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The Complete Poems
Philip Larkin
Top 10 Best Quotes
“What do they think has happened, the old fools, To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools, And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose, They could alter things back to when they danced all night, Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September? Or do they fancy there's really been no change, And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight, Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming Watching the light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange; Why aren't they screaming?”
“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”
“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.”
“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”
“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.”
“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.—
“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.—
“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;—
“In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make By loving others, but across most it sweeps As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache, As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps, Spreads slowly through them ——
“Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs: —
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Book Keywords:
ageing, poetry