The Explosion
On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead:
In the sun the slagheap slept.
Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.
One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.
So they passed in beards and moleskins,
Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,
Through the tall gates standing open.
At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.
The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face -
Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said, and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion
Larger than in life they managed -
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,
One showing the eggs unbroken.
Commentary
Proceeding with the mining disaster theme, here’s a guest poem submitted independently by Mike Christie and
Ameya Nagarajan
Note: the sixth verse (“The dead go on . . . “) should be in italics.
[Mike’s commentary]
I’ve liked the two poems people sent in about mining disasters: I wanted to add this one to the list. It’s long been one of my favourite Larkin poems. It manages to be powerfully moving without being sentimental; the last image, of the men somehow expanding and disappearing away from this mortal world, as the wives understand they are dead, is one of my favourite images in all of poetry.
— Mike Christie
[Ameya’s commentary]
All these mining poems reminded me of larkin, what I like about this poem is that it focuses on the life of the miners and thus highlights even more the tragedy of their death.
The saddest image is the one conjured by “Gold as on a coin” because it implies the miners are worth more to their families after death because of compensation, an amount of money that their labour could never provide.
— Ameya
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Ian Baillieu · 16 November 2003
For such a serious and tragic subject, I find it odd and unfortunate that Larkin chose to use a rhythm now forever associated with Longfellow’s oft-parodied ‘Hiawatha’. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th stanzas especially.
Gregory Hyde · 5 August 2007
Just having re-read Larkin’s poem “The Explosion” I was interested to read any comments your site might have. In reaction to Mike Christie’s comments, I rather think that the husbands of the wives are moving “towards them” as the poem states, instead of “somehow expanding and disappearing away from this mortal world.” In fact, one of them even shows to them “the eggs unbroken”– an indication that the poem suggests the relationship between the men who died in the mining disaster and those left behind is not unbroken–that there is new life. “For a second” the wives have a vision that implies their husbands still remain connected to them. Ameya’s comments interpreting the phrase “Gold as on a coin,” as referring to the compensation the wives received from the mining company on the death of their husbands, I think are off. I see the phrase is tied to the previous line which states that in response to the words heard during the Church service, the wives saw the lives of their husbands as larger, more meaningful and of value, than their low-status occupation as miners might suggest. What strikes me most about this poem is that the author, who in so many of his other poems expresses doubts about any hereafter, here in the last poem of the last book of poetry he published, expresses a more ambiguous attitude towards a continued existence after death. Of course, one can argue that he is merely speaking of the way people of faith might feel about the question–the wives attending their husbands’ funerals– but I suspect the author may be reaching beyond what he wrote in some of his previous poems to express a faith of his own.