The Complete Poems Quotes

“That was a pretty one, I heard you call
From the unsatisfactory hall
To the unsatisfactory room where I
Played record after record, idly,
Wasting my time at home, that you
Looked so much forward to.

Oliver's Riverside Blues, it was. And now
I shall, I suppose, always remember how
The flock of notes those antique Negroes blew
Our of Chicago air into
A huge remembering pre-electric horn
The year after I was born
Three decades later made this sudden bridge
From your unsatisfactory age
To my unsatisfactory prime.

Truly, though our element is time,
We're not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.

- Reference Back”
― Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems

“Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence.
In her wake
No waters breed or break.”
― Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems

“Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.”
― Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems

“When first we faced, and touching showed
How well we knew the early moves,
Behind the moonlight and the frost,
The excitement and the gratitude,
There stood how much our meeting owed
To other meetings, other loves.

The decades of a different life
That opened past your inch-close eyes
Belonged to others, lavished, lost;
Nor could I hold you hard enough
To call my years of hunger-strife
Back for your mouth to colonise.

Admitted: and the pain is real.
But when did love not try to change
The world back to itself–no cost,
No past, no people else at all–
Only what meeting made us feel,
So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?

- When first we faced, and touching showed”
― Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems

“May out of the clouds of chance
A calm wind blow, a bird be sighted and steer
Straight for your bough, and its pursuing love
Break in the air, a scarlet target afloat
For the strength of your striking arrow;

— Philip Larkin, from section III of “Now,” The Complete Poems, ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)”
― Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems

“Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs: — Philip Larkin, from “Wants,” The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)”
― Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems

“Then begins
A snivel on the violins:
I think of your face among all those faces,

Beautiful and devout before
Cascades of monumental slithering,
One of your gloves unnoticed on the floor
Beside those new, slightly-outmoded shoes.
Here it goes quickly dark. I lose
All but the outline of the still and withering

Leaves on half-emptied trees. Behind
The glowing wavebands, rabid storms of chording
By being distant overpower my mind
All the more shamelessly, their cut-off shout
Leaving me desperate to pick out
Your hands, tiny in all that air, applauding.

— Philip Larkin, from “Broadcast,” The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)”
― Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems

“Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.

— Philip Larkin, from “Reference Back,” The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)”
― Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems

“How strange it is
For the heart to be loveless, and as cold as these.”
― Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems

“Alone now, in my dark room,
The pebbles cease to drop into the rocking pool
And gradually the surface quietens
Reflecting image of darkest peace and silence.
No questions catch the clothes
But only as it were a spreading
Draws all threads to their finished pattern
And you are pieced together bit by bit
Set against the evening
Lovely and glowing, like a chain of gold

from "(A Study in Light and Dark)”
― Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems