Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis

by Philip Larkin

They see him, too. They’re quiet. To realise

  This new thing held in common makes them quiet,

  For past these doors are rooms, and rooms past those,

  And more rooms yet, each one further off

  And harder to return from; and who knows

  Which he will see, and when? For the moment, wait,

  Look down at the yard. Outside seems old enough:

  Red brick, lagged pipes, and someone walking by it

  Out to the car park, free. Then, past the gate,

  Traffic; a locked church; short terraced streets

  Where kids chalk games, and girls with hair-dos fetch

  Their separates from the cleaners – O world,

  Your loves, your chances, are beyond the stretch

  Of any hand from here! And so, unreal,

  A touching dream to which we all are lulled

  But wake from separately. In it, conceits

  And self-protecting ignorance congeal

  To carry life, collapsing only when

  Called to these corridors (for now once more

  The nurse beckons –). Each gets up and goes

  At last. Some will be out by lunch, or four;

  Others, not knowing it, have come to join

  The unseen congregations whose white rows

  Lie set apart above – women, men;

  Old, young; crude facets of the only coin

  This place accepts. All know they are going to die.

  Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,

  And somewhere like this. That is what it means,

  This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend

  The thought of dying, for unless its powers

  Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes

  The coming dark, though crowds each evening try

  With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.

  Posterity

  Jake Balokowsky, my biographer,

  Has this page microfilmed. Sitting inside

  His air-conditioned cell at Kennedy

  In jeans and sneakers, he’s no call to hide

  Some slight impatience with his destiny:

  ‘I’m stuck with this old fart at least a year;

  I wanted to teach school in Tel Aviv,

  But Myra’s folks’ – he makes the money sign –

  ‘Insisted I got tenure. When there’s kids –’

  He shrugs. ‘It’s stinking dead, the research line;

  Just let me put this bastard on the skids,

  I’ll get a couple of semesters leave

  To work on Protest Theater.’ They both rise,

  Make for the Coke dispenser. ‘What’s he like?

  Christ, I just told you. Oh, you know the thing,

  That crummy textbook stuff from Freshman Psych,

  Not out of kicks or something happening –

  One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.’

  Dublinesque

  Down stucco sidestreets,

  Where light is pewter

  And afternoon mist

  Brings lights on in shops

  Above race-guides and rosaries,

  A funeral passes.

  The hearse is ahead,

  But after there follows

  A troop of streetwalkers

  In wide flowered hats,

  Leg-of-mutton sleeves,

  And ankle-length dresses.

  There is an air of great friendliness,

  As if they were honouring

  One they were fond of;

  Some caper a few steps,

  Skirts held skilfully

  (Someone claps time),

  And of great sadness also.

  As they wend away

  A voice is heard singing

  Of Kitty, or Katy,

  As if the name meant once

  All love, all beauty.

  Homage to a Government

  Next year we are to bring the soldiers home

  For lack of money, and it is all right.

  Places they guarded, or kept orderly,

  Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly.

  We want the money for ourselves at home

  Instead of working. And this is all right.

  It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen,

  But now it’s been decided nobody minds.

  The places are a long way off, not here,

  Which is all right, and from what we hear

  The soldiers there only made trouble happen.

  Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

  Next year we shall be living in a country

  That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.

  The statues will be standing in the same

  Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.

  Our children will not know it’s a different country.

  All we can hope to leave them now is money.

  1969

  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.

  How Distant

  How distant, the departure of young men

  Down valleys, or watching

  The green shore past the salt-white cordage

  Rising and falling,

  Cattlemen, or carpenters, or keen

  Simply to get away

  From married villages before morning,

  Melodeons play

  On tiny decks past fraying cliffs of water

  Or late at night

  Sweet under the differently-swung stars,

  When the chance sight

  Of a girl doing her laundry in the steerage

  Ramifies endlessly.

  This is being young,

  Assumption of the startled century

  Like new store clothes,

  The huge decisions printed out by feet

  Inventing where they tread,

  The random windows conjuring a street.

  Sad Steps

  Groping back to bed after a piss

  I part thick curtains, and am startled by

  The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

  Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie

  Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.

  There’s something laughable about this,

  The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow

  Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart

  (Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

  High and preposterous and separate –

  Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!

  O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

  One shivers slightly, looking up there.

  The hardness and the brightness and the plain

  Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

  Is a reminder of the strength and pain

  Of being young; that it can’t come again,

  But is for others undiminished somewhere.

  Solar

  Suspended lion face

  Spilling at the centre

  Of an unfurnished sky

  How still you stand,

  And how unaided

  Single stalkless flower

  You pour unrecompensed.

  The eye sees you

  Simplified by distance

  Into an origin,

  Your petalled head of flames

  Continuously exploding.

  Heat is the echo of your

  Gold.

  Coined there among
<
br />   Lonely horizontals

  You exist openly.

  Our needs hourly

  Climb and return like angels.

  Unclosing like a hand,

  You give for ever.

  Annus Mirabilis

  Sexual intercourse began

  In nineteen sixty-three

  (Which was rather late for me) –

  Between the end of the Chatterley ban

  And the Beatles’ first LP.

  Up till then there’d only been

  A sort of bargaining,

  A wrangle for a ring,

  A shame that started at sixteen

  And spread to everything.

  Then all at once the quarrel sank:

  Everyone felt the same,

  And every life became

  A brilliant breaking of the bank,

  A quite unlosable game.

  So life was never better than

  In nineteen sixty-three

  (Though just too late for me) –

  Between the end of the Chatterley ban

  And the Beatles’ first LP.

  Vers de Société

  My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps

  To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps

  You’d care to join us? In a pig’s arse, friend.

  Day comes to an end.

  The gas fire breathes, the trees are darkly swayed.

  And so Dear Warlock-Williams: I’m afraid –

  Funny how hard it is to be alone.

  I could spend half my evenings, if I wanted,

  Holding a glass of washing sherry, canted

  Over to catch the drivel of some bitch

  Who’s read nothing but Which;

  Just think of all the spare time that has flown

  Straight into nothingness by being filled

  With forks and faces, rather than repaid

  Under a lamp, hearing the noise of wind,

  And looking out to see the moon thinned

  To an air-sharpened blade.

  A life, and yet how sternly it’s instilled

  All solitude is selfish. No one now

  Believes the hermit with his gown and dish

  Talking to God (who’s gone too); the big wish

  Is to have people nice to you, which means

  Doing it back somehow.

  Virtue is social. Are, then, these routines

  Playing at goodness, like going to church?

  Something that bores us, something we don’t do well

  (Asking that ass about his fool research)

  But try to feel, because, however crudely,

  It shows us what should be?

  Too subtle, that. Too decent, too. Oh hell,

  Only the young can be alone freely.

  The time is shorter now for company,

  And sitting by a lamp more often brings

  Not peace, but other things.

  Beyond the light stand failure and remorse

  Whispering Dear Warlock-Williams: Why, of course –

  Show Saturday

  Grey day for the Show, but cars jam the narrow lanes.

  Inside, on the field, judging has started: dogs

  (Set their legs back, hold out their tails) and ponies (manes

  Repeatedly smoothed, to calm heads); over there, sheep

  (Cheviot and Blackface); by the hedge, squealing logs

  (Chain Saw Competition). Each has its own keen crowd.

  In the main arena, more judges meet by a jeep:

  The jumping’s on next. Announcements, splutteringly loud,

  Clash with the quack of a man with pound notes round his hat

  And a lit-up board. There’s more than just animals:

  Bead-stalls, balloon-men, a Bank; a beer-marquee that

  Half-screens a canvas Gents; a tent selling tweed,

  And another, jackets. Folks sit about on bales

  Like great straw dice. For each scene is linked by spaces

  Not given to anything much, where kids scrap, freed,

  While their owners stare different ways with incurious faces.

  The wrestling starts, late; a wide ring of people; then cars;

  Then trees; then pale sky. Two young men in acrobats’ tights

  And embroidered trunks hug each other; rock over the grass,

  Stiff-legged, in a two-man scrum. One falls: they shake hands.

  Two more start, one grey-haired: he wins, though. They’re not so much fights

  As long immobile strainings that end in unbalance

  With one on his back, unharmed, while the other stands

  Smoothing his hair. But there are other talents –

  The long high tent of growing and making, wired-off

  Wood tables past which crowds shuffle, eyeing the scrubbed spaced

  Extrusions of earth: blanch leeks like church candles, six pods of

  Broad beans (one split open), dark shining-leafed cabbages – rows

  Of single supreme versions, followed (on laced

  Paper mats) by dairy and kitchen; four brown eggs, four white eggs,

  Four plain scones, four dropped scones, pure excellences that enclose

  A recession of skills. And, after them, lambing-sticks, rugs,

  Needlework, knitted caps, baskets, all worthy, all well done,

  But less than the honeycombs. Outside, the jumping’s over.

  The young ones thunder their ponies in competition

  Twice round the ring; then trick races, Musical Stalls,

  Sliding off, riding bareback, the ponies dragged to and fro for

  Bewildering requirements, not minding. But now, in the background,

  Like shifting scenery, horse-boxes move; each crawls

  Towards the stock entrance, tilting and swaying, bound

  For far-off farms. The pound-note man decamps.

  The car park has thinned. They’re loading jumps on a truck.

  Back now to private addresses, gates and lamps

  In high stone one-street villages, empty at dusk,

  And side roads of small towns (sports finals stuck

  In front doors, allotments reaching down to the railway);

  Back now to autumn, leaving the ended husk

  Of summer that brought them here for Show Saturday –

  The men with hunters, dog-breeding wool-defined women,

  Children all saddle-swank, mugfaced middleaged wives

  Glaring at jellies, husbands on leave from the garden

  Watchful as weasels, car-tuning curt-haired sons –

  Back now, all of them, to their local lives:

  To names on vans, and business calendars

  Hung up in kitchens; back to loud occasions

  In the Corn Exchange, to market days in bars,

  To winter coming, as the dismantled Show

  Itself dies back into the area of work.

  Let it stay hidden there like strength, below

  Sale-bills and swindling; something people do,

  Not noticing how time’s rolling smithy-smoke

  Shadows much greater gestures; something they share

  That breaks ancestrally each year into

  Regenerate union. Let it always be there.

  Money

  Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:

  ‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?

  I am all you never had of goods and sex.

  You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’

  So I look at others, what they do with theirs:

  They certainly don’t keep it upstairs.

  By now they’ve a second house and car and wife:

  Clearly money has something to do with life

  – In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:

  You can’t put off being young until you retire,

  And however you bank your screw, the money you save

  Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave.

  I listen to mone
y singing. It’s like looking down

  From long french windows at a provincial town,

  The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad

  In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

  Cut Grass

  Cut grass lies frail:

  Brief is the breath

  Mown stalks exhale.

  Long, long the death

  It dies in the white hours

  Of young-leafed June

  With chestnut flowers,

  With hedges snowlike strewn,

  White lilac bowed,

  Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,

  And that high-builded cloud

  Moving at summer’s pace.

  Poems uncollected by Larkin

  Love

  The difficult part of love

  Is being selfish enough,