20 pages • 40 minutes read
High Windows
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Symbols & Motifs
The Long Slide & Verticality
The “long slide” (Line 8) appears twice in “High Windows”: once in each of the reflections of the observing elders on the younger generation. Its first appearance seems somewhat sinister in relation to the other lines in its stanza. After discussing the sexual revolution in jarringly inhuman terms (the “outdated combine harvester” [Line 7], for example), Larkin concludes the second stanza with the following line: “And everyone young going down the long slide” (Line 8). In relation to agricultural/industrial imagery, a hint of the slaughterhouse lurks in this line’s connotations. Larkin sets this phrase apart from its syntactical whole, isolating the image and pairing it with technological language to introduce a hint of menace. However, the beginning of the next stanza quickly reassures the reader of the image’s positivity: “going down the long slide // To happiness, endlessly” (Lines 8-9).
The long slide is similarly complex in its second appearance in the poem. While the image no longer seems sinister after the reader has already contextualized it after the second and third stanzas, its reappearance undermines hopefulness. The speaker initially hopes (or, rather, “know[s]” [Line 4]) that the new social freedoms will allow the new generation to finally go “down the long slide // To happiness” (Lines 8, 9), to the “paradise // Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives (Lines 4, 5). However, if the speaker hopes for this result, then it means it has not occurred for him and his generation. When the speaker wonders if he was similarly observed in his youth—if an old man thought of his generation that they “will all go down the long slide / Like free bloody birds” (Lines 15-16)—he is understanding that the paradise he “knows” (Line 4) will appear cannot do so.
The long slide, then, functions as a symbol of the utopian life that can never be. The symbol really rounds out when complicated by the poem’s titular “high windows” (Line 17). The contrast between “going down the long slide” (Line 8) and looking up at “high windows” (Line 17), and out “beyond” to the “deep blue air” (Line 19), introduces a vertical contrast. Just as the slide is defined by vertical motion, so the disparity between slide and window—between the unreal “endless[ ]” (Line 9) utopia and the real “endless” “Nothing” (Line 20)—is emphasized by their opposing vertical positions.
High Windows
Of course, the key symbol in Larkin’s poem is the titular “high windows” (Line 17). The poem is sandwiched by the windows, which loom over it as the title and dominate its last stanza. Furthermore, the poem’s tone and conclusions hinge on how a reader understands the image of the “high windows (Line 17). Are the windows a symbol for the indomitable return of traditional morality in the cultural imagination? Are they an affirmation of the divine, or of its absence? Do the windows, with their unchanging “deep blue” (Line 19) void beyond, signify the unchanging expanse of the human experience? Each of these reads is plausible, and each aligns with textual evidence within the poem. That the poem so suddenly swerves into ambiguity in its final lines is crucial to the function of the symbol.
Unlike concrete social customs, which can be discarded as easily as “an outdated combine harvester” (Line 7), the qualities defining human existence cannot be easily compared to anything. The symbol of the high windows affirms a fundamental mystery to the human pursuit of happiness, freedom, or living a satisfactory life. The poem’s speaker assumes happiness is simply one cultural change away—that the “long slide” exists past just one more social fence. But instead of finding utopia, each new “beyond” (Line 19) reveals “Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless” (Line 20).
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By Philip Larkin
