Not inward, not downward, not into an abyss, but up. Up is the direction of God, of illumination, transcendence, salvation. Illumination is a central metaphor for Christian understanding and salvation. Notice that nowhere among these images is darkness or obscurity. The preceding lines do not point in that direction, but it is possible. What comes across more fully is a confusion, a blending of the atheistic and theistic, a longing for transcendence vying with a rationalistic belief that there is nothing beyond this life.
There is more here than the surface rejection of religion. In this poem a man struggles with what paradise is, what progress means, and whether there may be some value left in looking up. Forsyth, Neil. JSTOR , doi Hitchens, Christopher. Yeats, W. Norton, , p. Larkin, Philip. Norton, , You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. See All Comments. Autoplay Next Video.
If You Forget Me. Pablo Neruda. Rudyard Kipling. Robert Frost. Mary Elizabeth Frye. Annabel Lee. Edgar Allan Poe. The Road Not Taken. Langston Hughes. Still I Rise. Maya Angelou. Caged Bird. Phenomenal Woman. All Poems.
Larkin could hardly fail to be aware of the "bonds and gestures pushed to one side", but the paradise in question is not that of the young couple but the dream of "everyone old", himself included. He regrets that he could not have behaved in this way when he was younger, due to the unavailability of modern birth control methods, and he envies the modern generation their sexual liberation.
He uses the image of a fairground "long slide" to picture the one-way ride to endless happiness that this is bringing "everyone young". Larkin then throws the thought process backwards to imagine what the generation before his would have thought of his own prospect of liberation from constraint. However, this is expressed not in sexual but religious terms.
It is release from fear of eternal damnation and offending the priesthood that he sees as their abiding desire, expressed in terms of envy of the next generation who will have the liberty that is denied to them. The image of the long slide is used again as the means to achieve freedom.
Once on the slide the desired outcome is inevitable, and Larkin reverses the traditional image of sliding downwards to perdition by emphasising that freedom must lie at its base, as does happiness for the generation that Larkin envies. However, the final stanza brings all this to a halt in a rather startling way. The natural conclusion to the two scenarios that Larkin has offered would be the suggestion that every generation, going back to time immemorial, has thrown off the shackles of its parents and found liberty by sliding away from its constraints.
But the image that Larkin has of his own situation is that the promise of godless and hell-less freedom has not been achieved. Instead, his thoughts turn to the "high windows" of a church or cathedral where he is still on the inside with the sunlight shining down on him. The promised freedom has therefore been an illusion. The poem ends with a despairing recognition that there is no ultimate freedom. The young couple might hope for endless happiness, but what is endless is the "deep blue air" that "shows nothing, and is nowhere".
It is the windows that are "sun-comprehending" and not people with their mortal longings. By making "High Windows" the title poem of his collection, Larkin makes the point that the individual can never have what he or she ultimately wants, because they can never know what that is.
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