Is having the blind persistence
To upset an existence
Just for your own sake.
What cheek it must take.
And then the unselfish side –
How can you be satisfied,
Putting someone else first
So that you come off worst?
My life is for me.
As well ignore gravity.
Still, vicious or virtuous,
Love suits most of us.
Only the bleeder found
Selfish this wrong way round
Is ever wholly rebuffed,
And he can get stuffed.
The Life with a Hole in it
When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
But you’ve always done what you want,
You always get your own way
– A perfectly vile and foul
Inversion of all that’s been.
What the old ratbags mean
Is I’ve never done what I don’t.
So the shit in the shuttered château
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds
Is far off as ever, but so
Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod
(Six kids, and the wife in pod,
And her parents coming to stay) …
Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world’s for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you’ll get. Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Of havings-to, fear, faces.
Days sift down it constantly. Years.
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 done, 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 for ever,
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 will not 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.
The Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
Poems unpublished by Larkin
Letter to a Friend about Girls
After comparing lives with you for years
I see how I’ve been losing: all the while
I’ve met a different gauge of girl from yours.
Grant that, and all the rest makes sense as well:
My mortification at your pushovers,
Your mystification at my fecklessness –
Everything proves we play in separate leagues.
Before, I couldn’t credit your intrigues
Because I thought all girls the same, but yes,
You bag real birds, though they’re from alien covers.
Now I believe your staggering skirmishes
In train, tutorial and telephone booth,
The wife whose husband watched away matches
While she behaved so badly in a bath,
And all the rest who beckon from that world
Described on Sundays only, where to want
Is straightway to be wanted, seek to find,
And no one gets upset or seems to mind
At what you say to them, or what you don’t:
A world where all the nonsense is annulled,
And beauty is accepted slang for yes.
But equally, haven’t you noticed mine?
They have their world, not much compared with yours,
But where they work, and age, and put off men
By being unattractive, or too shy,
Or having morals – anyhow, none give in:
Some of them go quite rigid with disgust
At anything but marriage: that’s all lust
And so not worth considering; they begin
Fetching your hat, so that you have to lie
Till everything’s confused: you mine away
For months, both of you, till the collapse comes
Into remorse, tears, and wondering why
You ever start such boring barren games
– But there, don’t mind my saeva indignatio:
I’m happier now I’ve got things clear, although
It’s strange we never meet each other’s sort:
There should be equal chances, I’d’ve thought.
Must finish now. One day perhaps I’ll know
What makes you be so lucky in your ratio
– One of those ‘more things’, could it be? Horatio.
December 1959
Love Again
Love again: wanking at ten past three
(Surely he’s taken her home by now?),
The bedroom hot as a bakery,
The drink gone dead, without showing how
To meet tomorrow, and afterwards,
And the usual pain, like dysentery.
Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt,
Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare,
And me supposed to be ignorant,
Or fi
nd it funny, or not to care,
Even … but why put it into words?
Isolate rather this element
That spreads through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And say why it never worked for me.
Something to do with violence
A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity.
20 September 1979
Index of Titles and First Lines
About twenty years ago, 1
After comparing lives with you for years, 1
Afternoons, 1
Always too eager for the future, we, 1
Ambulances, 1
Annus Mirabilis, 1
Arundel Tomb, An, 1
At Grass, 1
Aubade, 1
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone, 1
Building, The, 1
Card Players, The, 1
Church Going, 1
Closed like confessionals, they thread, 1
Coming, 1
Coming up England by a different line, 1
Cut Grass, 1
Cut grass lies frail, 1
Dawn, 1
Deceptions, 1
Dockery and Son, 1
‘Dockery was junior to you’, 1
Down stucco sidestreets, 1
Dublinesque, 1
Even so distant, I can taste the grief, 1
Faith Healing, 1
For nations vague as weed, 1
For Sidney Bechet, 1
Forget What Did, 1
Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel, 1
Going, 1
Going, Going, 1
Grey day for the Show, but cars jam the narrow lanes, 1
Groping back to bed after a piss, 1
Here, 1
High Windows, 1
Higher than the handsomest hotel, 1
Homage to a Government, 1
How Distant, 1
How distant, the departure of young men, 1
Hurrying to catch my Comet, 1
I deal with farmers, things like dips and feed, 1
I Remember, I Remember, 1
I thought it would last my time, 1
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night, 1
If, My Darling, 1
If my darling were once to decide, 1
Jake Balokowsky, my biographer, 1
Jan van Hogspeuw staggers to the door, 1
Letter to a Friend about Girls, 1
Life with a Hole in it, The, 1
Light spreads darkly downwards from the high, 1
Livings, 1
Love, 1
Love Again, 1
Love again: wanking at ten past three, 1
MCMXIV, 1
Money, 1
Mower, The, 1
Mr Bleaney, 1
My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps, 1
Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses, 1
Next, Please, 1
Next year we are to bring the soldiers home, 1
Nothing To Be Said, 1
Oh, no one can deny, 1
Old Fools, The, 1
On longer evenings, 1
Once I am sure there’s nothing going on, 1
Poetry of Departures, 1
Posterity, 1
Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me, 1
Sad Steps, 1
Self’s the Man, 1
Send No Money, 1
Sexual intercourse began, 1
Show Saturday, 1
Side by side, their faces blurred, 1
Slowly the women file to where he stands, 1
Solar, 1
Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand, 1
Standing under the fobbed, 1
Stopping the diary, 1
Study of Reading Habits, A, 1
Summer is fading, 1
Suspended lion face, 1
Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows, 1
Talking in Bed, 1
Talking in bed ought to be easiest, 1
That note you hold, narrowing and rising, shakes, 1
That Whitsun, I was late getting away, 1
The difficult part of love, 1
The eye can hardly pick them out, 1
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found, 1
The trees are coming into leaf, 1
There is an evening coming in, 1
They fuck you up, your mum and dad, 1
This Be The Verse, 1
‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He stayed’, 1
Those long uneven lines, 1
To step over the low wall that divides, 1
To the Sea, 1
To wake, and hear a cock, 1
Toads, 1
Toads Revisited, 1
Trees, The, 1
Vers de Société, 1
Walking around in the park, 1
Wants, 1
What do they think has happened, the old fools, 1
When getting my nose in a book, 1
When I see a couple of kids, 1
When I throw back my head and howl, 1
Whitsun Weddings, The, 1
Why should I let the toad work, 1
Wild Oats, 1
About the Author
Philip Larkin was born in Coventry in 1922 and was educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and St John’s College, Oxford. As well as his volumes of poems, which include The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, he wrote two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, and two books of collected journalism: All What Jazz: A Record Library, and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose. He worked as a librarian at the University of Hull from 1955 until his death in 1985. He was the best-loved poet of his generation, and the recipient of innumerable honours, including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and the WH Smith Award.
By Philip Larkin
poetry
THE NORTH SHIP
XX POEMS
THE FANTASY POETS NO. 21
THE LESS DECEIVED (THE MARVELL PRESS)
THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS
HIGH WINDOWS
COLLECTED POEMS (EDITED BY ANTHONY THWAITE)
EARLY POEMS AND JUVENILIA (EDITED BY A. T. TOLLEY)
THE OXFORD BOOK OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENGLISH VERSE (ED.)
fiction
JILL
A GIRL IN WINTER
TROUBLE AT WILLOW GABLES (EDITED BY JAMES BOOTH)
non-fiction
ALL WHAT JAZZ: A RECORD DIARY 1961–71
REQUIRED WRITING: MISCELLANEOUS PIECES 1955–82
SELECTED LETTERS OF PHILIP LARKIN 1940–1985
(EDITED BY ANTHONY THWAITE)
FURTHER REQUIREMENTS: INTERVIEWS, BROADCASTS,
STATEMENTS AND REVIEWS 1952–85
(EDITED BY ANTHONY THWAITE)
Copyright
First published in 2011
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
© The Estate of Philip Larkin, 2011
Introduction © Martin Amis, 2011
The right of Philip Larkin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–27176–4
by Martin Amis
Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis Page 7
