Can you elaborate (in private if necessary!!)?

Inspired by the Churches and Cathedrals thread, here's one of my very favourite poems. The phrase in the third-to-last stanza - 'some ruin-bibber, randy for antique' - is one of Larkin's devastatingly accurate but not entirely unsympathetic characterisations (I think the devastating accuracy is a funny kind of sympathy?) ... it could probably be applied to more than a few music-lovers.

The last 10 or 11 lines build to a wonderfully oblique conclusion.


Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.


Philip Larkin

Tinners, I can't say 'Wonderful!' because Mart has already done it, but I echo it. These lines, among many, in particular...

 For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

Perfect.

I'd never put it into words quite like that before, but I think so too!

I don't think I ought to have described the last 10 lines as 'building up' to anything: 8 or 9 of them do, but the last line is a deflation - strictly speaking, bathos.

Isn't it more of a 'flattening out' than a 'deflation'? Very Larkinesque, that.

And does anyone else have this problem (if it is one)? Having heard Larkin's inimitable voice reciting his own verse, I find it virtually impossible to read the stuff without hearing it so delivered in my head. Gee, thanks Philip. On the other hand, it always seems to make more sense that way, somehow.

I'm alarmed by your collective alarm, gentlemen! I didn't mean to diminish it, or to suggest the 'b*****' needed 'forgiving' - I only wanted to analyse the effect correctly. It's the deflation (which I thought of in a sort of Bloomian sense) that makes the last stanza so perfect, isn't it? The realisation that that's the only place the poem can be heading ...

I did say 'technically speaking', George! The 'b' word is defined by my dictionary as ... oh, actually, my dictionary does think the word implies something ludicrous to the descent. That's not what I meant at all.

As you were.

i do like that larkin poem but prefer the one with the last line 'what remains of us is love'
if i have the energy or if someone else doesn't post it while i'm at the shops i'll post it later