Random, Senseless Larkinization

SKIN

Obedient daily dress
You cannot always keep
That unfakable young surface
You must learn your lines --
Anger, amusement, sleep;
Those few forbidding signs

Of the continuous coarse
Sand-laden wind, time;
You must thicken, work loose
Into an old bag
Carrying a soiled name.
Parch then; be roughened; sag;

And pardon me, that I
Could find, when you were new,
No brash festivity
To wear you at, such as
Clothes are entitled to
Till the fashion changes.

- Philip Larkin

I'm not a huge reader of poetry, but I love this one by Philip Larkin. There isn't one thing I don't like about it. I love how he grabs or hooks us right off the top with a concept that is personally intimate - skin, and how he then immediately displaces it to a metaphor that contains the entire poem. I love the strange-making/dishabituation/alienating effect I experience by considering my skin to be clothing, taking something I identify with as utterly personal and then alienating it to a category of things that are optionally personal, and most importantly, only temporarily containers for identity. I love his characterization of the passage of time, as well as the notion that the core attributes of who we are - the morally responsible agent - is somehow independent of that passage.

What is that agency? It reads like the accumulated wisdom of a life. This is a retrospective poem, looking over a life lived, and over a self inhabited. The moral agent is able to apologise to its own skin for not having animated the skin in a lively enough fashion during its youth.

Death as a change of fashion? Interesting thought. Fashions fade when they no longer make the statement in the present that they did in the past. New fashions brashly trumpet new ways of presenting the self that have energy and capture the imagination. Is that why death is necessary? From a cultural perspective, is death and the passage of generations what gives life its character? The answer may be kind of obvious. Its countervailing proposition would be about the importance of continuity and tradition across generations, which many would favour as the key point to understand about generations - the transfer of accumulated wisdom to youth.

This poem does not explore this proposition in its text, but of course it does by its very existence as something written, which makes it able to transcend the death of its author, as Derrida would have emphasized. As writing, it descends to us from those who have come before. So do we attend more to its message or its operation?

Cool poem, anyhow.