At the hospital with Oliver and Larkin

What I learnt from reading their poems side by side

Longstanding readers of this newsletter (which started way back in September) will know that I have only recently discovered the poetry of Mary Oliver, while I am an old fan of my countryman, Philip Larkin.

The length of my acquaintance with these poets is certainly the most trivial of all the differences between them. Oliver (born in Ohio in 1935) is most known for her lyrical poems about nature and the uplifting message that many take from her work. Larkin (born in Coventry, England, in 1922) is best known for his urban or suburban topic matter and his gruff, curmudgeonly public image. It would seem safe to say that they are seen as two very different poets. 

During my first reading of Mary Oliver, however, I was excited to come across a poem that had interesting parallels with a well-known Larkin poem. 

The poems in question are Oliver’s University Hospital, Boston¹ and Larkin’s The Building².

What could I learn, I wondered, from reading these two poems on the same topic (a hospital) side by side? I felt compelled to respond to that question.

What follows is a brief exploration of their differences and similarities. I’d suggest you follow the links above to read these two poems before starting on the essay below.

Royal Naval Hospital, Haslar. Oil painting by Godfrey Jervis Gordon (Wellcome Collection)

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The two poems begin in contrasting styles, though both start with the buildings they are describing. Oliver is in pastoral mode with her “trees on the hospital lawn,” whereas Larkin launches into an elaborate periphrasis about the size of the building, which is “higher than the handsomest hotel.”

And both poets suggest the hospital is a place apart from the everyday. Larkin makes this explicit with his lurid description of it as a “lucent comb” that “shows up for miles.” While Oliver’s reference to the “clean rooms high above this city” actually makes me think of the title poem from which Larkin’s The Building is taken, with its “thought of high windows.”³

Larkin also engages in a game of hide and seek with the reader, disclosing only what the place is like or what it’s not: “what keep drawing up/at the entrance are not taxis;” “like an airport lounge.” But he never names the building as a hospital. Its identity is established, in part, metonymically through the accumulation of details such as nurses, porters, and wards—though, curiously, no doctors. 

Oliver, on the other hand, names the place in the title (and mentions doctors). My impression as the poems begin is that Larkin is up to something, while Oliver is being more straightforwardly descriptive and lyrical.

After its gentle, lyrical beginning, the focus of Oliver’s poem moves partly to the person she is in the hospital to visit:

we walk out

into the light of a summer day,

we sit under the trees

Then she introduces what will be a key theme in the poem, as she notices:

the original

hospital built before the Civil War.

Oliver is also a protagonist in her own poem, and it’s clear that a relationship of some kind with a patient has brought her here. 

In Larkin’s poem, however, it’s not clear if the observer is there as a patient or visitor or simply some omniscient narrator figure. The protagonist is the unnamed hospital, along with the society it seems to have become an intimate part of. It has the feel of a BBC film such as Night Mail (the amazing last 3 minutes of the film feature Auden’s poem Night Mail with music by Benjamin Britten). Just like that celebrated film, Larkin's focus is on the institution. 

Oliver’s poem, having introduced the Civil War and with the trees mentioned early in the poem representing deep time, then veers off rather wonderfully into history and speculation as she imagines past suffering:

How many young men, I wonder,

came here, wheeled on cots off the slow trains

from the red and hideous battlefields

to lie all summer in the small and stuffy chambers

Oliver’s way to express the universality of suffering as part of human experience is to explore this distant, but still looming, historical event. ⁴

Larkin’s poem also creates a sense of the inevitability of illness or injury to the human condition, but where Oliver dives into the past, Larkin stays rooted in the present:

Humans, caught

On ground curiously neutral, homes and names

Suddenly in abeyance; some are young,

Some old, but most at that vague age that claims

The end of choice

Larkin’s use of “Humans” here is eye-catching. It almost makes me think we are in some kind of 1950s sci-fi film. Put another way, if Oliver is appealing to history, Larkin (who would probably have been appalled at the thought) is appealing to sociology or anthropology to make full sense of this place in our lives. 

Larkin’s clumsily playful refusal to name the building is absorbed into another game that he plays, in which he invokes religion with words such as “congregations” and “cathedrals.” So this is what he’s up to! He appears to want us, half-seriously at least—to entertain the idea that hospitals have replaced churches or cathedrals and therefore, by extension, medicine has replaced religion. Hardy (one of Larkin’s poetic heroes) said somewhere that a novel is an impression, not an argument, and so it is with Larkin here. He suggests, nudges, and teases, but leaves us to make up our own minds. 

Going back to Oliver, I find myself intrigued by the steadfast secularity in her poem. The lines,

Now the bed is made all new,

the machines have been rolled away

seem to me to open up a space for a moment of religious reflection, but Oliver does not take that path:

The silence

continues, deep and neutral

“Neutral” seems very loaded and deliberate. The word seems to prevent a religious reading of the previous lines or, indeed, of the poem as a whole. I feel as if the whole poem rocks on its axis. It’s a startling, beautiful choice of word. 

And although “the machines have been rolled away,” Oliver does not dwell on death. The closing line of the poem, right after “deep and neutral” is:

as I stand there, loving you.

It’s simple and personal, and the switch from simple present tense “stand” to the present participle “loving” suggests continuation, resilience, or a resistance to ending. Put another way, and noting that this line follows one about being “deep and neutral," these words suggest suffering is made bearable through love.

This is in contrast to the lack of consolation in Larkin’s poem. The poet/observer arrives at this bleak summary:

That is what it means,

This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend

The thought of dying

The “coming dark” will not be deferred by “wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.” If Larkin’s poem charts a kind of human comedy, it is not one that ends cheerfully. 

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I found it enriching to be drawn into reading these two poems together. It helped me, for example, to see in better relief features such as Oliver’s secular, historical approach and the sociological perspective in Larkin’s poem. 

It’s easy for us as readers to focus on differences. Yet perhaps the most satisfying part of this exploration was to experience how both writers were working within similar traditions and using a similar range of techniques, such as shifts in perspective or focus, the employment of imagery, and precise and powerful word choice. Both poets practise, in different ways, that attentiveness that has been called “the natural prayer of the soul."⁵ And both poets expertly employ the hospital as a vehicle for examining a larger theme.⁶

Above all, this reading reminded me that art stands in relation to other art. Sometimes this is a function of a tradition or of language, and sometimes it is the explicit aim of the artist to forge those connections. But nothing is more rewarding for me than to understand that, as readers, we are also free to make these connections for ourselves.

1. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive, 1978

2. From High Windows, 1974

3. ibid.

4. I’m aware that there is rich heritage of poems about the Civil War, including works by Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell and Charles Wright (I’m thinking of his poem Chickamauga.) I take Oliver’s poem to contain at least a nod to that tradition, but I’d really welcome comments from those readers more familiar with the topic.

5. This often-quoted phrase (e.g., see How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch, 1999) seems to have come from the French philosopher Nicholas Malebranche (1638–1715), who was quoted by Walter Benjamin in his essay on Kafka (1934), though it’s not entirely clear where Malebranche said it.

6. Some of Oliver’s language also recalls, to me at least, a passage in Part IV of TS Eliot’s East Coker (from Four Quartets), especially where she so beautifully describes the activity of the hospital:

“where day and night the doctors keep
arriving, where intricate machines
chart with cool devotion
the murmur of the blood.”

Compare this with Eliot’s

“The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.”