I've never heard Larkin read, so I'm quite happy with my own internal 'voice' for them.

Just reading 'Church Going' again, I wanted to comment on a couple of wonderful details, but then I kept noticing more and more of them ... Marvellously accurate phrases, conveying such levels of meaning with just two or three words, like 'and stuff' in line 5 ('some brass and stuff'), which is just casual enough; 'unignorable' in line 7 ('a tense, musty, unignorable silence'), an astonishing adjective; the sneaky use of the phrase 'God knows' in line 8, which is not casual at all but appears to be. Later, 'let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep' is perfect; as is 'the ghostly silt' as the poet's name for what has gone, or will have gone - it's a name for history, more or less.

Wonderful images: the cycle-clips (what else!) taken off 'in awkward reverence'; the 'Here endeth' pronounced 'much more loudly than I'd meant', in response to which 'The echoes snigger briefly' (that's wonderful!); the detail of the 'Irish sixpence' he donates as he leaves.

And familiar words used with incredibly precise meanings, like 'particular' ('after dark, will dubious women come/To make their children touch a particular stone?'), 'advised' ('on some/Advised night see walking a dead one'), which contrasts with the incredibly precise words of which the poet - 'bored, uninformed' - pretends not to know the meaning ('the crew/That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were').

The strange affection of a phrase like 'This special shell'.

I know most of the last stanza off by heart, but I can never remember the three syllables 'he once heard' in the middle of the penultimate line. I wonder why.


Oh, martle's posted another poem while I was writing. I love 'An Arundel Tomb', too - the ending of that one is also very typical of Larkin, especially the way he makes the very last word, 'love', the only half-rhyme in the entire poem!

An Arundel Tomb

Lovely; I really like that one too. I must ask at the Library next week and see if there is a CD of his work I can order.
Mind you, my computer voice reads it quite well! I must look on the internet also and see what's there.
I think I like the 'Church Going' and 'An Arundel Tomb' because it's something people do, wander into places, but it's the way he puts it...

I have never listened to his work before, although I have heard some of it on the radio, but have never followed it up or paid attention.

Partly prompted by BBM's recent quiz question on the NMC thread here's another poem by Philip Larkin.


Aubade

I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not used, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never:
But at the total emptiness forever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing
that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no-one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

George, I've only just started reading this thread, latest posts first, and hadn't previously read any Larkin. In fact I'm really only just discovering that I can enjoy poetry. Though I'm not sure that I would say I enjoyed Aubade. It expresses so well some of that fear I try to suppress...

I've just read your footnote. How interesting. I do like An Arundel Tomb. (Thanks to martle for posting it. I'll read more of this thread when I find the time.)

I find that there are Larkin poems that I love, but others that I really can't be bothered with.
And I'm afraid that I find that hedgehog poem hysterically funny. 

But I've gone to bed. Getting up in 6 hours time.

This Larkin fellow seems to have been one of the Annoying British Materialist school, out of the same stable as all those insufferable biologists and philosophers. He does not quite dare to be a Buddhist and he has forgotten or ignores the triumph of Art over Life (a fact of which most cultivated persons were aware in 1908 but are now no longer). Nor for that matter does there seem to be much passion in his work, even.

It is a consolation then to turn to the universal truths of this tasteful piece of self-analysis from the pen of Christopher Isherwood:

  When I was young and wanted to see the sights,
  They told me: "Cast an eye over the Roman Camp
  If you care to,
  But plan to spend most of your day at the Aquarium -
  Because, after all, the Aquarium -
  Well, I mean to say, the Aquarium -
  Till you've seen the Aquarium you ain't seen nothing."

  So I cast an eye over
  The Roman Camp -
  And that old Roman Camp,
  That old, old Roman Camp
  Got me
  Interested.

  So that now, near closing-time,
  I find that I still know nothing -
  And am not even sorry that I know nothing -
  About fish.

Sounds as if we are kindred spirits!  I decided to try and understand a bit more about poetry this year, and, like you, started at the end of the thread, then went back and plodded all the way through! But it was worth it.

Thanks, Andy. I enjoyed listening to Larkin, although I did not understand everything. I find his poems touch me. How strange that psychologists would classify him as depressed. Why do people think that we should be unfeeling?