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At Grass - October 2002
Chosen by Sean O'Brien
'At Grass' (1950) has been used (for example by Alvarez) to exemplify poetic timidity or even sentimentality, but the third stanza is an imaginative triumph. Larkin evokes the race-meeting from the outside, as an event unwitnessed but overheard, so that transience and absence are made manifest in the language: 'outside, / Squadrons of empty cars, and heat, / And littered grass: then the long cry / Hanging unhushed till it subside / To stop-press columns on the street.' No human figure appears in these lines and there's an elegiac undertow, a dying fall built into the plain facts in lines two and three. The enjambment in lines four and five is also quietly dramatic, balanced by the characteristic negative 'unhushed'. A marvellous piece of work, with instinct and craft exactly combined.
- Sean O'Brien
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