‘Aubade’ by Philip Larkin

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Philip Larkin was honored today with a memorial stone in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. He died thirty-one years ago today. Larkin’s memorial sits between those of Anthony Trollope and Ted Hughes. Chaucer’s tomb sits nearby. Edward Lear’s memorial stone is immediately above Larkin’s.

I wrote the following essay in June:

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“I don’t know that I ever expected much of life,” Philip Larkin wrote to his lifelong friend Kingsley Amis in October 1979, “but it terrifies me to think it’s nearly over.” He had another six years of life left, but the emptiness of the end—”the total emptiness for ever,/The sure extinction that we travel to”—was much on his mind.

The poem from which those lines originate, “Aubade,” was published in 1977 in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). Larkin had started it in 1974, worked at it that year, and then left it until 1977, when he finished it. “Death is the most important thing about life,” he wrote his companion, Monica Jones, when they were both still young.
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Today in History: Dec. 2

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“To be a king is to inherit old ideas and genealogy. I don’t want to descend from anyone.”—Napoleon Bonaparte

On this date in 1804, Napoleon was crowned (or crowned himself) Emperor Napoleon 1 of France, because he did not want to be merely king.

The crown was one that had been designed for him, as the crown worn by the King of France was destroyed during the French Revolution. As Pope Pius VII brought it forward, he took the crown from the pope’s hands and placed it on his head himself, in order to forestall any potential papal claim over his throne. In November, French voters had approved Napoleon’s new constitution, which named him emperor, by a 99.93% to 0.07% margin.

Napoleon then crowned his wife, Joséphine, empress.
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Today in History: December 1

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Great Train Robbery, a film directed by Edwin S. Porter for Edison Studios, was first shown at Huber’s Museum in New York City in 1903 on this date. It is the first Western, the first action movie, the first fictional film to use on-location shooting. Made on a budget of about $150, it earned that back and more for Edison, and it rapidly became an international success: the first action movie blockbuster.

Legend has it that at the last sequence, a frame of which is seen at top, in which actor Justus Barnes takes aim at the camera and fires point blank, audience members dove for cover. Nothing that “real” had yet been seen on screen, and audiences had no training in how to watch a film. As legends go, it makes its point, but it most likely never happened: no contemporary accounts describe audiences in panic.
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