Best Society - Analysis

A poem that argues itself into a locked room

The central drama of Best Society is that the speaker tries to accept the public verdict that solitude is selfish, yet ends by choosing it anyway—and finding, in that choice, a steadier kind of truth. The poem keeps setting up a socially approved logic (virtue requires other people) and then quietly showing why that logic can’t account for what the self actually feels like when it is finally alone. Larkin lets the speaker sound reasonable, even briskly moralistic, right up to the moment he admits the private act that contradicts the sermon: Viciously, then, I lock my door.

Childhood solitude as something as ordinary as skin

In the opening, solitude is presented as an unproblematic possession: the child assumes it lay at hand, as natural as nakedness. That comparison matters because nakedness is both innocent (a body just being a body) and faintly taboo (something you’re told to cover). The child’s tone is almost offhand—Casually—as if solitude is a fact of life, Not specially right or wrong. Already, though, the poem is laying groundwork for a later shame: what begins as plentiful and obvious becomes, under adult judgment, something you must either justify or hide.

After twenty: wanting solitude and mistrusting it at once

The first real turn arrives with Then, after twenty, when solitude becomes both more difficult to get and more desired, but also More undesirable. That triple pull is the poem’s key tension: the speaker craves aloneness but doubts its legitimacy. The reason he gives is sharply social: what you are when alone has to be expressed / In terms of others to achieve the rank of fact. Without witnesses, language, or shared standards, the private self risks seeming like make-believe, mere compensation. In other words, solitude is not just a place; it’s a status problem—if no one can corroborate you, are you real?

The public sermon: virtue needs an audience

The third stanza sounds like a tidy civic lecture: Much better stay in company! The speaker lines up examples that reduce goodness to a network effect. To love you must have someone else; giving requires a legatee; Good neighbours need whole parishfuls of people. He concludes, with brisk certainty, Our virtues are all social. The tone here is almost prosecutorial, and the sting lands in the conditional: if you’re Deprived of solitude and you chafe, it proves you’re not the virtuous sort. It’s a cruelly neat trap: either you like company, or your discomfort is a moral failing. The poem lets that voice speak fully, so we can feel how plausible—and how bullying—it is.

The guilty adverb and the pleasure of ordinary weather

What follows is the poem’s most revealing hinge: the speaker acts against his own argument. Viciously is an overcharged word for locking a door; it’s as if he borrows society’s accusation in advance, calling himself vicious before anyone else can. Yet the sensory scene that comes with the locked door is oddly comforting. The gas-fire breathes, making the room feel alive and intimate; outside, the wind Ushers in evening rain, a phrase that turns bad weather into a kind of ceremony. This isn’t the loneliness of deprivation. It’s shelter, chosen and furnished with small, steady sounds—an atmosphere in which the self can stop performing.

Solitude as a giant palm: supported, not stranded

The poem’s final image decisively revises solitude’s meaning. Alone again, the speaker is not abandoned; Uncontradicting solitude / Supports me. That word Uncontradicting is crucial: company, by implication, contradicts—questions, corrects, reframes, demands you be legible. In solitude, he is held on a giant palm, an image of scale and gentleness at once, as if aloneness is a larger, older element than the social world that judges it. And then the self appears not as a heroic essence but as a small creature: sea-anemone or simple snail, cautiously Unfolds. The tone softens into patient observation. What he is emerges only when it doesn’t have to defend itself in terms of others.

The poem’s hard question: is society’s virtue partly a refusal?

If virtues are all social, why does the poem make social life feel like contradiction? The speaker’s private relief suggests a disturbing possibility: that some public righteousness depends on not having to face what one is when no one is looking. The locked door reads less like a crime than like an experiment—what remains of a person when the audience leaves?

What Best Society finally insists on

By ending with what I am, the poem doesn’t reject community so much as reject community’s monopoly on reality. The earlier claim that the solitary self is make-believe is answered by a different standard of fact: a bodily, animal unfolding that can’t be argued into existence, only allowed. Larkin lets the speaker keep his guilt—he never retracts Viciously—but he also shows the cost of the social verdict. In this poem, the best society is not the crowd that certifies your virtues; it is the quiet condition that makes it possible to meet yourself without contradiction.