2 October 2017
I first came across Philip Larkin's poems as a schoolboy in the late nineteen-sixties, when I began taking English "A" level and my teacher Peter Way asked our class to talk about Larkin's poems "Wires" and "At Grass." At the time, I had no great interest in poems, but I was interested in these two partly because (as a country boy) I thought that they both had a mistake in them. "Wires" says that the electric current running through cattle-fencing has a "muscle-shredding violence" (if this were true, the countryside would be strewn with the bodies of incapacitated cows and farmworkers); and in the evening of "At Grass" a "groom's boy" comes to collect a horse from a field, carrying "bridles" rather than a much more probable halter.
