The title of Philip Larkin’s Sad Steps is a reference to Sonnet XXXI from the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella by the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney. Sonnet XXXI is more usually known by its first line: “With what sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies!” Thus before the reader gets to the first line there is already the echo of another voice behind the poem, if they have recognised the reference.
The first line clashes immediately with Sidney’s elegant apostrophe: “Groping back to bed after a piss”. This is the deliberately crude Larkin who started “This Be the Verse” with the line “They f**k you up, your Mum and Dad,”, trying to shake the reader out of a “poetic” frame of mind. Then the image of the moon with its startling “cleanliness” and the “cavernous...wind-picked sky” shifts the poem into a more lyrical tone. A similar movement, with a similar image, occurs in Larkin’s Vers de Société, with its “crowd of craps” and “pig’s arse”, before the nightscape with trees “darkly swayed” and “the moon thinned/ To a wind-sharpened blade”
As soon as this tone is established, Larkin distances himself from it: “There’s something laughable about this”. He presents the scene before him with his own brand of lyricism whilst mocking his vision, the moon “High and preposterous and separate.” He bursts out into a flurry of tropes: “Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!/ O wolves of memory! Immensements!, the sort of tone he described as “like a slightly unconvincing translation of a French Symbolist poet”.
This extravagant and obviously ironic flight of rhetoric is immediately checked: “No,/ One shivers slightly, looking up there.”, and Larkin concludes that the moon reminds him of “the strength and pain/ Of being young, how it can’t come again,/ But is for other undiminished somewhere.”
The poem is literally “equivocal”, it balances the various voices and impulses it has evoked: Sidney’s courtly sonnet, Larkin’s quotidian crudity, the symbolist outburst, the lyrical image of the moon, and its chill. Each emotion is registered, and Larkin lets us experience each without wanting to deny or completely scorn them. The longing evoked by the last stanza is a high point of this effect: it seems to be both the yearnings of youth, and Larkin’s nostalgia for them. Even the title is a poised ambiguity: the “sad steps” are both the ascent of the moon in a sixteenth century sky, and Larkin’s stumblings on his way back from the lavatory in the 1960s.
