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Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin

Solar

Suspended lion face
Spilling at the centre
Of an unfurnished sky
How still you stand,
And how unaided
Single stalkless flower
You pour unrecompensed.
 
The eye sees you
Simplified by distance
Into an origin,
Your petalled head of flames
Continuously exploding.
Heat is the echo of your
Gold.
 
Coined there among
Lonely horizontals
You exist openly.
Our needs hourly
Climb and return like angels.
Unclosing like a hand,
You give for ever.

#English #XXCentury

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Woman at a Window, by Caspar David Friedrich
High Windows

When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she… Taking pills or wearing a diaphrag… I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all th…
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Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest… Lying together there goes back so… An emblem of two people being hone… Yet more and more time passes sile… Outside the wind’s incomplete unre…
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First Sight

Lambs that learn to walk in snow When their bleating clouds the air Meet a vast unwelcome, know Nothing but a sunless glare. Newly stumbling to and fro
The North Ship

I saw three ships go sailing by, Over the sea, the lifting sea, And the wind rose in the morning s… And one was rigged for a long jour… The first ship turned towards the…
The Sunday Sessions: MCMXIV (1914)

Those long uneven lines Standing as patiently As if they were stretched outside The Oval or Villa Park, The crowns of hats, the sun
Poetry of Departures

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand, As epitaph: He chucked up everything And just cleared off, And always the voice will sound
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Man Reading (Nicola d’Inverno), by John Singer Sargent
Maturity

A stationary sense... as, I suppo… I shall have, till my single body… Inaccurate, tired; Then I shall start to feel the ba… Take over, sickening and masterful…
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Reasons for Attendance

The trumpet’s voice, loud and auth… Draws me a moment to the lighted g… To watch the dancers —all under tw… Solemnly on the beat of happiness. –Or so I fancy, sensing the smoke…
Ambulances

Closed like confessionals, they th… Loud noons of cities, giving back None of the glances they absorb. Light glossy grey, arms on a plaqu… They come to rest at any kerb:
Money

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches… ‘Why do you let me lie here wastef… I am all you never had of goods an… You could get them still by writin… So I look at others, what they do…
Nothing to Be Said

For nations vague as weed, For nomads among stones, Small—statured cross—faced tribes And cobble—close families In mill—towns on dark mornings
Born Yesterday

Tightly-folded bud, I have wished you something None of the others would: Not the usual stuff About being beautiful,
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Autobiography at an Air-Station

Delay, well, travellers must expec… Delay. For how long? No one seems… With all the luggage weighed, the… It can’t be long... We amble too… Sit in steel chairs, buy cigarette…
At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Vers de Société

My wife and I have asked a crowd… To come and waste their time and o… You’d care to join us? In a pig’s… Day comes to an end. The gas fire breathes, the trees a…
This Is the First Thing

This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe Within a wood.



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