Work

A very busy period at work recently, with early starts and late finishes and lots of odd hours at the weekends and in the evenings - and it brought this Larkin poem to mind. Actually, this is not my attitude to work at all, which I find very stimulating and (largely) enjoyable - and idleness is but a transient joy.  And actually, toads are much maligned, too!  But still, this is a fine poem:  Philip Larkin's Toads:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts-
They don’t end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.

Comments

[glo]

Thank you for your answer. I know I should explore more of Kipling works, and I have been telling myself to read more of his novels for a very long time. And it is surely still my aim. Now action is needed! But 2009 seems not to be a good vintage for reading for I haven't read much since the beginning of the year, I must sadly recognise.

[Lindsay]

There are definetely some Kipling poems about work - he was obsessed with the subject at one stage, and one of his best collections of stories is call The Days Work.

[glo]

I was trying to recall other poems whose theme is actually work and can't find any. It must be quite a rare topic for poets - not very inspirational, I'm afraid, or just something poets didn't use to know "for real" themselves. Well, of course there is an endless list of poems on hard rural work or craftsmen's activities but these are not tasks and duties achieved by the poets themselves.
Conversely, one feels that Larkin experienced the situation first-hand to be able to write such a poem. He sounds both so desperate and ironic!
And anyway, I hope you can enjoy a nice and well-deserved weekend and forget work till next Monday.