Sharpened Light: On Larkin’s “Sad Steps”

It’s before midnight and, for nearly ten minutes now, the dog has been sitting in the middle of the living room floor. He has been watching me, sometimes shifting from one front paw to the other. This can mean only one thing: time for a pee.

Outside, the grass is damp. From the dying tree on the front lawn, I hear the dry-leaf whisper of bats’ wings. And over to the left, where the street curves into a proper hill and the neighbors’ roofs carve a clear space in the sky, there hangs a moon. The evening news has called it “blue,” the second full moon of the month.

How big the moon is tonight, how seemingly ready for description. It’s positioned in my view, as if to say, say something new about me.

That seems to be a reason for the moon, doesn’t it? Its reflected light, its varied faces, the pull it exerts on bodies—all demand literary representation. I think of Dickinson’s moon: “The moon is distant from the Sea— / And yet, with Amber Hands— / She leads Him—docile as a Boy— / Along appointed Sands—.” Or Shelley’s, “Wandering companionless.” Or Shakespeare’s: “That monthly changes in her circled orb” (Romeo and Juliet). In Marvin Bell’s “White Clover,” the moon is mirrored on suburban lawns as hundreds of “moons on long stems.” And in Dorianne Laux’s “Facts About the Moon,” the moon is a mother who loves her bad son, no matter that he’s “a leech, a fuckup, / a little shit.” The moon becomes whatever the poet needs it to be, reflecting—as is its way—emotions like some cosmic, Freudian projection.

Last summer, I spent all of July and August trying to memorize “Sad Steps,” Philip Larkin’s poem about the moon. No, I should say that I spent two months trying to forget “Sad Steps” in order to have reason to memorize it. It’s only eighteen lines long; I knew the poem after a few repetitions. But then, I would make myself forget the text so that I could study it again the next day.

Memorization seemed like an important thing to do at the time. I was thirty-five and felt very old all of a sudden, my six-year marriage cracked in a way that would take the next year to unbreak. Larkin: the only person unhappier than I was. And older. My recitations of “Sad Steps” were a dialogue. Nightly, I walked the dog around the perimeter of the yard and practiced my lines. If I learned the poem well enough, I might understand why I was as alone as the speaker in “Sad Steps,” a man who stumbles from the bathroom in the middle of the night, stopping to consider the moon on his way to an empty bed. Here is the poem in full:

Groping back to bed after a pissI part thick curtains, and am startled byThe rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lieUnder a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.There’s something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blowLoosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate—Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.The hardness and the brightness and the plainFar-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and painOf being young; that it can’t come again,But is for others undiminished somewhere.

“Sad Steps” is itself a conversation, a response to Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet XXXI, which begins “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies!” In Sidney’s poem, the speaker experiences a “fellowship,” finding in the moon’s “wan” face a mirror of his own heartsickness. Is love, the speaker wishes to know, as torturous for celestial bodies as it is for earthly ones: pride, scorn, ingratitude?

Larkin’s response isn’t the first...