The North Ship

by Philip Larkin

The North Ship, Philip Larkin's earliest volume of verse, was first published in August 1945 and reissued in 1966 by Faber. The introduction, by Larkin himself, explains the circumstances of its publication and the influences which shaped its content.

This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.

Genres: Poetry, British Literature, Classics

56 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1945

About the author

Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL, was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent his working life as a university librarian and was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post. Larkin is commonly regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. He first came to prominence with the release of his third collection The Less Deceived in 1955. The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows followed in 1964 and 1974. In 2003 Larkin was chosen as "the nation's best-loved poet" in a survey by the Poetry Book Society, and in 2008 The Times named Larkin as the greatest post-war writer.

Larkin was born in city of Coventry, England, the only son and younger child of Sydney Larkin (1884–1948), city treasurer of Coventry, who came from Lichfield, and his wife, Eva Emily Day (1886–1977), of Epping. From 1930 to 1940 he was educated at King Henry VIII School in Coventry, and in October 1940, in the midst of the Second World War, went up to St John's College, Oxford, to read English language and literature. Having been rejected for military service because of his poor eyesight, Larkin was able, unlike many of his contemporaries, to follow the traditional full-length degree course, taking a first-class degree in 1943. Whilst at Oxford he met Kingsley Amis, who would become a lifelong friend and frequent correspondent. Shortly after graduating he was appointed municipal librarian at Wellington, Shropshire. In 1946, he became assistant librarian at University College, Leicester and in 1955 sub-librarian at Queen's University, Belfast. In March 1955, Larkin was appointed librarian at The University of Hull, a position he retained until his death.

Reviews

[Paul Christensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

If Larkin had only published this and not his brilliant later collections, he would be forgotten today.

The North Ship has a few poems that hint at his future genius, but most of the poems herein are interchangeable, working the theme of lovelessness in a way that echoes the cold emptiness of jazz - a horrible music that Larkin for some reason loved.

The epic title poem, however, is something else entirely, and deserves to have been published in a booklet by itself.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Larkin's first collection of poems - you can see the roots of something special here in several of his works.

Here's "Winter", a good example of his style:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IqffYNX...

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the poems are excellent and others not so much. The North Ship tale of three ships stands out like a lighthouse on a dark night.

I saw three ships go sailing by,
Over the sea, the lifting sea,
And the wind rose in the morning sky,
And one was rigged for a long journey.

I also liked Winter with lines

“My thoughts are children
With uneasy faces
That awake and rise
Beneath running skies
From buried places.”

This was Larkin’s first volume of published verse and learning his craft.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land
Where gulls blew over a wave
That fell along miles of sand;
And the wind climbed up the caves
To tear at a dark-faced garden
Whose black flowers were dead,
And broke round a house we slept in,
A drawn blind and a bed.

I was sleeping, and you woke me
To walk on the chilled shore
Of a night with no memory,
Till your voice forsook my ear
Till your two hands withdrew
And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold hill of stars.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first Philip Larkin book I have read is also the first he ever wrote. Most of the time I had no idea what he was talking about but I do love the music of the way he said it. The title poem about a nautical voyage to the far cold north is my favourite piece in this collection. It's wonderful in fact. I suppose I am destined to become a Larkin fan 😉

[Mark]

About as derivative and vague as you'd expect from a gifted undergraduate, though in spots he is already working towards that effect where the rhythms are so natural and unforced you almost don't notice the perfect, surprising rhymes. But the first fruits of that work are still a long way off, what we get is mostly stolen in equal measures from early Auden and Yeats. Larkin was not an intellectual or a mystic, so their styles are ill-fitting on him. The first poem of the title sequence is good, and Larkin's own introduction, written twenty years later, is worth reading. Otherwise, of interest to fans and specialists only.

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 2 out of 5]

Coming backwards to 'The North Sea' from The Whitsun Weddings was a surprise and a disappointment to me, until I realised that the collection was published when Larkin was about 23 and learned that Larkin himself was quite embarrassed by the poems, their datedness and overt homage to Yeats, by the time they were in print.

The poems certainly felt immature - there's little of that surprising wordplay I loved in The Whitsun Weddings, and that mixing of close everyday observation and big themes. The poems in 'The North Sea' are less tight, less precise, but also less lyrical, and also feel distinctly teenagerish: death, girls, kisses, the futility of life, deer, birds, dark hair, snow, time, tears, parting. Here's one (numbered XVIII in the book):

If grief could burn out
Like a sunken coal
The heart would rest quiet
The unrent soul
Be as still as a veil
But I have watched all night

The fire grow silent
The grey ash soft
And I stir the stubborn flint
The flames have left
And the bereft
Heart lies impotent.

Now compare this to 'The Mower', an uncollected poem from 1979

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Maybe it's just being at two different ends of life. Maybe it's just finding his voice. But even though 'The Mower' is probably never going to be ranked as a great poem, there's something real and individual and piercing about it, that captures what Larkin is for me.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philip Larkin, The North Ship (Faber and Faber, 1945)

The North Ship, Philip Larkin's first book, is considered one of the classics of modern poetry. But you'd never know that given the somewhat embarrassed introduction Larkin wrote tot he 1965 Faber and Faber edition:

“...the book was nicely enough produced, with hardly any misprints; above all, it was indubitably there, and ambition tangibly satisfied. Yet was it? Then, as now, I could never contemplate it without a twinge, faint or powerful, of shame compounded with disappointment....”

The thing is, every specific charge Larkin levels against himself in the introduction is valid. The book does show a hero-worship of Yeats that made it archaic even by the end of the second world war, and any poet who's done the hero-worship thing and then looked back on his early work after growing out of it likely feels the same profound sense of embarrassment. Which is not to say that the work itself is bad, not at all, it just sounds like it was written fifty years earlier than it actually was. (In the Faber edition, Larkin adds a poem written a year or so after the work in The North Ship to show how radically his material had changed in such a short time; it sounds much more Larkin-as-we-knew-him.)

By the time this edition came out, Larkin was already one of the UK's best-known and most-loved poets, and remained so until his passing in 1985; I shouldn't wonder if the republication of this little book turned an entire new generation on to Yeats, and that cannot be a bad thing. While fans of Larkin's later work may find themselves in a bit of a culture shock when they read this, it's definitely worth their time—and yours. *** ½

[Descending Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is Larkin's first poetry collection made up of 32 poems. Although this is an early work ~ some of these were even written when Larkin was an undergraduate at university, this is a solid debut. Most of the poems are short and snappy, really well written. Highlights ~ "All catches alight" "Night-Music" "Like the train's beat" "Nursery Tale" "The Dancer" "If hands could free you, heart" "Pour away that youth" "The North Ship" and "Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair".

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth revisiting these early poems to compare with just how good Larkin's later works are.

[B. Rule · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were a few high points here, and Larkin's early work already operates with an admirable clarity. That said, I didn't think this volume was especially memorable.

[Phillip Marsh · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

Clearly his earlier work. I didn’t find the dark cynicism, clever observation, or beautiful phrasing that is present in The Whitsun Weddings, and I enjoyed it less as a result.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

At the risk of sounding self-important, for a card-carrying lover of Larkin, the task of rating and reviewing his first volume of verse is a test of integrity. Here goes: two stars—many of the poems in The North Ship are just not that good. There, it was painful, but I guess I pass. Two things mitigate the pain somewhat. Firstly, as he explains in his introduction to the 1965 edition, Larkin himself was disappointed with the book and was hesitant to have it republished. Secondly - and again Larkin admits this - it is heavily influenced by Yeats, a poet whose work (with the exception of some of the famous anthology pieces) I have come to realise that I do not care for. Of course, there are some good poems here (XIV "Nursery Tale", XIX "Ugly Sister" and the titular XXI "The North Ship") and some good in parts; but there is also a lot of indulgent and samey self-pity. One-third of the poems contain the word "heart" and it feels like more than that! Fortunately, there are also hints (IV "Dawn", XII "Like the train's beat", XXIV "Love, we must part now", XXV "Morning has spread again") at the much better verse that is to come.

[Harry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Grabbed this slim volume off my dad's bookshelf as a palette cleanser between more meaty tomes.

I knew this wasn't going to be great from the outset, as it starts with an apologetic introduction by an older Larkin in which he chastises his younger self for being too in love with the 'music' of Yeats. He's not wrong: the poems in this (mercifully short) collection are fairly obvious, clumsy attempts at imitating that poet's thematically heavy, lyrical style. There's the odd flash of brilliance, but just as often the poems are over-serious, unoriginal and weighed down by trying too hard to be big-R Romantic.

As someone who hasn't really explored Larkin's work before, I'd probably now avoid the rest of his work if it wasn't for the number of people saying the mature Larkin is a very different proposition to the 23-year-old who wrote the poems collected here.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

An early, Yeats-influenced collection by Larkin, The North Ship has a very different feel than his mature books. As the poet explains in his introduction it dates from the year before he discovered the poetry of Thomas Hardy and his writing headed off in a very different direction. Although very different in style and subject matter from his great later works, The North Ship is a fascinating window into the young Larkin's mind, and - occasionally - there are turns of phrase that foreshadow his later work.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Have always been a fan of Larkin's most well-known, was surprised to realise I hadn't read his earliest volume of verse. Almost as if Larkin hasn't quite found his voice yet, as he himself attests in his own introduction, feeling that he was simply imitating the 'principal poets of the day' who spoke 'loud and clear', such as Yeats, Auden and Dylan Thomas. However, can still see very marked glimpses of the young poet who would become the eminent Philip Larkin. An interesting body of work.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the earliest and seemingly the shortest of Larkin’s poetry collections. All the talent of the later verse is there, but less accomplishment, and it does feel like Larkin is still testing his waters, sounding his depths. This sort of experimentation meant that some poems didn’t work as coherent wholes presented to an unfamiliar reader; instead, they resembled etudes or exercises, more like draft pieces with an internal logic known to Larkin alone. I think I noticed Larkin trying to rhyme here more often than before (which is to say, than later), too, and this may have worked against him in forcing certain arrangements of/and words. But still, here you get the metaphysical flavor of the signature Larkin in lines like, “beyond the glass / The colourless vial of day painlessly spilled / My world back after a year,” and the consummately forlorn Larkin in something like “The Ugly Sister” (“Since I was not bewitched in adolescence / And brought to love, / I will attend to the trees and their gracious silence, / To winds that move”), and the thoroughly deprecating Larkin in something like “I see a girl dragged by the wrists” (“For me the task’s to learn the many times / When I must stoop, and throw a shovelful”). All in all, the Larkin of The North Ship was as remarkable as expected in his ingenuity of expression, scope of mental vision, and austerity of tone.

North Ship miscellany, as per tradition:
I. "All catches alight" - "All runs back to the whole." (all of it)
III. "The moon is full tonight" - "All quietness and certitude of worth"
IV. "Dawn" - "How strange it is / For the heart to be loveless" (all of it)
VI. "Kick up the fire, and let the flames break loose" - "Who can confront / The instantaneous grief of being alone? / Or watch the sad increase / Across the mind of this prolific plant, / Dumb idleness?"
VII. "The horns of the morning" - "The dawn reassembles."; "Here, where no love is"
IX. "Climbing the hill within the deafening wind" - "The walking of girls' vulnerable feet"
XVIII. "If grief could burn out" - "the deft / Heart lies impotent." (all of it)
XIX. "Ugly Sister" - (see above; all of it)
XX. "I see a girl dragged by the wrists" - "For the first time I'm content to see / What poor mortar and bricks / I have to build with, knowing that I can / Never in seventy years be more a man / Than now - a sack of meal upon two sticks." (also see above; all of it)
XXXII. "Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair" - "Will you refuse to come till I have sent / Her terribly away, importantly live / Part invalid, part baby, and part saint?" (all of it)

[Kerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

He plays by the rules in this one- they're not bad, just safe.

Writes like Keats about death and Byron about nature, and does that Shakespeare sonnet uno-reverse card on the last couplet. He also seems to do that thing where when he doesn't know where his poem is going, he pivots to talking about graves and death? (Emily Dickinson can do it, but she hides her tracks! Otherwise its moody and awkward)

I still love his descriptions on the passage of time- but they're nights or hours in this collection, not years and decades. Probably because this collection is more lovesick and looks for clues in everything. The star of these poems is the simplicity. Ex

Butterfly or
falling leaf,
which ought I to imitate
in my dancing?

or

This is the first thing
I have understood
Time is the echo of an axe
within a wood

Maybe I'm dumb or dont know what makes good poetry (both likely), but I appreciate those stanzas far more than poetry with bells and whistles that need translators.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

'My sleep is made cold / By a recurrent dream' ('The North Ship').

A series of bleak, dimly construed poems that speak of a troubled youth with troubled dreams ('I Dreamed Of An Out-Thrust Arm Of Land'). Opaque poetry, sunk in dreamland, they improve as we progress, become a brilliant mosaic of impressionism. A.N. Wilson summated this first collection as Auden-influenced. But Yeats is clearly apparent in 'I See A Girl Dragged By The Wrists' in 'The beast most innocent / That is so fabulous it never sleeps' - and my favourite of The North Ship collection, highly evocative, highly impressionistic. It is also an exemplar of Larkin's wonderful rhythm, which becomes as insistent as his opaquely hidden message, one eye, the mind's, on the constraining limits of life bound by body to earth, with its despairs and desires ('There is regret. Always, there is regret', 'Love, We Must Part Now').

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some women only date affluent male arseholes. I am EXTREMELY disappointed for THIS to be my obsessional poetry interest. Jesus. No one could be more disappointed than myself.

Because this poetry is so fucking good, and like Shakespeare and Hughes and other arseholes, wonderfully imagistic (the 'long sibilant-muscled trees').

High point was the 'sharp vivacity of bone' from a 'polish airgirl in the corner street'- I reckon on HullTrains, because her voice is 'watering a stony place' and the stony godforesaken wasteland could only be Hull.

Although all of this rapture seems to simultaneously be taking the piss. Take this one:

This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.

Slayed.

[ARealAcrobaticAct · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5)

a general scattering of melancholy and, as the introduction suggests, taking from hardy. larkin is clearly a talent, even as an undergraduate, and some youthful pomp is certainly present. favourites were those that depicted quiet and charming aspects of life, or momentary and evanescent observations. notable favourites were: ‘kick up the fire’, ‘climbing the hill within the deafening wind’, ‘night-music’, ‘like the train’s beat’, ‘the bottle is drunk out by one’, ‘to write one song, i said’, ‘ugly sister’, ‘love, we must part now: do not let it be’, ‘morning has spread again’, ‘pour away that youth’, ‘so through that unripe day you bore your head’, and ‘the north ship’. that being said, some were hit and miss and slightly too nebulous.

[Josh Hounsome · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really it should be 3.5 starts. Larkin's introduction written some 20 years later comments on much which is true about some of the poems in this book. Some poems feel unfinished and overly vague, whilst are of the quality we come to see from Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, both of which are excellent books.

Regardless of the somewhat incohesive overall feel at times, one thing that is evident here that Larkin has consistently excelled at is rhythm and tempo of writing. Syllables bounce and lines meld together in an addictive way that still make this a joy to read.

"Let me become an instrument sharply stringed
For all things to strike music as they please."

[Best · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this debut right after rereading High Windows, Larkin’s last collection. Could definitely see glimmers of brilliance in his earliest works. While the subject matters that this collection grappled with were more simplistic by juxtaposition, I felt the early poems here had their own merits and nicely captured some youthful essence of being alive. Really enjoyed this and will read again for sure.

[Professor Typewriter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philip Larkin’s first collection of poems is good work. As is the case with most first volumes of poetry, you will see literary influences. Clearly, the poetry of William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, WB Yeats, and biblical texts shaped early Larkin poetry. Readers will also see hints of Larkin’s phrasing and diction in this volume. Good work.

[Ian Banks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like many debuts, there are hints of brilliance here. Not a single poem is less than vivid and evocative but none more so than the title poem, save possibly the bleak XXVI or the wistful XX which spoke to me more than I really like to admit.

[Paul Grimsley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not sure if Larkin's own preface knocked me slightly off-kilter as I went into this, but he is right that this comes across as a poet processing the voices of his influences and not displaying the fully realised voice of his later works.

[Naïma · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of poetry has a beautiful unique writing style. I've always been drawn to ships and sailors and saw this collection of poetry in our class library at school. I read it at school when I was too distracted to study and it was good decision to do so. Loved this one!

[Joyce · Rating 2 out of 5]

quite amusing that these poems by a moderately talented yet still callow youth so resemble stephen dedalus' villanelle, intended by joyce as an example of the sort of thing a moderately talented yet still callow youth might produce

[Karolina · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘There is regret. Always there is regret.
But it is better that our lives unloose,
As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,
Break from an estuary with their courses set,
And waving part, and waving drop from sight. ‘

[Dane Cobain · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Larkin’s first collection, and while I prefer his older stuff, I still enjoyed reading this and would recommend it to people who like traditional verse.