Collected Poems Quotes

“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.”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.

from “Why Did I Dream of You Last Night?,”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“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, Collected Poems

“When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.

Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired -- though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it's just
A compensating make-believe.

Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on -- in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.

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."

(Best Company)”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“We should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,

Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear,
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!

Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,

Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it's
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

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.

- Next, Please”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“The breath that sharpens life is life itself.”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“On pillow after pillow lies
The wild white hair and staring eyes;
Jaws stand open; necks are stretched
With every tendon sharply sketched;
A bearded mouth talks silently
To someone no one else can see.

Sixty years ago they smiled
At lover, husband, first-born child.

Smiles are for youth. For old age come
Death's terror and delirium.

- Heads in the Women's Ward”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“A stationary sense . . . as, I suppose,
I shall have, till my single body grows
        Inaccurate, tired;
Then I shall start to feel the backward pull
Take over, sickening and masterful —
        Some say, desired.

And this must be the prime of life . . . I blink,
As if at pain; for it is pain, to think
        This pantomime
Of compensating act and counter-act,
Defeat and counterfeit, makes up, in fact,
        My ablest time.

- Maturity”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my coat and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.

(A Study Of Reading Habits) ”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“Life is slow dying.”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“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.

- The Mower”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“They say eyes clear with age,
As dew clarifies air
To sharpen evenings,
As if time put an edge
Round the last shape of things
To show them there;
The many-levelled trees,
The long soft tides of grass
Wrinkling away the gold
Wind-ridden waves- all these,
They say, come back to focus
As we grow old.

- Long Sight In Age”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“Death is no different whined at than withstood.”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“Have I been wrong, to think the breath
That sharpens life is life itself, not death?”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“I take off my cycle-clips in awkward reverence.”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“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.

— Philip Larkin, from “Sad Steps,” Collected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2001)”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“The glow, back over the common, comes from the railway:
that’s the Church candle, been burning now quite a number of years:
there, that’s the light the lover flicks
as he follows the joys of consummation with the joys of a cigarette:
that light was the flash as a man shot himself:    
that’s a searchlight feeling for bombers:
there, the light appears as the squinting wife regards the fuddled husband:
these are twin headlights of a capitalist’s car:
this, the gaslight of a trodden worker who would tread:
that’s the light of a cinema:     
that’s the light of Mars that’s the moon
that’s a match.


     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.

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989)”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems