High Windows

First edition. Demy 8vo. Pp. [ii], 42, [4, blank]. Pale grey cloth lettered in gilt to spine. In a glossy white dustjacket printed in grey and greenish blue (priced £1.40 net to front flap).

Light toning to dustwrapper, else Fine.

Author's justly celebrated last collection of poetry. High Windows which contains some of Larkin's greatest poems including the wickedly morbid "The Old Fools" and the immortal "This Be The Verse", ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad..."), was "published 3 June 1974 in an impression of 6,142 copies. [...] The first printing, according to Charles Monteith, sold out in three weeks, a record – in Faber's experience – for a cased volume of new verse."

A meditation on the liberated sexuality of the young, and a search for transcendence in a temporal world, the title poem was completed in February 1967 at the height of the "swinging sixties". Larkin's initial title for "High Windows" – an image reminiscent of the stained glass windows of cathedrals – in the original draft of the poem, dated March 3, 1965, was "The Long Slide."

A lot of ink has been spilt in the search for decipherment of the poem's elusive ending, looking up, as it does, to 'wordless', 'endless', and radiant 'nothingness'. According to Andrew Motion, Larkin's biographer and author of Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, Larkin clarified that the "high windows" represent an "ultimate symbol of freedom from... restrictions." Motion himself indicates that the poem's conclusion "toys with the idea of vanishing into a wild blue yonder. However improbable an escape into 'deep blue air' might be, it offered a temporary release from the struggle to reconcile disparate elements of the everyday."

This preoccupation with death and transience caused contemporary critics to label the book "darker" and more "socially engaged" than his earlier volumes. In riposte, Larkin told The Sunday Times a year before his death in 1985, "[A poem] represents the mastering, even if just for a moment, of the pessimism and the melancholy, and enables you – you the poet, and you, the reader – to go on."

[Bloomfield (2002, 2nd ed.), A10a]