Of course, even Larkin’s casual poems make most of what’s out there look like rubbish. No other manuscript or typescript version of this poem has appeared, which suggests that it might merely have been intended, as the circumstances of its discovery suggest, for an audience of one: a casual poem for Larkin’s most casual lover. He was also a meticulous keeper of notebooks, recording the dates on which poems were begun, abandoned, returned to and completed. Larkin was known to spend months, sometimes years, on individual poems, taking them through dozens of drafts.
This is a poem about exhausted abundance, after all, not prolonged deprivation, and the evocation of “famine” seems out of place. (When he did, the poem was typically a longer one with longer lines, heavier enjambment, and a more ambitious rhyme scheme-a poem whose structure concealed weak rhymes.) And where “shorter” is lazy, “famished” is labored-a rhyme that lacks the inevitability and absolute precision of Larkin’s best rhymes. It’s an unstressed rhyme on a syllable (“-er”) that’s also a common suffix-the sort of rhyme Larkin rarely permitted in his poetry. “Summer”/”shorter” has “rhyme of last resort” written all over it.
He held his writing to a standard that would silence most poets, and there are reasons to suspect that “We met at the end of the party” failed to meet it - a couple of the rhymes, for example. One of the side effects of his perpetual disappointment was a hectoring perfectionism. It’s also likely that Larkin simply didn’t deem the recently discovered poem worthy of publication.
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