The Philip Larkin Society

Dockery and Son - November 2008

Chosen by Gillian Steinberg

'Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn't he?' said the Dean. 'His son's here now.'
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. 'And do
You keep in touch with –' Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
'Our version' of 'these incidents last night'?
I try the door of where I used to live:

Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In '43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn

High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
How much… How little… Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end to see the ranged
Joining and parting lines reflect a strong

Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of… No, that's not the difference: rather, how

Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut like doors. They're more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we've got

And how we got it: looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son's harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age and then the only end of age.

© The estate of Philip Larkin

Larkin minced no words in his discussions of children. He condemns them as 'awful' and expresses his gratitude that 'I've never lived in hideous contact with them… The nearer you are to being born, the worse you are' (FR 48). In his interview with the Observer he calls them 'selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar little brutes' (RW 48). He makes sure we know the feeling is not a new one: 'I hated everybody when I was a child, or I thought I did. When I grew up, I realized that what I hated was children' (FR 47).

This is obviously a man who didn't have much desire for parenthood. And yet, in this poem, he speaks to me as the mother of two young sons and a person who doesn't find children awful (at least, not most of the time). This poem uncomfortably confronts my assumptions about reproducing: have I increased or diluted myself? And it helps me, happily, to find myself more closely aligned with Dockery than with the speaker.

I like the speaker here because he's willing to say what he thinks, as he thinks it, and he might be right. I like hearing that having children doesn't have to be what everyone does; and, of course, it is selfish in its own way. And I appreciate that he credits Dockery (and therefore, by association, me) with having thought so thoroughly about whether we 'should be added to.'

I can see why the speaker's made his choice, but I'm glad I've made mine. 'Whether or not we use it, it goes…' Certainly Dockery (and therefore, by association, I) will finish up in the same place as the speaker in the end, but maybe he has used his life; and maybe I've used mine.

I'd guess that most people don't think of 'Dockery and Son' as a feel-good sort of poem, but its process of thinking through this big question, and the places that thinking takes the speaker, takes me to some useful places too.

- Gillian Steinberg

Gillian Steinberg is an Assistant Professor of English at Yeshiva University in New York City. She directs the first-year writing program at the College and is working on a book about Larkin's poetry and its relationship to its readers.