Philip Larkin, "Annus Mirabilis"

"Annus Mirabilis"¹

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) -²
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban³
And the Beatles' first LP.⁴

Up to then there’d only been⁵
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring⁶,
A shame that started at sixteen⁷
And spread⁸ to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,⁹
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -¹⁰
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles' first LP.¹¹

1. “Annus mirabilis” is Latin for “miraculous year.” The term originally described 1666, the year Isaac Newton invented gravity (I kid, I kid). Today it more often refers to 1905, the year Albert Einstein published four papers all individually worthy of a Nobel prize.

Why bother with the allusion? I think it serves as ironic understatement. Like, you know how someone will highlight how small a dog is by naming him Hercules? This is a miraculous year! It’s equal to Isaac Newton ushering in the scientific revolution! It’s as important as Albert Einstein changing our understanding of reality itself! It’s… It’s… It’s about casual sex.

Also, for “an egg with goggles” (his description, not mine), Larkin wrote about sex quite a bit. “The Large, Cool Store,” “Talking in Bed,” and the incredibly bleak “Love Again” are three favorites. This isn’t even the only poem specifically about the sexual revolution: there’s also “High Windows”!

2. I think parentheses are the right choice here. We’re learning important information about the age of the speaker (who, let’s be real, is just Philip Larkin), but parentheses, as opposed to commas or em-dashes, downplay his own importance. You can feel the guy shoving his hands in his pockets, looking down, and kicking a pebble as he mentions himself.

3. The obscenity case over D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover ended November 2, 1960, and the Beatles released Please Please Me) on March 22, 1963, so sex was invented (discovered?) sometime between then. Lady Chatterly’s Lover (original title: Tenderness) is the perfect book to reference, considering it was banned for it’s frank depictions of sex. And the Beatles (original name: The Quarrymen) are the perfect band to reference because they’re such a potent symbol of the swingin’ sixties. (An aside: I once read Stephen Hawking’s list of top ten albums. They were all classical music with one exception: Please Please Me. He said no one had ever heard anything like it.)

4. Okay, we’re one stanza in, and in these five lines we have almost everything that makes Larkin Larkin.

1. The poem is immediately accessible. I remember studying “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot in college. That poem opens with six unattributed lines from Dante in the original 14^th century Italian. (Yay.) After that, we get Eliot’s famous opening line “Let us go then, you and I.” My professor kindly pointed out that the “you” and “I” are both Prufrock—he’s talking to himself. Call me a philistine, but my first thought was, “How the hell are you supposed to know that!?” The answer, I suppose, is that you are supposed to know that by either reading the copious footnotes that accompany the poem or by studying English literature in college. With Larkin, there is nothing esoteric, vague, or abstract. It’s written with a commonplace vocabulary and conversational tone of voice that doesn’t require any real parsing. Even the allusions are pretty well known. (There’s an old witticism that the only difference between a “vase” and a “vahhhze” is how much it costs. I think about that line whenever I wonder about the difference between a lowly “pop culture reference” and a highfalutin “literary allusion.”)

2. The poem is shocking, funny, and bitter—all at the same time. Shocking? Funny? Okay, maybe your monocle didn’t drop from your eye in surprise, and maybe you didn’t audibly chortle, but the absurdity of sex “beginning” in 1963 is definitely attention-grabbing. As for bitter, well, the opening line is a complaint about missing out on the whole sexual revolution thing. And it really doesn’t feel like we’re supposed the judge the speaker for being shallow: we’re supposed to commiserate!

3. Finally, this conversational, attention-grabbing sentence is—miraculously—written in formal verse. The first, third, and fourth lines are written in iambic tetrameter, and the second and fifth lines are written in iambic trimeter (the latter of which is so rare my spellcheck doesn’t recognize it). The meter is loose enough to avoid that stultifying, “drumbeat” feeling of perfect iambs, and the rhyme scheme (no slant rhymes here, by the way) is Larkin’s own: ABBAB. (The triple Bs are especially impressive. Norman invasion notwithstanding, English is ultimately a Germanic language, and rhymes are hard to come by: going from couplets to triplets makes things exponentially harder.) At 103 words, the whole thing is so tight, so polished, you can hardly believe someone could fit a meaningful sentence into it. Listen, I don’t think poets really work this way—it’s the literary critics who make this stuff up—but if the “free love” the speaker is missing out on is “loose” and “open” and “groovy” it really makes sense for a poem complaining about FOMO to be so goddamned scrunched up not a single syllable can be changed. This is a weird analogy, but there’s this episode of Seinfeld where Kramer gets an industrial meat-slicer. (Listen, I just said it was a weird analogy.) Holding up a piece of roast beef, he brags, “Look how thin that is. See that’s all surface area. The taste has nowhere to hide!” That’s how I feel about these opening lines.

5. I’m American, but I assume “been” is a perfect rhyme with “seen.” Still, it makes reading this poem aloud tricky. What am I supposed to do? Adopt an English accent for one word?

6. Here we have another Larkin-ism: a slight misogyny. His metaphor for sex is not something romantic like a duet or a dance. It’s not even the typical “pursuit.” Rather, it is, in addition to a “bargaining,” a “shame,” and a “quarrel,” a “wrangle”—which makes me think of a wrestling match more than anything else—in which the woman uses sex to secure herself a wedding ring. It wasn’t until writing these annotations that I noticed how often he links violence and sex, either explicity (“Love Again”) or implicitly (“Sunny Prestatyn”).

Lots of men see marriage as a trap (consider the phrase “the old ball-and-chain”), and that sentiment is on full display here. It’s one of the things I like most about Larkin: not the ugliness itself, but the fact that he was willing, for his art, to expose his ugliest thoughts. You see this in poems like “Self’s the Man” (on marriage), “Breadfruit” (on sex and marriage), and “Wild Oats” (on loneliness and sex and marriage).

I mean, really, go read “Breadfruit” and ask yourself: who else would be willing to expose such selfish sexual desire, especially in a poem lacking the plausible deniability of laundering the feelings through a novel’s characters? We live in an era where every YA protagonist operates via some internalized social justice Hays Code, and have a warped understanding of the human condition because of it. I’m sorry to say, this is (sometimes) how men think.

7. This is the only moment in the poem that strikes me as false. Sixteen? Not thirteen? Not twelve? It obviously sounds better, but why so late in puberty? Perhaps that’s when boys start openly pursuing girls? Perhaps there’s some difference between 1960s England and 2020s America I don’t understand? Perhaps some other reason that completely escapes me?

8. Note the alliteration and assonance of “bargaining/wrangle/ring” and “started/sixteen/spread.” I don’t think these poetic devices mean anything (though they can in other situations). Still, they somehow sonically add to the claustrophobia of this cramped little bit of verse. I can’t really cogently argue this. It just feels that way.

9. More alliteration with “brilliant/breaking/bank” here. The plosive phonetics of a “b” are perfect for this line. What about the phrase itself? Merriam-Webster defines “to break the bank” as meaning “to be very expensive or too expensive : to cost a lot of money—usually used in negative statements.” But here it seems used in a very positive manner: we’ve got “the quarrel sank” and “brilliant” and “unloseable” all creating the effect. The feeling, to me, is not so much “That car repair is going to put us in the red” as it is “Let’s go to Vegas and blow everything on hookers, drugs, and poker!”

Of course, the question remains, are the two breaking the bank together, or is he breaking her bank? (Wink, wink; nod, nod.) I think it’s probably the happy former, considering it’s a game without losers, but it’s worth noting the one other time Larkin uses similar language: in “A Study of Reading Habits,” imagining himself as a villain in a dime novel, he writes:

Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

(And there’s that violence and sex again…)

10. What is the purpose of repetition in poetry? Look for a full answer in my upcoming essay “What Is the Purpose of Repetition in Poetry?” Till then, I’ve found the best way to articulate what a certain bit of writing is doing is to remove, reverse, or otherwise change that bit of writing and see how the feeling of the piece changes. And if you read the poem without the repeated lines, (1) it feels annoyingly incomplete, and (2) it ends with fulfillment! Yes the “rather late for me” from the first stanza is still lurking, but “rather late” implies a chance which “just too late” (the one change in the repeated stanza) snuffs out. I especially love how the three stressed syllables of “Just…too…late…” slow down the speech into resignation.

11. In the first annotation, I joked that causal sex couldn’t be as important as Newton’s and Einstein’s discoveries. But what made this sort of casual sex possible? The pill, of course. Introduced in 1960 (“Between the end of the Chatterly ban…”), it was an invention that had massive effects on society. Effects Larkin missed out on. (Sort of. He did, after all, have three girlfriends at once for a spell.)

People talk about how Larkin’s poetry mirrors the decline of the British empire. I don’t know; I sort of see it and I sort of don’t. But here, I do see how his very small, very personal complaint reflects a much larger, society-wide change.

This poem was very much on my mind in 2012 when I was dating my now-wife and Tinder came into being. I was in total disbelief. There was a hookup app now?! Girls were out there just waiting to fuck you? All the awkward pickup lines and first dates and cruel rejections were now replaced by a few “swipes?” Of course, we’ve seen the fallout from Tinder et al., so, yeah, I do sort of feel like I caught the last chopper out of Nam. Perhaps that’s why I never got started on my own 2012 version of this poem: things went sour before I had time to get my thoughts down.