Toads.
So, I’ve been reading Philip Larkin poems lately. I love Larkins poetry…It has a kind of quiet melancholic desperation that I think most people feel at one time or another.
I’ve been getting attacks of the ‘Oh my god, what if I’m actually quite rubbish’ kind of thoughts lately, along with the equally depressing, ‘Oh my god, what if i’m not rubbish, but I still never get anywhere because I’m afraid’ sort. I’m not saying that for any kind of sympathy, or for compliments…it’s sort of like when you see those adverts on telly for cancer research and they point out that it could happen to any of us. It’s a feeling of ’shit happens…what if it happens to me, what if I stay stuck in this rut forever?’ Decidedly selfish thoughts , but that doesn’t make them go away. Nor does it make us any better equipped to deal with life.
I think Larkin said it better.
Toads
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.
Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts-
They don’t end as paupers;
Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.
Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually _starves_.
Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:
For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,
And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.
I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.
— Philip Larkin
Oh yes, this wasn’t just random by the way, I’m drawing something to do with toads…I’ll post it later.
Oh, I love Larkin too. Read him for my A levels as a teen and there’s some melancholia (if there’s such a word) in his tone! Apparently, he’s a misyoginist, tho (again, I hope that’s spelt right!)
Yeh, he has his misogynist moments…and a few racist and marginally fascist ones too! But, the fact that his stuff is so un-politically correct is part of it’s charms…i think he was a product of his age. I’m sure he was a grumpy git and the kind of person most people wouldn’t put up with for more than a few minutes these days…he’d probably get himself arrested…but he was a great poet.