PHILIP LARKIN’S LION

In the Bodleian’s Special Collections is a medieval book of hours. Dating from mid-fifteenth century France, it is written in French and Latin. For every month of the year, it shows an illustration of a human activity typically performed during that month, next to an image relating to a sign of the zodiac. In the 1980s, the Bodleian cropped these images, reproduced them as postcards and sold them in the library’s bookshop.

Philip Larkin bought a full set of postcards and, every month, would write a poem on one, inspired by the image on the front, which he would send to his partner, Monica Jones. The poems can therefore be read as a form of ekphrasis – descriptions of a work of art. In July 1982, he sent her an untitled poem under the sign of Leo:

Long lion days

Start with white haze. By midday you meet A hammer of heat – Whatever was sown Now fully grown; Whatever conceived

When this poem is separated from the card on which it is written, it lends itself to various interpretations and associations. In his 1992 book Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State, Tom Paulin – after mentioning icons of patriotic devotion in English culture, such as bows and arrows, cricket bats and oak trees – reads the midday “hammer of heat” in Larkin’s poem as “a martial memory of imperial high noon”.

But that association with the British Empire is less self-evident when the poem is read in its original context – on the back of a postcard, showing a colourful fragment from a medieval book made in France. The postcard is postmarked July 22 1982. Moreover, Larkin signed the poem “Ted”, which turns it into a parody of Ted Hughes’s elemental nature poetry.

‘Long lion days’: Larkin’s poem for Monica Jones, written on the back of a postcard from the Bodleian bookshop

Now fully leaved, Abounding, ablaze – O long lion days!