'Readings will grow erratic' in Philip Larkin's 'Deceptions'

This essay relates the multitude of critical readings that Larkin's 'Deceptions' has received to problems of distance and identification with both victim and rapist in the poem itself. These are examined in the poem's composition, drawing upon notebook transcriptions made by A. T. Tolley. The author compares the poem with its source, and corrects the attribution of the epigraph to Mayhew (it was written by Bracebridge Hemyng). The purpose of the essay is to define what the true subject matter of Larkin's poem may be, beyond its borrowed nineteenth-century occasion, and to question interpretations of the poem's closing phrase 'fulfilment's desolate attic'.