The Whitsun Weddings and in Ambulances is reflected on in terms of the significance of our response to seeing an ambulance stop. Passers-by view them as ‘confessionals’, secretive, mysterious places where we confront our deepest nature. They are impersonal and unpredictable, resting ‘at any kerb’ and reminding us of our mortality because ‘All streets in time are visited’.The contrast of the mundane reality of a visit to the shops with the ‘wild white face’ (note the alliteration and assonance denoting an interruption from the norm) shows how anyone can be randomly caught up in another’s loss, before the patient is dehumanisingly ‘stowed’ and it is this that leads in stanza 3 to the onlookers understanding the tenuousness of their own lives, ‘the solving emptiness’ which is infinite.Whether religious or colloquial, ‘Poor soul’ is not, therefore an expression of sympathy but of self-pity, ‘at their own distress’.
Inside the departing ambulance, in stanzas 4 and 5, there comes a sense of inherent extinction, of the eventual falling apart of life. Larkin puns ‘borne’ with ‘deadened’ as the closing doors symbolize life ending, then begins defining what actually constitutes a life. He defines it as an accidental, haphazard event, a ‘unique random blend Of families and fashions’ as the ‘thread’ of stanza 1 ‘begins to loosen’.Near death, the patient is no longer part of a living relationship, but ‘Far from the exchange of love’ as if death nullifies an individual.
Larkin’s shift from third to first person plural replaces the anonymous patient with ‘we’, telling us of death’s inescapability and nothingness while maintaining stately seriousness through the strict iambic tetrameter and grave noun phrases e. g. ‘what is left to come’. As the coherence of life unravels, so does the grammar – with the final stanza’s convoluted, awkward syntax .
As in other Larkin poems, abstract nouns and inactive verbs add to the sense of trying to explain something just out of reach. Like Larkin, Abse writes about death, often beginning with a specific experience too, although usually more personally, without Larkin’s trademark use of persona. Arianrhod is inspired by hearing the name of a disturbed patient in a hospital and connecting it with another Arianrhod from the past. Her pathetic death tempts us to impose delusions of destiny on unconnected events, Abse warns.In In Llandough Hospital, death seems something which turns adults back into uncomprehending children, and as in Ambulances makes us confront our own mortality – ‘I question why’ – rather than in this case the dying patient, the poet’s own father. Abse seems in In the Theatre to sense a spiritual dimension as the brain-dead patient calls out ‘Leave my soul alone’ to the onlookers’ terror.
However, his voice winds down like an ‘antique gramophone’ which seems to suggest Abse finally sees the human body as merely a mechanism.Gwen in The Silence of Tudor Evans weeps for herself on her deathbed whereas her former lover weeps ‘because he had grown so ugly and so old’. As in Ambulances, we encounter very human self-concern. The bleakness of Ambulances is seen as typical of Larkin, yet death is treated differently in Toads Revisited where the narrator ends by accepting the dull routine of his life as slipping away meaninglessly with a wry shrug: ‘Help me down Cemetery Road’.
An Arundel Tomb is different again, tenderly suggesting that individual lives seem irrelevant in the passage of time and that human love cannot defeat such relentless destruction.Love becomes ‘blurred’ like a worn statue so that the couple ‘lie so long’ with the obvious pun on art’s or time’s deceitfulness which has ‘transfigured them into Untruth’. The famously cynical Larkin here is again stately and dignified with the steady iambic tetrameter and the suggestion that although we set ourselves ‘almost true’ ideals this is perhaps as much as we can hope for before death washes away our identity. All of this is handled with unsentimental compassion.
For Abse, death too can bring out tender compassion c. . Cousin Sidney with its foolish, oversized protagonist whose early death causes family anguish and bitterness – but as in An Arundel Tomb, with time’s passage, death and memories fade. Whereas for Larkin, death seems to be treated with gravity, for Abse it can even be an occasion for humour as in The Death of Aunt Alice who when alive relished others’ spectacular demises. Both poets are tender in treatment of death, but Larkin tends to close with more abstract uncertainties and doubts.
