The North Ship
The North Ship is the debut collection of poems by Philip Larkin (1922–1985), published in 1945 by Reginald A. Caton's Fortune Press. Caton did not pay his writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves. A similar arrangement had been used in 1934 by Dylan Thomas for his first anthology.
 First edition | |
| Author | Philip Larkin |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Publisher | Fortune Press |
Published in English | 1945 |
| Followed by | The Less Deceived |
Some of the poems were composed while Larkin was an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, but the bulk were written in the period 1943 to 1944 when he was running the public library in Wellington, Shropshire, and writing his second novel A Girl in Winter.
The volume was published again, in 1966, by Faber and Faber Limited.[1] In the 1945 version there are 31 items, numbered with Roman numerals. The last of these, "The North Ship" is a set of five poems tracking a ship's northward progress. Of the 30 single poems, only seven have titles. In the 1966 reissue an extra poem, "Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair" was added at the end. This edition is still in print.
The North Ship constitutes the first part of the 2003 edition of Larkin's Collected Poems.
Content
The book contains 32 poems:
- Ellipsis (...) indicates first line of an untitled poem
| Sequence | Poem title or first line | |
|---|---|---|
| I | All catches alight... | |
| II | This was your place of birth, this daytime palace... | |
| III | The moon is full tonight... | |
| IV | Dawn | |
| V | Conscript | |
| VI | Kick up the fire, and let the flames break loose... | |
| VII | The horns of the morning... | |
| VIII | Winter | |
| IX | Climbing the hill within the deafening wind... | |
| X | Within the dream you said... | |
| XI | Night-Music | |
| XII | Like the train's beat... | |
| XIII | I put my mouth... | |
| XIV | Nursery Tale | |
| XV | The Dancer | |
| XVI | The bottle is drunk out by one... | |
| XVII | To write one song, I said... | |
| XVIII | If grief could burn out... | |
| XIX | Ugly Sister | |
| XX | I see a girl dragged by the wrists... | |
| XXI | I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land... | |
| XXII | One man walking a deserted platform... | |
| XXIII | If hands could free you, heart... | |
| XXIV | Love, we must part now: do not let it be... | |
| XXV | Morning has spread again... | |
| XXVI | This is the first thing... | |
| XXVII | Heaviest of flowers, the head... | |
| XXVIII | Is it for now or for always... | |
| XXIX | Pour away that youth... | |
| XXX | So through that unripe day you bore your head... | |
| XXXI | The North Ship |
Legend
|
| XXXII | Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair... | |
See also
- List of poems by Philip Larkin – a complete list of all the known poems, both published and unpublished, and their date of composition