Philip Larkin

[Slim]

The poet Philip Larkin was born 100 years ago today.

I don't think I'd ever heard of him before I studied English Literature on a Humanities course which I never finished, in 1979. I remember a tutorial with a genial lecturer in the first term who read us a couple of his poems as seven or eight of us sat around in comfortable chairs in his office.

At that time Larkin was working as a library administrator in Hull and would only have been in his late 50s, which I must say does make me reflect on my own mortality a bit now I think about it.

And on that note here's a snippet from his poem Aubade, which is about exactly that:

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.

[Slim]

This is possibly his best known work, 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.

[dom]

Radio 4 are doing a 10 * 15 minute series to commemorate his birth 100 years ago...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m0019yy2