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Faith Healing

Slowly the women file to where he stands

Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,

Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly

Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,

Within whose warm spring rain of loving care

Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,

What's wrong, the deep American voice demands,

And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer

Philip Larkin

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

All they find, outside the fold,

Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,

Philip Larkin

Wires

The widest prairies have electric fences,

For though old cattle know they must not stray

Young steers are always scenting purer water

Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires

Leads them to blunder up against the wires

Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter.

Young steers become old cattle from that day,

Electric limits to their widest senses.

Philip Larkin

Essential Beauty

In frames as large as rooms that face all ways

And block the ends of streets with giant loaves,

Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise

Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon, shine

Perpetually these sharply-pictured groves

Of how life should be. High above the gutter

A silver knife sinks into golden butter,

A glass of milk stands in a meadow, and

Philip Larkin

Toads Revisited

Walking around in the park

Should feel better than work:

The lake, the sunshine,

The grass to lie on,

Blurred playground noises

Beyond black-stockinged nurses -

Not a bad place to be.

Yet it doesn't suit me.

Philip Larkin

Send No Money

Standing under the fobbed

Impendent belly of Time

Tell me the truth, I said,

Teach me the way things go.

All the other lads there

Were itching to have a bash,

But I thought wanting unfair:

It and finding out clash.

Philip Larkin

Next, Please

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!

Philip Larkin

Going

There is an evening coming in

Across the fields, one never seen before,

That lights no lamps.

Silken it seems at a distance, yet

When it is drawn up over the knees and breast

It brings no comfort.

Where has the tree gone, that locked

Earth to the sky? What is under my hands,

Philip Larkin

Dockery And Son

'Dockery was junior to you,

Wasn't he?' said the Dean. 'His son's here now.'

Death-suited, visitant, I nod. 'And do

You keep in touch with-' Or remember how

Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight

We used to stand before that desk, to give

'Our version' of 'these incidents last night'?

I try the door of where I used to live:

Philip Larkin

Deceptions

"Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain

consciousness until the next morning. I was horrified to

discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable,

and cried like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt."

—Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor

Even so distant, I can taste the grief,

Bitter and sharp with stalks, he made you gulp.

The sun's occasional print, the brisk brief

Philip Larkin

Take One Home For The Kiddies

On shallow straw, in shadeless glass,

Huddled by empty bowls, they sleep:

No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass -

Mam, get us one of them to keep.

Living toys are something novel,

But it soon wears off somehow.

Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel -

Mam, we're playing funerals now.

Philip Larkin

Days

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

Philip Larkin