Philip Larkin’s poem Maiden Name explores the question of what a friend’s name “means” when she marries and changes it. He first picks up that favourite issue in critical theory, the relationship between signs and things, by commenting that the maiden name’s “five light sounds no longer mean your face/ Your voice, and all your variants of grace”.
Language and Identity
It’s an implicit reflection on the mysterious workings of language; the reader is offered the idea that a series of noises, “five light sounds”, can be put together to call up for the poet a person’s attributes. Notice that Larkin doesn’t say that the name “means” the person, he says it meant her “face/And voice”, and later that the name was used “of her”, was “applicable”, like an adjective or a description. The word and the person are never completely conflated – appropriately enough, since the poem is about the contingent relationship between a person’s name and their self.
The change of name on marriage is described as being “thankfully confused/ By law with someone else”. Again Larkin does not say that the new name and identity are stable or unproblematic: “confused” is not a word usually associated with accuracy or intelligibility. “thankfully” is an ambiguous word: though it seems positive, there is a slight question over whether the poet or his friend is thankful at the marriage, which colours its effect. This ambiguous impression is strengthened by the last line of the second stanza, which casually mentions that “you’re past and gone” – paradoxically, in this line the woman’s self is presented as past, whilst her previous name still exists, reversing the assumptions of the first stanza.
Larkin’s Technique
The first line of the last stanza is quite a mouthful: “It means what we feel now about you then”. As well as being the final turn of the poem’s argument, it juggles three sets of important words: “means”/“feel”; “it”/“we”/“you”; “now”/“then”; all of which are essential to the line’s meaning, and which must be deployed and understood in exactly the right order for the reader to follow the poet’s conclusion. (Larkin’s mastery of the iambic metre ensures that such a crowded line is actually easy to read: the stresses carry it along naturally.) They’re also relatively commonplace words, which one might expect to skip over whilst reading a line of poetry, but Larkin employs these simple terms to couch his central argument, making the reader give serious weight to such “everyday” language.
Having reached the end of the poem, we realise that Larkin has actually been playing on the familiar term “maiden name”, giving it the ordinary meaning of a woman’s name before her marriage, but also another resonance. The “name” ends up being identified as a “maiden”, the girl who was “so beautiful, so near, so young”, and seems to be conjured up briefly in the poem.
