17 pages • 34 minutes read
The Explosion
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Themes
The Reality of Death by Accident
What are the implications of death when it is an accident? Is there anything more terrifying: a day laid out to be routine suddenly shattered by the rude intrusion of death, a reality you had pretended simply did not exist?
“The Explosion” uses the catastrophic mine disaster to offer a sobering meditation on the reality of death by accident, how death is always lurking, always approaching, and always premature. Despite the happy busyness of the opening stanzas, what hangs about the miners goofing with each other, laughing, chasing down rogue rabbits, smoking one last pipe before they head down the mine for another day of work, is that dark shadow that points toward the mine entrance (Lines 2-3). Whether we elect to live with the realization, everybody dies; the poem argues, everyone lives every day in the shadow of accidents. We live like those miners heading to the mine entrance, happily ignoring that reality.
But Larkin is not content to introduce happy characters and then simply kill them off. That would render the poem too dark, too depressing for a poet intrigued by the strategy of hope and the logic of endurance. The miners do not live long enough to feel the gravitational pull of disappointment, the weight of lost opportunities, and the sheer impress of a wasted life. They die, yes, but they die by accident, they die suddenly. They die as they lived, uncomplicated by the reality that death is always coming. Thus, the poem itself survives the explosion. Beginning with Stanza 6, which take place in a chapel, the poem moves beyond the glum meditation on this disaster as a sobering reminder of death’s omnipotence to explore the hunger to hope.
The Consolation of Religion
Larkin was not a religious man. Yet in the face of sudden death, Larkin understood that many find consolation in the conceptions of a Christian afterlife. Stanzas 6-8 offer fragments of the consoling and familiar Christian maxims that reimagine death into a welcoming portal, a boundary whose crossing represents the culmination of the pilgrim journey of life and the beginning of the rich rewards of God’s provident care. It is not that Christians hunger for death; rather, as the grieving families realize in their chapel service, their lost loved ones are now enjoying the “comfort” of “God’s house” (Line 17). The chapel service further offers the tender anticipation of a reunion with the dead.
Save for the obvious—the entire construct of Christian consolation is hope for which, after more than two millennia, there is no reassuring evidence for some—the mourners respond to the notion of that reunion. For the briefest moment, “a second” (Line 20), they forget their sorrow and imagine seeing their loved ones again, their faces as “plain as the lettering in the chapels” (Line 19). In death, the miners morph into transcendent beings, “larger than in life they managed” (Line 22) ever to be. In death, in the rhetoric of Christianity, they become greater than they ever were, ever could be, in life. They appear to the mourners to be walking toward them, now dazzled as if from the sun itself.
It is a sumptuous vision of Christian consolation that Larkin neither endorses nor disparages. Larkin was a committed agnostic who regarded religion as a comfort only for the gullible who pretend they will not die. Here, however, Larkin suspends irony and allows the dazzling rhetoric of Christian redemption to sustain those who most need it.
Nature’s Continuity
If Larkin is something of a considerate agnostic, he is as well a committed realist. His poem reflects his take on the rich dimension of the natural world all around the miners. In this, the poem offers an alternative to the consolations the mourners find in the rhetoric of the Christian afterlife. In the nest of lark’s eggs filched as a joke by one of the miners, the poem offers what might seem at best stoic comfort but comfort nevertheless: Yes, individual people die, but nature continues. In this, Larkin suggests that the comfort the religious find in the chapel, in which they see the afterlife as a chance for the individual to live on and, in fact, reunite with those they most loved on earth, is quite different from the reality of the natural world.
If that logic escapes Larkin, the reality of the bird’s eggs does not. The survival of the eggs in the nest, of course, does not mitigate the deaths of the miners. That the world will continue on after you die can seem more of a harrowing truth. Not to be here, not to be anywhere, as an epiphany might seem chilling. But in the closing line, in a single insistent image, the poem offers a quiet counter different from the rhetoric of Christianity. The unbroken lark’s eggs are the promise of nature itself, its promise of continuity, a promise at once fragile as the eggs and yet as durable as the eggs. Therein the poet offers his counter-promise. If Christianity offers an afterlife in some vaguely defined space, consider a nest full of eggs patiently, quietly, unironically awaiting the transition into living, nature’s promise of continuity.
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By Philip Larkin
