Toads Revisited

[steepholm]

A misprint spreads halfway round the world while a copyeditor is still tying her laces and making the bows come out even.

I had occasion to reread Philip Larkin's "Toads" today, and (having a cat on my lap) decided to pull it from the internet rather than consulting my first edition of The Less Deceived (although I have of course since checked that). You can find it in many places on the web, but I happened to pull down this copy.

All was going well, until I came to the penultimate verse. Here are the last three, for context:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

See the problem? Yes, that "of" in the second line should be a "to." The trouble with the alternative reading is that it doesn't make any fucking sense.

Naturally, I looked elsewhere on the internet, and found that the poem was widely distributed in both versions, but that the "of" examples seemed, if anything, to be in the majority, especially on sites aimed at the public rather than academia. You can even hear it read aloud that way in a gruff, down-to-earth voice, as here.

It's such an obvious mistake that it's hard to believe that no one spotted it. The sad truth is, I suppose, that people either a) don't expect poetry to make sense or b) don't expect to understand it. Or both. And that, if both, it's hard to lose either.

Comments

[green_knight]

I had to stare very hard to find the 'of' you are speaking of.

I think the problem here is that people read it as
blarney – my way of getting

instead of
blarney my way to getting

which the line break kind of supports, so once the error slipped in, I can see why it proliferated.

[steepholm]

I suppose I can see how that reading might have seemed plausible, especially to someone who hadn't taken in that Larkin uses punctuation. "Way of" is a common collocation, after all.

[calimac]

My copy is of the 1988/89 Collected Poems, so I checked that. It's right, but there's something about the gerund that looks odd. I grasp that "blarney my way to ..." is a single phrase, but I'm inclined to think that "get" instead of "getting" would be more regular.

My thought on "Toads" in general is that "let the toad work / squat on my life" is a brilliant image, but that if Larkin had ever actually been long-term unemployed, he would never have written this poem. And he secretly knows that, though he allows himself to pretend that it's lack of courage that stops him from taking the leap.

[steepholm]

Agreed that he wouldn't have written it had he been unemployed (which he never was, even short-term) - and I'm sure he's well aware of that. The poem is skewering the very romanticisation of precarious lifestyles that it also indulges in.

[calimac]

I'm doubtful about that. I don't see verses 3-5 as consciously falsified, saying things the author knows aren't true. Instead, they read like what a Tory - which Larkin was - would actually say about the unemployed, in complete unaware denial of what being unemployed is actually like.

[steepholm]

A Tory he certainly was, and later a great admirer of Mrs Thatcher. Still, although it's not the kind of thing one can prove either way, from what I know of him there's at least one more ply of irony here than you're giving him credit for. He may believe it in a sense, but he's also well aware of it as an "attitude" that he's taking out for inspection and dissection. "No one actually starves" is very much in quote marks.

[calimac]

If it is, then he's tone-deaf. Because that's exactly the sort of defensive remark that Tory blimps would actually make. If you're going to mark something like that as ironic, you need to mark it more clearly.

[sovay]

Yes, that "of" in the second line should be a "to." The trouble with the alternative reading is that it doesn't make any fucking sense.

That's so interesting! I think it slips past because "My way of getting" is a completely functional and meaningful phrase, just not in this context, so it doesn't present the immediate nonsense of so many typos. Perhaps people assume it was dialect.

[steepholm]

Yes. I'm learning from the responses here and on LJ that what is "obvious" to me (I happen to know the poem well and have baked into my neural network) is not necessarily stand-out obvious to people reading it fairly fresh.

[sovay]

is not necessarily stand-out obvious to people reading it fairly fresh.

I think the line break helped the error propagate. I'm not sure I agree with green_knight that people read the verse with an implied en-dash, but I do think that seeing the phrase on its own line encourages the reader to take it as an isolated syntactical unit rather than fitting it into the grammar on either side, which would make clear that "of" sounds funny. But then again, even if they notice it sounds funny, you may be right that they just assume Larkin was doing something poetic that they don't understand and go on.