Maiden Name.

[NNadir]

Maiden Name

Marrying left your maiden name disused.
Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,
Your voice, and all your variants of grace;
For since you were so thankfully confused
By law with someone else, you cannot be
Semantically the same as that young beauty:
It was of her that these two words were used.

Now it's a phrase applicable to no one,
Lying just where you left it,scattered through
Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two
Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon -
Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly
Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.
No, it means you. Or, since you're past and gone,

It means what we feel now about you then:
How beautiful you were, and near, and young,
So vivid, you might still be there among
Those first few days, unfingermarked again.
So your old name shelters our faithfulness,
Instead of losing shape and meaning less
With your depreciating luggage laden.

-Phillip Larkin.

A thread over in E&E on rabbits in Australia made me think of this fine poet. The poem comes from another age.

My wife and my sons, for the record, carry her "maiden" name. Happily she was no maiden before she married me. :-)

[Spider Jerusalem]

1. Larkin was a dreadful, racist, misogynist bastard...

but a brilliant poet nonetheless; here's my favourite Larkin poem:

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

[NNadir]

2. I have heard it said that this case was overstated.

Whatever the case, he was a brilliant poet.

The transistor works even though Shockley was a racist creep, and the Stark effect is still a well known effect in Physics although Johannes Stark served time in prison for being a Nazi.