Three Poems on Decline

Hesse, Larkin, & Housman

Poetry is often associated with a maudlin, sentimental mood. There is something about the subtle combination of rhythm and text, uninterrupted by music, that seems well-fitted for such reflections. Today, I’d like to present three classic poems on the theme of decline.

The Last Glass Bead Game Player

Herman Hesse’s famous novel The Glass Bead Game envisages a world containing a province of transcendent intellectuals, who specialise in every kind of academic pursuit with the diligence of a religious order. The highest discipline of this province is the eponymous Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel). The game combines all kinds of abstracted knowledge, from the interrelations of planets and mathematical symbols to the evolution of a piece of music or a school of philosophy.

In this poem, the protagonist considers that the Glass Bead Game and the enlightened province of Castalia must one day come to an end — a heretical thought in the context of the novel. He wonders what the world will be like when this highest achievement of human civilisation is played for the last time, before dissipating into the tides of history.

(The original poem is in German).

Going, Going

This strikingly conservative, anti-progressive poem by Philip Larkin was considered by critics as ‘not among his finest work’. He laments the gradual takeover of England by the polluting forces of modern industry, with particular criticism for the motorcar and the acres of tarmac and concrete it requires. And the poem signals a shift from a serene confidence in the resilient, renewing power of Nature, towards a fear that human progress might finally overthrow it.

In hindsight, it is not surprising that this poem was disliked by critics. There are certain taboos in elite society, and even today, any intimation of national decline must run along prescribed tracks: Tory Party misdeeds, little-Englanders and NIMBYs and xenophobes and misogynists, and a whole cast of deplorable types whose regrettable attitudes and actions simply bring us all down. But there are many other causes of national decline. Larkin astutely notes the dangers of modernisation, including the degeneration of national morality and character (‘a cast of crooks and tarts’), which visitors to the second-tier towns in Britain would soon understand.

Blue Remembered Hills (Poem XL)

If any poem could spell ‘nostalgia’ in just eight lines, it would be this classic by Alfred Housman. It is arguably the most famous piece from his influential collection A Shropshire Lad, firmly rooted in the quiet localism of the English countryside.

These poems were widely read by the post-WWI generation, to whom their themes of dying youth were particularly resonant. Poem XL (i.e. 40) focuses upon the individual emotions experienced when looking back on a happy past, that for whatever reason is impossible in the present. This mood aligns with the feelings of old age, where the pleasures of youth cannot be experienced again due to declining health, or energy, or simply accumulated experience and cynicism. It also expresses the feeling of alienation arising when one’s surroundings have changed beyond all recognition, never to be restored to their former character.

If you’d like to hear more poetry on Creative Liberty, please feel free to suggest a poem — or theme — in the comments below.