Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” dramatizes a maudlin, sterile existence in five dectrains, ten-line stanzas. The rime scheme varies, but as is customary with Larkin, it is unobtrusive and easily overlooked.
The speaker’s temperament, world view, and life attitudes make him a deeply, disturbingly sympathetic character: the poor individual lives alone, is stuck in a boring job, and sees his lousy life ebbing away. He knows only that death is certain, but he has nothing in life to enjoy anyway, so his conundrum is profound. There is a hip-hop song with the line, “Life’s a bitch, and then you die.” This sad adage fairly summarizes the speaker’s attitude.
First Dectrain: “I work all day, and get half-drunk at night”
The speaker reports that during the day he works and then at night he gets “half-drunk.” Then he cannot even sleep through the night; he wakes up around four in the morning, sees the “soundless dark.” The “curtain-edges” eventually tell him that the sun is coming up.
But he does not emphasis the furniture, he emphasizes what is in his mind, “unresting death,” and he realizes that he is one day closer to that momentous event. He cannot think of anything else—just wonders “how / And where and when I shall myself die.” No answer comes to him, but only “the dread / Of dying, and being dead, / Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.”
Second Dectrain: “The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse”
The speaker reports that his mind “blanks at the glare.” He makes it clear that he is not being bothered by the ordinary life regrets that trouble most people, such as the mistakes of young adulthood or that he has not performed enough charitable acts, or that he has wasted too much time in foolishness.
No, he is simply distraught over “the total emptiness for ever,” that after he dies, there is nothing, nowhere to be, nowhere to go. The saddest part is that he is convinced this situation is coming, it is coming soon, and that there is “nothing more terrible, nothing more true.”
Third Dectrain: “This is a special way of being afraid”
This dectrain dramatizes the most heartrending belief from which the speaker suffers. Religion, according to this poor unrealized soul, is just a “vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.” It wrenches the heart of the reader who understands that this speaker’s ignorance is what is dooming him. He does not understand that a human being is essentially an immortal soul who has a body and mind, and if fact the soul can never die.
Unfortunately for his mental and spiritual health, he thinks the religious tenet that teaches humanity about its immortality is merely “specious stuff.” He thus deeply mourns losing his physical body for he believes that without it he will have no awareness or consciousness.
Fourth Dectrain: “And so it stays just on the edge of vision”
That horrible fear of death then “stays just on the edge of vision / A small unfocused blur.” He reasons that “most things may never happen: this one will.” And it nearly drives him insane. He believes that there is nothing he can do to assuage the pain of knowing that death is coming at him: “Courage is no good,” because courage just means, “not scaring others.” A truly bizarre appraisal of that prized characteristic! And “being brave / Lets no one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than withstood.” So sad that the poor man suffers from uninformed opinions, taking them to be facts.
Fifth Dectrain: “Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape”
Finally, his entire room is filled with sunlight and it is time for him to go to work. He summarizes his melancholy rant with “[we] know that we can’t escape [death], / Yet can’t accept [it].” But until death does come to get him, he will be aware that “telephones crouch, getting ready to ring / In locked-up offices,” and “the sky is white as clay, with no sun.” He has to go work, while “[p]ostmen like doctors go from house to house.” He has to dump his glum somewhere, so he chooses to dump it on the working people of the world, implying that they are all working in vain.
Another Larkin Article: Philip Larkin’s “Here”
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