Programme 4

At Grass

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Larkin gently and wistfully contemplates a seemingly idyllic existence with contrasting memories of a more active lifestyle.

Poet Wendy Cope reveals how Larkin drew inspiration from a film about a retired racehorse. Fellow poet Owen Shears finds himself responding filmically to the poem - 'it kind of moves from scene to scene - we almost seem to start on this wide shot with the eye being hardly able to pick them out until they move … and then there's this technique of flashback, as if the whole poem is moving in the world of film back to when these horses were famous race horses … and then we appear to be on this very tight close-up of the horses with the flies around their ears'.

Both Wendy Cope and PJ Kavanagh dismiss any sense of melancholy or intimations of mortality in the concluding lines:

Only the groom, and the groom's boy,
With bridles in the evening come.

www.ai.mit.edu/people/elliza/authors/horses.html
Compare with Edwin Muir's 'The Horses'