As the music comes to a climax – ‘rabid storms of chording’ (Larkin famously preferred jazz to classical) – and concludes in a ‘cut-off shout,’ the audience claps and the speaker is ‘desperate to pick out/Your hands...applauding,’ feeling the distance that separates them all the more keenly.

It is noticeable that Larkin describes the music negatively – ‘a sudden scuttle,’ ‘A snivel on the violins’ – and this contrasts with poems like For Sidney Bechet and Reference Back . The phrase ‘Behind/The glowing wavebands’ possibly refers to the lit up tuning dial on an old radio: the sound seems to emanate from behind this.

Faith Healing

This poem contains one of Larkin’s few genuinely positive statements about love: ‘In everyone there sleeps/A sense of life lived according to love.’ Such a life would ‘solve, satisfy and set in order,’ but the problem, of course, is that so many people never experience it. Like the old women ‘Moustached in flowered frocks’ they only have brief, illusory moments – ‘some twenty seconds’ – to remind them of a ‘life lived according to love.’

It is enough to provoke a painful regression to childhood, as described in the second stanza. Their lives, exiled from love, are a frozen ‘rigid landscape;’ their weeping like a thaw; the whole experience of loosening tightly bound emotion being described as ‘An immense slackening ache.’ For them ‘all time has disproved’ that twenty second experience of love.

The faith healer himself is stereotyped, and rather a neutral figure in this poem. He is one of Larkin’s ‘successful men,’ though the poet’s prime interest is in the women, who are among life’s ‘losers.’ There is no obvious sense of his being a charlatan, and, although no successful cures are mentioned, his function in the poem is simply to reawaken love . There is certainly ambiguity in this: he causes pain, but he also creates awareness. Faith Healing , therefore, returns us to the ‘choice’ implied in Mr Bleaney : to be unaware and reasonably content, or to be aware, but forever dissatisfied as a result.

The women, Larkin describes brilliantly as ‘losing thoughts’ (meaning thoughts that lose out to other, more attractive, alternatives). They have been, perhaps, dispensed with time and again: ‘Shall I ask her out? No, I’ll ask...,’ ‘Shall I pop round for a cup of tea? No, I’ll visit...’ They inhabit a kind of emotional Siberia – ‘exiled’ in the frozen wilderness. Bringing them back involves an impossible and ugly reversion to childhood – an attempt to start life again – as they cry as only little children cry: ‘Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief.’ The word ‘blort’ is a coinage, apparently combining the senses of ‘blurt’ and ‘bloat.’ It is a repugnant image in what is actually quite a tender poem, and Larkin makes the reader feel sympathy for what is ugly and, conventionally speaking, unlovable.