My Heart Aches and I Get Half Drunk
“Ode to a Nightingale” and Larkin’s “Aubade”
Reading “Ode to a Nightingale” again for the first time in some years, I slowly became aware of a niggling suspicion that I had recently been looking at another poem in the same form. I could not immediately bring its identity to mind but, after my subconscious had been left to mull over the matter for a few days, the requisite name rose to the surface: Philip Larkin’s “Aubade”.
My first reaction on re-examination of “Aubade” was disappointment; the stanza forms were not after all identical, and the practice of printing the Keats poem with certain lines indented, whereas in the Larkin they are all flush with the left-hand margin, gives each poem a quite different and distinctive look on the page. Closer reading, though, showed that I was almost right: the two stanza forms do have much in common. First, they both consist of ten lines; second, their respective ten lines both comprise nine pentameters and one trimeter (the third-last line in the Keats, the second-last in the Larkin); third, their rhyme schemes both divide the stanza into an introductory quatrain rhyming ABAB and a following sestet rhyming CDECDE in Keats and CCDEED in Larkin.
Well, you may be thinking, so what? Just a coincidence; there must, after all, be many ten-line stanza patterns in English poetry and some of them are bound to be similar. An even closer reading, however, turned up what I took to be a clinching piece of evidence, a clue deliberately planted by Larkin, I persuaded myself, for those subtle enough to detect it. I have said that in both poems the stanza consists of nine pentameters and one trimeter. If, however, we go to the second stanza of “Nightingale” we find what appears to be an irregularity in the final line:
And with thee fade away into the forest dim
which seems to call for scansion as a hexameter:
And with/ thee fade/ away/ into/ the for/ est dim.
If we now turn to the second stanza of “Aubade”, what do we find? Sure enough, its last line too might be scanned as a hexameter, though a slightly more contrapuntal one than Keats’s:
And soon;/ nothing/ more ter/ rible,/ nothing/ more true.
Admittedly the stress in the fourth foot above is notional, as it were, not being reflected in the natural stress of the word, but there is nothing unusual about that. On the contrary, it is a commonplace of English verse; the whole force and subtlety of English versification derives from the playing off of natural speech stresses and rhythms against the notional stresses and rhythms of the underlying metrical pattern (but see the appended note for a fuller discussion of versification in the two poems and how it affects this point).
In any event, at this stage I felt rather pleased with myself, so pleased in fact that for a while I gave no further thought to the poems. At last, though, it occurred to me to wonder why Larkin might have chosen for “Aubade” a form reminiscent of “Nightingale” and even laced it, perhaps, with a clue to its paternity. Once the penny had dropped it took little more than a cursory reading to see what had been staring me in the face: that there are certain thematic and structural similarities as well and that, on one level at least, “Aubade” is nothing less than a restatement of “Nightingale”, an inversion of its argument, in Larkinian terms, its negative counterpart.
It is not my intention to engage in a thorough treatment of either poem; simply to identify traces of the former on the latter and see how Larkin turns them to his purposes.
But for the sake of my argument, let me make a few broad and brief points. What do we have in “Nightingale”? Essentially a night vision framed by waking reality; or if vision is the wrong word (we are talking of birdsong, after all), an auditory trance, an aural epiphany.
The opening image of the poem is of drugged senses:
My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.
As the following lines reveal, the cause of this stupor is both the nightingale’s song and the poet’s excessive pleasure in it. However, it has retrospective significance too, as “Lethe-wards” implies. Lethe is the river of oblivion, of forgetfulness. Well, obviously, forgetting implies that you have something to forget. What that is Keats does not immediately unveil, but the third stanza sets it before us:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
The world before, outside, the epiphany, in other words — the vision’s frame — is a world of transience, morbidity, pain and death, and consciousness of all these things. The trance of the nightingale’s song, opening a way of escape in the fabric of time, stands opposed to all this, both in itself and in what it is the emblem and correlative of: art, “the viewless wings of Poesy”. The nightingale and Poesy are from, indeed are, an immortal realm where these ills hold no sway — or consciousness of them is suspended — and as long as Keats is borne aloft on their song he is held outside the trammels, the mortal coil, of the world (though paradoxically his rapture tempts him to think that now might very well be the ideal, most painless time to yield to death). The poem’s final question — “do I wake or sleep?” — may be momentarily genuine, but within a few seconds becomes rhetorical. Once he comes round, Keats knows perfectly well where he is and the poem is brought full circle; the frame closes. He is back in the world of “the weariness, the fever and the fret” where the best he might hope for is not a nightingale but a good doctor.
Enter Larkin. The general configuration of “Aubade” is remarkably similar. We have the same opening image of drug-induced stupor. The first line states with typical Larkinesque bluntness:
I work all day and get half drunk at night.
The “and” here is no simple coordinating conjunction; for “and” read “therefore”. Larkin immediately establishes, in the first hemistich, the same frame that we find in “Nightingale”: the everyday world whose awfulness has to be forgotten in a half-drunken stupor; and the same nocturnal setting for the poem’s drama, the night vision. But, a characteristic Larkin touch, it is no transcendent presence that provides the drug or carries the poet away into ecstasy. It is just booze, and it just knocks him out; because the next thing we know it is four in the morning and the poet is waking up to a most unwelcome and unpleasant “vision” indeed:
...I see what’s really always there: Unresting death…
No beating about the bush. (One can almost imagine a character in a Larkin poem declaring, “Nightingales are a load of crap.”) In only the fifth line of the poem Larkin has turned the argument of “Nightingale” on its head, presenting a nightmare epiphany where the tedium and misery of the workaday world are supplanted not by the ecstatic escape of art (or love or religion or nature), but by the void — not even personified, not even capitalized — of ever present, annihilating, lower-case death. Life’s a bitch, as the T-shirt slogan has it, and then you die.
In the case of “Aubade” one can imagine that, far from regretting the end of the Song of the Night and the approach of dawn, Larkin will be breathing a sigh of relief and wiping his brow. Made it through another one. After this horror, mere work, mere boredom seem like a pleasant change. They can, after all, momentarily distract you from your mortality. Indeed, the final image of the postmen going from house to house like doctors suggests that, though the world is sick, a hopeless case, there is some palliative comfort in the routines of everyday life, as opposed to the unresting, incurable and simple truth that is revealed night after night in the still, blue hours. This, as I said above, is precisely the opposite of the argument in Keats’s poem, in which it is the everyday world itself which hammers home relentlessly the message of ever-present death and suffering, and the night vision which offers palliation. Again, whereas the trance of “Nightingale” dulls consciousness of the world’s sorrows in pure sensation, the vision in “Aubade” heightens consciousness of the central ill identified by the poet.
I am not claiming that there is some sort of line-by-line, stanza-by-stanza correspondence between the two poems, that “Aubade” is a running commentary on “Nightingale”. For one thing, “Nightingale” has eight stanzas against “Aubade”’s five, so such a correspondence would be impossible. It may be that in the beginning Larkin was not even thinking of the Keats poem when the idea for “Aubade” occurred to him; this may simply have been one more version of his life-long treatment of the terror mortis theme. At some point, though, the ghost of a resemblance must have struck him, if my view is correct, and the possibility of using “Nightingale” as a disguised model have taken shape. That the formal and thematic similarities are all purely coincidental seems to me unlikely — or at any rate, it would be a pity. I think, in fact, that further correspondences can be identified without straining credibility.
In stanza two of “Nightingale”, for example, Keats expresses the wish
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Leaving the world is, of course, precisely what terrifies Larkin, and his second stanza accordingly talks of
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
Keats’s stanza five concentrates on sensation in his “embalmed darkness”. Though admittedly he “cannot see what flowers are at my feet” because of that darkness, he can smell, and what he smells is depicted with great richness and sensuality. Larkin’s third stanza, on the other hand, laments the prospective total loss of sensory perception —”no sight, no sound/ No touch or taste or smell”. Stanza six of “Nightingale” makes death — Death — seem an easeful and pleasant idea in the context, a desirable consummation almost of his present rapture. Larkin’s fourth stanza, far from being tempted by the thought of death, “rages out/ In furnace-fear” against the very idea. And finally, the last stanza of “Nightingale”, in which the bird flies off over meadows, streams and hills, its gradually fading song ushering back the humdrum world, finds its counterpart in Larkin’s last stanza where the vision of unresting death grows fainter as “Slowly light strengthens and the room takes shape”, and, like Keats himself waking after the music has fled, the “Intricate, rented world begins to rouse” to another day of work and those paramedical posties doing their rounds to see that everyone has made it through the night.
Note on scansion
I am no longer entirely sure that I am convinced by the prosodic “clue” in “Aubade”, but its place in the development of my thoughts about the two poems was crucial. How convincing you find it depends, I suppose, on how strict a view of scansion you take; or rather, on how strictly you believe the two poets adhere to the niceties of scansion. The iambic metre in particular, because it has been the dominant English metre, allows considerable variation; so I am not suggesting that just because a line has twelve syllables it must be a hexameter rather than a pentameter. It all depends on the distribution of stresses. The point is that one extra syllable in a line of pentameter is naturally attracted to one of the five feet; two extra syllables, however, may tempt the reader to introduce a whole new foot, rather than to apportion one syllable to each of two other feet in the line. The ear often wants to resolve a line into the smallest possible units, and, no doubt, those most closely resembling the iambic pattern .In the case of the Keats, the line stood out for my ear as metrically odd even before I had made any connexion with “Aubade”.
In “Nightingale”, of the seventy-two ostensibly pentameter lines, all but seventeen have ten syllables exactly. Sixteen of the remaining seventeen have one extra syllable (though even here, contraction may have been intended in many instances, thereby reducing the count to the standard ten). All these lines fall within the normal allowable variation of iambic pentameter. Only the line in question has two extra syllables and to make it scan as a five-stress line one would require two trisyllabic feet; for example:
And with/ thee fade/ away in/ to the for/ est dim.
As I say, this has no parallel in the poem; and if we are going to allow an anomaly, why not that of a hexameter? There appear to be hexameters, after all, in Shakespeare’s blank verse (see Hamlet I ii 2).
Larkin’s case is not quite so straightforward. The closer one comes to the present day, it seems, the more latitude poets allow themselves in iambic verse. In fact the iambic part becomes less important than the pentameter. Certainly in “Aubade” there are more departures from the ten-syllable, and iambic, standard than in Keats. There are, for example, three nine-syllable lines. There are some hendecasyllables too. As in Keats, they present no problems. More to the point, there are three other dodecasyllables — other, that is, than line 20, the line of the “planted clue”. Two of these (lines 25 and 46) do not really present a problem either, because the twelfth syllable is hypermetrical, attendant on a feminine rhyme. This leaves one other line of twelve syllables, line 45, which seems anomalous. You might scan it as
Meanwhile/ telephones/ crouch, get/ ting ready/ to ring
or
Meanwhile/ tele/ phones crouch/ getting read/y to ring
to preserve five stresses. But it could also be analysed as
Meanwhile/ tele/ phones crouch/ getting/ ready/ to ring
which seems warranted by the position of “getting”. It is difficult to deprive “getting” entirely of a major stress. Line 20 would have to be scanned as follows to make it pentameter:
And soon/ nothing/ more terri/ ble nothing/ more true
or
And soon/ nothing more/ terrible/ nothing/ more true.
So there are two lines in Larkin which might be hexameters. This may undermine my claim by removing the metrical uniqueness of line 20, but it does not, I think, make the claim untenable. If, however, it is decided that both the original lines in question, the Keats and the Larkin — or even one of them — should more reasonably be construed as pentameter, then my point is overturned. It would nevertheless be one of those instances where a false clue has led to a correct solution, because the thematic correspondences do, I believe, stand up to scrutiny.
I was originally convinced that Larkin’s line 20 was a genuine clue because I thought such an anomaly would not have been perpetrated inadvertently by so skilled and scrupulous a technician. While I still believe, of course, that he was a skilled and scrupulous technician, my subsequent more detailed analysis of the poem shows that he was not, perhaps, scrupulous in quite the sense I required to clinch that particular part of my argument. In any event, it is clear that Larkin allowed himself a much broader scope for metrical variation than Keats, so it may be that he would have regarded both lines 20 and 45 as containing five unproblematical stresses and would have delivered himself of a few pungent and derisive expletives over my contorted efforts to prove otherwise.
Stephen Edgar
2 July to 5 September 1993
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