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Now, Helpless In The Hollow Of An Unarmorial Age, A Trough Of Smoke In Slow Suspended Skeins Above Their Scrap Of History, Only An Attitude Remains: Time Has Transfigured Them Into Untruth. The Stone Finality They Hardly Meant Has Come To Be Their Final Blazon, And To Prove Our Almost-instinct Almost True: What Will Survive Of Us Is Love.

-Philip Larkin

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Now, Helpless In The

Philip Larkin

...

Now, Helpless In The Hollow Of An Unarmorial Age, A Trough Of Smoke In Slow Suspended Skeins Above Their Scrap Of History, Only An Attitude Remains: Time Has Transfigured Them Into Untruth. The Stone Finality They Hardly Meant Has Come To Be Their Final Blazon, And To Prove Our Almost-instinct Almost True: What Will Survive Of Us Is Love.

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Why Should I Let The Toad Work Squat On My Life? Can't I Use My Wit As A Pitchfork And Drive The Brute Off? Six Days Of The Week It Soils With Its Sickening Poison-- Just For Paying A Few Bills! That's Out Of Proportion.

Beneath It All, Desire Of Oblivion Runs: Despite The Artful Tensions Of The Calendar, The Life Insurance, The Tabled Fertility Rites, The Costly Aversion Of The Eyes From Death- Beneath It All, Desire Of Oblivion Runs.

My Age Fallen Away Like White Swaddling Floats In The Middle Distance, Becomes An Inhabited Cloud.

I Wouldn't Mind Seeing China If I Could Come Back The Same Day.

Never Such Innocence, Never Before Or Since, As Changed Itself To Past Without A Word--the Men Leaving The Gardens Tidy, The Thousands Of Marriages Lasting A Little While Longer: Never Such Innocence Again.

The Trees Are Coming Into Leaf Like Something Almost Being Said.

They Say Eyes Clear With Age.

Only One Ship Is Seeking Us, A Black-sailed Unfamiliar, Towing At Her Backa Huge And Birdless Silence. In Her Wakeno Waters Breed Or Break.

Most Things May Never Happen: This One Will.

I Am Beginning To Think Of The Human Imagination As A Fruit Machine On Which Victories Are Rare And Separated By Much Vain Expense, And Represent A Rare Alignment Of Mental And Spiritual Qualities That Normally Are Quite At Odds.

Walk With The Dead For Fear Of Death.

A Writer Can Have Only One Language, If Language Is Going To Mean Anything To Him.

The Poetic Impulse Is Distinct From Ideas About Things Or Feelings About Things, Though It May Use These. It's More Like A Desire To Separate A Piece Of One's Experience & Set It Up On Its Own, An Isolated Object Never To Trouble You Again, At Least Not For A Bit. In The Absence Of This Impulse Nothing Stirs.

I Am Awakened Each Dawn Increasingly To Fear.

It Becomes Still More Difficult To Find words At Once True And Kind, or Not Untrue And Not Unkind.

Spring, Of All Seasons Most Gratuitous, Is Fold Of Untaught Flower, Is Race Of Water, Is Earth's Most Multiple, Excited Daughter; And Those She Has Least Use For See Her Best, Their Paths Grown Craven And Circuitous, Their Visions Mountain-clear, Their Needs Immodest.

Poetry Should Begin With Emotion In The Poet, And End With The Same Emotion In The Reader. The Poem Is Simply The Instrument Of Transferance.

Sex Is Designed For People Who Like Overcoming Obstacles.

I Am Always Trying To 'preserve' Things By Getting Other People To Read What I Have Written, And Feel What I Felt.

Uncontradicting Solitude Supports Me On Its Giant Palm; And Like A Sea-anemone Or Simple Snail, There Cautiously Unfolds, Emerges, What I Am.

To Write You Must Be Warm, Fed, Loved And Sober.

I Have Started To Say "a Quarter Of A Century" Or "thirty Years Back" About My Own Life.

I Work All Day, And Get Half-drunk At Night.

One Of The Great Criticisms Of Poets Of The Past Is That They Said One Thing And Did Another.

Above All, Though, Children Are Linked To Adults By The Simple Fact That They Are In Process Of Turning Into Them. For This They May Be Forgiven Much. Children Are Bound To Be Inferior To Adults, Or There Is No Incentive To Grow Up.

Any Memory For The Most Part Depending On Chance.

You Can't Put Off Being Young Until You Retire.

I Think Writing About Unhappiness Is Probably The Source Of My Popularity, If I Have Any - After All, Most People Are Unhappy, Don't You Think?

Dear, I Can't Write, It's All A Fantasy: A Kind Of Circling Obsession.

The Trees Are Coming Into Leaf Like Something Almost Being Said; The Recent Buds Relax And Spread, Their Greenness Is A Kind Of Grief. Is It That They Are Born Again And We Grow Old? No, They Die Too. Their Yearly Trick Of Looking New Is Written Down In Rings Of Grain. Yet Still The Unresting Castles Thresh In Fullgrown Thickness Every May. Last Year Is Dead, They Seem To Say, Begin Afresh, Afresh, Afresh.

It Is Fatal To Decide, Intellectually, What Good Poetry Is Because You Are Then In Honour Bound To Try To Write It, Instead Of The Poems That Only You Can Write.

Here No Elsewhere Underwrites My Existence.

Get Stewed:books Are A Load Of Crap.

Things Are Tougher Than We Are, Just As Earth Will Always Respond However We Mess It About.

I Can't Understand These Chaps Who Go Round American Universities Explaining How They Write Poems: It's Like Going Round Explaining How You Sleep With Your Wife.

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In Everyone There Sleeps A Sense Of Life Lived According To Love.

I Never Think Of Poetry Or The Poetry Scene, Only Separate Poems Written By Individuals.

Life Is First Boredom, Then Fear.

I Listen To Money Singing, It's Like Looking Down From Long French Windows At A Provincial Town. The Slums, The Canal, The Churches Ornate And Mad In The Evening Sun. It Is Intensely Sad.

I Think We Got Much Better Poetry When It Was All Regarded As Sinful Or Subversive, And You Had To Hide It Under The Cushion When Somebody Came In.

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There Is Bad In All Good Authors: What A Pity The Converse Isn't True!

... Everyone Young Going Down The Long Slide To Happiness, Endlessly.

How Little Our Careers Express What Lies In Us, And Yet How Much Time They Take Up. It's Sad, Really.

All The Unhurried Day / Your Mind Lay Open Like A Drawer Of Knives.

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Life Has A Practice Of Living You, If You Don't Live It.

Many Famous Feet Have Trod Sublunary Paths, And Famous Hands Have Weighed The Strength They Have Against The Strength They Need; And Famous Lips Interrogated God Concerning Franchise In Eternity.

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I Have Wished You Something None Of The Others Would.

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Now, Helpless In The Hollow Of An Unarmorial Age, A Trough Of Smoke In Slow Suspended Skeins Above Their Scrap Of History, Only An Attitude Remains: Time Has Transfigured Them Into Untruth. The Stone Finality They Hardly Meant Has Come To Be Their Final Blazon, And To Prove Our Almost-instinct Almost True: What Will Survive Of Us Is Love.

And The Case Of Butterflies So Rich It Looks As If All Summer Settled There And Died.

The Breath That Sharpens Life Is Life Itself.

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Death Is No Different Whined At Than Withstood.

Joy Is For The Simple Or The Great To Feel, Neither Of Which We Are.

Since The Majority Of Me Rejects The Majority Of You, Debating Ends Forthwith, And We Divide.'' Philip Larkin

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Boys Dream Of Native Girls Who Bring Breadfruit, Whatever They Are.

What Are Days For? Days Are Where We Live.

But Superstition, Like Belief, Must Die.

Sex Means Nothing--just The Moment Of Ecstasy, That Flares And Dies In Minutes.

Give Me A Thrill, Says The Reader, Give Me A Kick; I Don't Care How You Succeed, Or What Subject You Pick.

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Death: The Anaesthetic From Which None Come Round.

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Everyone Should Be Forcibly Transplanted To Another Continent From Their Family At The Age Of Three.

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Guiding Principles

Saki Says That Youth Is Like Hors D'oeuvres: You Are So Busy Thinking Of The Next Courses You Don't Notice It. When You've Had Them, You Wish You'd Had More Hors D'oeuvres.

I'd Like To Think...that People In Pubs Would Talk About My Poems

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I Didn't Choose Poetry: Poetry Chose Me.

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Still, Vicious Or Virtuous, Love Suits Most Of Us.

I Don't Think I Write Well - Just Better Than Anyone Else.

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Most People Know More As They Get Older: I Give All That The Cold Shoulder.

The Difficult Part Of Love Is Being Selfish Enough.

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