Now, when you've read this poem, before you say or think "Why did he post this miserable depressing little poem?!?" read my comments following it.
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HOME IS SO SAD
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theftAnd turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.*
Ok. First of all: it doesn't actually work like this, at least in my experience as both child and parent. Larkin didn't have children himself. You may know his famous and really very unpleasant poem which ends "And don't have any kids yourself." (I looked that up to see if I was remembering it correctly, and I was not. I was remembering it without "any", which I think is actually better–more emphatic and final. Glad to be of assistance, Mr. Larkin.) So what does he know about how it may have looked from home's point of view? Presumably he was describing the home in which he grew up. The poem was written in 1958, when he had been gone for about fifteen years, and I think he was in fact the last (of only two) to leave. So maybe his childhood home did more or less stay as it was left; I don't know, of course.
But that was certainly not the case in my childhood home, which changed continually after I left (the second of five). My parents lived happily for many years after we were all gone, in the same house which changed significantly as they rearranged things to suit themselves. And it hasn't been the case for my wife and me as our children have left home. Neither we nor the house are sitting here forlornly. I am writing this, for instance, in a room which was the bedroom of one or more of the children for a long time, and which I like to call my study though I don't think it will really merit that name until I get an easy chair in here–right now it looks more like an office.
Second: the reason I posted this poem, though if I were thinking of this series as The 52 Best Poems Ever I would not include it, is that, like the Yeats poem I posted for Week 15, it contains one image, one thought, that comes into my mind very often, and has done for years. How often? At least once a week, I'm sure. It's this:
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide.
That's an almost unbearably poignant image of the way life tends to go, especially family life. I've lived long enough to have seen way too many joyful beginnings end in sadness. Somehow for me Larkin's image captures perfectly both the eager hope and the disappointment, the way we aim and the way we miss.
So it's not so much that I like this poem as that I consider it brilliant in a very narrow way, and that the one bit has become part of me. Fortunately disappointment is not the end of the story. Frequently even in this life disappointment is transcended.
–Mac is the proprietor of this blog.
Light On Dark Water 
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