What are days for?

Answering Larkin's question - and some thoughts on what's next

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

Netflix’s recent adaption of David Nicholls’s One Day opens with a poem, read as the camera pans across rooftops. Well, half a poem:

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

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When I first read Larkin’s poems, ‘Days’ was one of the ones I kept coming back to. I don’t think it’s particularly typical, although it’s surprising how many Larkins you can say that about. There’s a curious (but also typical) combination of chattiness and an almost continental existential doubt in those short, aphoristic lines. Days are where we live, but also a kind of object. It’s as if the speaker is alone in a bare, sunlit room with one of them, turning it over with a pencil.

There’s something a bit… instapoet to all this. Is it profound, or are the lines just short? It’s almost (almost) the kind of thing a moody teenager might stick on their wall. You only ask what days are for if you have a lot of time to kill. But then, I think it helps to understand and appreciate Larkin if we recognise that many of his best poems are just that: young person’s poems. It is no slight on them although, again, it doesn’t fit the familiar image. Much of Larkin’s poetry imagines an argument between freedom (for Larkin, often the same thing as selfishness) and something which we may as well call responsibility, or commitment, or simply other people. The other people rarely win out.¹

I still love ‘Days’. That first stanza has such charisma. ‘They come, they wake us / time and time over’ is beautiful, the second line echoing without repeating the rhythm of the first. But it’s the second stanza which always stuck with me.

Ah, solving that question
brings the doctor and priest
in their long coats
running over the fields.

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It’s a wonderfully creepy image, exact and strange. I see the doctor and the priest racing like dads at a school sports day, though they might equally be running over different fields towards the same location.²

Reading it now, I can also see that the ‘answer’ Larkin meant is death. This is Larkin after all What are days for? Dying. Strangely, almost unbelievably, I didn’t realise this until a few weeks ago. When I first read the poem (as a moody teenager) I was more interested in what it was saying about doctors and priests. The first stanza, as I read it, was a lesson about living in the moment, like an artist or a poet. The doctors and priests were authority figures, determined to answer questions that shouldn’t or couldn’t be answered, to worry us into living somewhere other than days. It was the artist against society. Death might have been in the background, but he wasn’t the heart of the poem. I was focused on the runners, not what they were running towards.

Of course, both readings can be true. People are often understandably resistant to the idea that you can read a poem ‘wrongly’. There are as many poems as there are readers. Well, yes, though that kind of talk can make us out as more separate from one another than we really are. There’s more than one way to read a poem, but perhaps more people have read it your way than you think.

There is, of course, another event which brings in the doctor and the priest and which solves the poet’s question of what to do with his time. Larkin never had children. Some of his most well-known poems are about not wanting to, though behind the bluff there is also a lot of doubt (‘where do these innate assumptions come from? Not from what / We think truest, or want most to do’). It’s curious how many critics have taken the bluff at face value. But that’s a different story.

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For a while now I’ve been running away from writing a book about Philip Larkin. It is quite possibly a very silly idea, not least because I have a few more important things on at the moment. But I can’t get the idea out of my head.

Now I wonder if I shouldn’t be running towards it, first by telling more people (hello) and then by making a start with this newsletter. I’m not yet sure what that actually means in practice and I will keep writing about other things too. But if you keep reading, I’ll assume you’re at least prepared to see where it goes.

1. When I see self-consciously “Trad” accounts on X/Twitter sharing Larkin quotes I wonder if they’ve really read him, or just liked the sound of his racist letters.   

2. The illustration is from OpenAI - I only asked for two men.