Features February 1986
Philip Larkin, 1922-1985
On Philip Larkin’s poetry.
Unless there is a cache of poems secreted somewhere in Hull, which we may doubt, the poet Philip Larkin died before the man. As far as I know, his last poem was “Aubade,” published in the Times Literary Supplement almost a decade ago. It begins:
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.
The fear of dying, daily companion of many, found its Homer, Dante, and Milton in Philip Larkin. His post-religious, almost Roman skepticism looks forward only to “total emptiness for ever,/The sure extinction that we travel to.” As in...
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