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Moonlight Sonata: Larkin and the Shakespeare Prize

Larkin’s late poem ‘The Mower’ asks to be read in the way he regarded Marvell’s desire for oblivion’: as ‘something to do with violence / A long way back’. The crushing of a hedgehog appears self-accusing when placed in a tradition of writing about ‘purposes mistook’ that includes Marvell’s allusions to Cromwell’s ‘casual slaughter’ and Shakespeare’s Chorus on the Essex Revolt. Larkin’s ambivalence about sublime violence predated his infatuation with Margaret Thatcher, and its connection with his father’s pre-War Nazi associations was a subtext of the 1976 Hamburg Shakespeare Lecture he gave for the FVS Foundation (sponsor of the pro-Hitler ‘Link’ Sydney Larkin is thought to have joined).