and switched on the radio to hear a series of voices on the Today programme being nice about someone in the tone of voice that told me that somebody had died, but I couldn't work out who it was.  They didn't say at the end of the feature, either, but went straight on into Thought for the Day, and I had to check on the BBC website.  Veteran broadcaster David Jacobs, 87.  I didn't know him at all.  Still, fair enough, the BBC honouring one of their own.

I was sorry the other day when I heard that Seamus Heaney had died.  I like Seamus Heaney.  I actually had my copy of his translation of Beowulf by the bed at the time.  I was rather shocked to read in yesterday's Telegraph Sean Thomas' iconoclastic view that Seamus Heaney wasn't that good, and on the very day of his funeral too.  Who is Sean Thomas, anyway?  I haven't heard of him any more than I have heard of David Jacobs, and I don't suppose he has translated Beowulf. Sean Thomas compared Heaney unfavourably to Philip Larkin and threw out the question, how much Heaney can you remember?  Everyone knows some Larkin, if only 'They f***k you up, your mum and dad', but Heaney?

That was the killer.  I thought hard, and could remember the concluding line of one poem 'I heard the steel stop in the bone of the brow'.  That certainly prefigures the rhythmic structure and internal rhyme scheme of Beowulf.  I recalled one I liked about freeing a frozen pump handle, and girls bathing in Galway (was it Galway?), 'So Venus comes, matter of fact', but I couldn't honestly remember very much.

I love Larkin.  I even have the whole of a four line poem from The North Ship indented into a sort of flattened terracotta egg, by the entrance to the alder wood:

This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.

Out of curiosity I looked to see what books I had by them, and they came in even at two slim volumes each.  The very first page of Door into the Dark has a school plate stuck to it with my name, 'A' level prize, and both of the Larkins have my maiden name written on the front page, which dates them.  I must have had them all for thirty years or more, and still haven't completed the set.  As I leafed through the pages I began to think that the iconoclastic Mr Thomas was right.  I could recite the whole of 'This be the Verse', beyond the famous first line, which is more than I can do for any of Heaney's poems, and overall more of Larkin has stuck.  The greenness of newly budded trees is a kind of grief, looking at them, and when I have omitted to write up my gardening diary and am struggling to recall what exactly I was doing last Friday, my internal soundtrack intones 'Forget What Did', Stopping the diary was a stun to memory.  Hearing news of military cutbacks and whether we are to intervene or not in the latest overseas troubles I find myself thinking that next year we are to bring the soldiers back for lack of money.  Places they guarded and kept orderly must guard themselves.  And so on and so on.  There are times when I try not to think about 'The Old Fools', because it is too bleak and terrifying.

I suppose Larkin made the error of being a librarian (boring) at the University of Hull (v. boring), and liking jazz (louche and pretentious).  And he was very close to Kinsley Amis (unpleasant to his wives and generally rackety) and acquired a reputation for misanthropy (though he was a good friend to Barbara Pym).  I haven't read his collected letters or any biography, and am not entirely sure I want to know.  I read about the lives of Bruce Chatwin and Laurie Lee on the strength of liking their work, and was disillusioned in both cases.

The iconoclastic Mr Thomas predicts that Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, will be forgotten within fifteen years.  It's a bold claim.  Still, when did you last settle down with a novel by Doris Lessing (2007) or Nadine Gordimer (1991).  And hands up who has heard of Sinclair Lewis?