At Grass by Philip Larkin
Melancholy, Artifice and Guilt in Larkin's Depiction of Horses
Oct 3, 2007
Like much of Philip Larkin’s poetry, “At Grass” is highly self-conscious: it describes a subject whilst remaining concerned with the means and methods of description.
Description and Ekphrasis
“At Grass” immediately signals its concern with the way its subject (the horses) are perceived by the phrasing of its first line. “The eye can hardly pick them out”, Larkin remarks, before he has even explained what there is to pick out. The movement which he describes, the “distressing” of the horses manes and tails, and the stirring of one to “crop grass and move about” is figured as a means by which they are noticed – as soon as it ceases the animals becomes “anonymous again.” The first stanza’s concern with vision is underlined by the horse “seeming to look” on, demonstrating the poet’s perceptions about the subject’s perceptions.
The most striking verbs in the poem – “fabled”, “inlay”, “almanacked”, “artificed” – are all concerned with the way other people have seen and recorded these horses. They have become racecourse stories, names engraved into trophies, records in official histories and part of the whole culture of horse-racing. The fieldglass and stop-watch in the last stanza are similar emblems of real action and movement being turned into observations and figures. There is even a clever synaesthesia, as Larkin describes how the “long cry/ Hanging unhushed” at the course turns into “stop-press columns” in the newspapers sold on the city streets.
This focus on how artifice and vision brings the poem close to the genre of ekphrasis, literature which describes art or sculpture. Though “At Grass” is actually about the horses, it seems more interested in describing the ways in which other people have recorded them than in doing so itself. Indeed the title “At Grass” almost sounds as if it could be the title of a genre painting.
The Difficulties of Description
Alongside this interest in depictions of the horses, “At Grass” shows a concern with the difficulties of depicting them accurately. As well as the first stanza’s comments on how difficult they are to even distinguish in the field, there are a cluster of words throughout the poem which suggest uncertainty: “seeming”, “perhaps”, “faint”, “faded”. The horses “gallop for what must be joy”- a typical Larkin comment which throws doubt onto an assertion even whilst in the process of making it.
The line “They shake their heads” is brilliantly ambiguous: we cannot resist applying it as a negative response to the question in the previous line (“Do memories plague their ears like flies?”) but it is also a movement which horses carry out all the time. By making us recognise it sheer movement by the horses, not to be tabulated and interpreted as their movements have been all their lives, Larkin implicates us in the air of melancholy which lies over the poem. For, amongst all the sympathy and art of “At Grass”, there is an awareness that it, too, is indulging in the artifice and registration which is describes. Along with self-conscious and sympathy, oddly enough, comes a touch of guilt.
