I Remember, I Remember by Philip Larkin
Coming up England by a different line For once, early in the cold new year, We stopped, and, watching men with number plates Sprint down the platform to familiar gates, ‘Why, Coventry!’ I exclaimed. ‘I was born here.’ I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign That this was still the town that had […]
How Distant by Philip Larkin
How distant, the departure of young men Down valleys, or watching The green shore past the salt-white cordage Rising and falling. Cattlemen, or carpenters, or keen Simply to get away From married villages before morning, Melodeons play On tiny decks past fraying cliffs of water Or late at night Sweet under the differently-swung stars, When […]
Home Is So Sad by Philip Larkin
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, Shaped in the comfort of the last to go As if to win them back. Instead, bereft Of anyone to please, it withers so, Having no heart to put aside the theft. And turn again to what it started as, A joyous shot at how […]
Homage To A Government by Philip Larkin
Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home For lack of money, and it is all right. Places they guarded, or kept orderly, We want the money for ourselves at home Instead of working. And this is all right. It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen, But now it’s been decided […]
High Windows by Philip Larkin
When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she’s Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives– Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, […]
He Hears That His Beloved Has Become Engaged by Philip Larkin
For C.G.B. When she came on, you couldn’t keep your seat; Fighting your way up through the orchestra, Tup-heavy bumpkin, you confused your feet, Fell in the drum; how we went ha ha ha! But once you gained her side and started waltzing We all began to cheer; the way she leant Her cheek on […]
Grief by Philip Larkin
If grief could burn out Like a sunken coal The heart would rest quiet The unrent soul Be as still as a veil But I have watched all night The fire grow silent The grey ash soft And I stir the stubborn flint The flames have left And the bereft Heart lies impotent End of […]
Going by Philip Larkin
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 sky? What is under my hands, That I […]
Friday Night At The Royal Station Hotel by Philip Larkin
Light spreads darkly downwards from the high Clusters of lights over empty chairs That face each other, coloured differently. Through open doors, the dining-room declares A larger loneliness of knives and glass And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads An unsold evening paper. Hours pass, And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds, […]
For Sidney Bechet by Philip Larkin
That note you hold, narrowing and rising, shakes Like New Orleans reflected on the water, And in all ears appropriate falsehood wakes, Building for some a legendary Quarter Of balconies, flower-baskets and quadrilles, Everyone making love and going shares– Oh, play that thing! Mute glorious Storyvilles Others may license, grouping around their chairs Sporting-house girls […]
First Sight by Philip Larkin
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, Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies Hidden round them, […]
Far Out by Philip Larkin
Beyond the dark cartoons Are darker spaces where Small cloudy nests of stars Seem to float on air. These have no proper names: Men out alone at night Never look up at them For guidance or delight, For such evasive dust Can make so little clear: Much less is known than not, More far than […]
Faith Healing by Philip Larkin
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 […]
Essential Beauty by Philip Larkin
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 […]
Dublinesque by Philip Larkin
Down stucco sidestreets, Where light is pewter And afternoon mist Brings lights on in shops Above race-guides and rosaries, A funeral passes. The hearse is ahead, But after there follows A troop of streetwalkers In wide flowered hats, Leg-of-mutton sleeves, And ankle-length dresses. There is an air of great friendliness, As if they were honouring […]
Dockery And Son by Philip Larkin
‘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 […]
Days by Philip Larkin
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. End of the poem 15 random poems […]
Cut Grass by Philip Larkin
Cut grass lies frail: Brief is the breath Mown stalks exhale. Long, long the death It dies in the white hours Of young-leafed June With chestnut flowers, With hedges snowlike strewn, White lilac bowed, Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace, And that high-builded cloud Moving at summer’s pace. End of the poem 15 random poems […]
Counting by Philip Larkin
Thinking in terms of one Is easily done— One room, one bed, one chair, One person there, Makes perfect sense; one set Of wishes can be met, One coffin filled. But counting up to two Is harder to do; For one must be denied Before it’s tried. End of the poem 15 random poems […]
Continuing To Live by Philip Larkin
Continuing to live — that is, repeat A habit formed to get necessaries — Is nearly always losing, or going without. It varies. This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise — Ah, if the game were poker, yes, You might discard them, draw a full house! But it’s chess. And once you have walked the […]
Church Going by Philip Larkin
Once I am sure there’s nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows […]
Breadfruit by Philip Larkin
Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit, Whatever they are, As bribes to teach them how to execute Sixteen sexual positions on the sand; This makes them join (the boys) the tennis club, Jive at the Mecca, use deodorants, and On Saturdays squire ex-schoolgirls to the pub By private car. Such uncorrected visions end […]
Best Society by Philip Larkin
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; […]
Aubade by Philip Larkin
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: […]
At Grass by Philip Larkin
The eye can hardly pick them out From the cold shade they shelter in, Till wind distresses tail and main; Then one crops grass, and moves about – The other seeming to look on – And stands anonymous again Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps Two dozen distances surficed To fable them: faint afternoons Of Cups […]
Arrival by Philip Larkin
Morning, a glass door, flashes Gold names off the new city, Whose white shelves and domes travel The slow sky all day. I land to stay here; And the windows flock open And the curtains fly out like doves And a past dries in a wind. Now let me lie down, under A wide-branched indifference, […]
Annus Mirabilis by Philip Larkin
Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP. Up to then there’d only been A sort of bargaining, A wrangle for the ring, A shame that started at sixteen And spread to everything. Then all at once the […]
An Arundel Tomb by Philip Larkin
Side by side, their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone, Their proper habits vaguely shown As jointed armour, stiffened pleat, And that faint hint of the absurd – The little dogs under their feet. Such plainness of the pre-baroque Hardly involves the eye, until It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still Clasped empty […]
Ambulances by Philip Larkin
Closed like confessionals, they thread Loud noons of cities, giving back None of the glances they absorb. Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque, They come to rest at any kerb: All streets in time are visited. Then children strewn on steps or road, Or women coming from the shops Past smells of different dinners, […]
A Study Of Reading Habits by Philip Larkin
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 […]
Zero by Robert Creeley
Zero by Robert Creeley for Mark Peters Not just nothing, Not there’s no answer, Not it’s nowhere or Nothing to show for it – It’s like There’s no past like the present. It’s all over with us. There are no doors… Oh my god! Like I wish I had a dog. Oh my god! I […]
Water Music by Robert Creeley
Water Music by Robert Creeley The words are a beautiful music. The words bounce like in water. Water music, loud in the clearing off the boats, birds, leaves. They look for a place to sit and eat– no meaning, no point. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry Monster, 2021. Poems […]
The Way by Robert Creeley
The Way by Robert Creeley My love’s manners in bed are not to be discussed by me, as mine by her I would not credit comment upon gracefully. Yet I ride by the margin of that lake in the wood, the castle, and the excitement of strongholds; and have a small boy’s notion of doing […]
The Warning by Robert Creeley
The Warning by Robert Creeley For love-I would split open your head and put a candle in behind the eyes. Love is dead in us if we forget the virtues of an amulet and quick surprise. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry Monster, 2021. Poems by topic and subject. Poetry […]
The Rain by Robert Creeley
The Rain by Robert Creeley All night the sound had come back again, and again falls this quite, persistent rain. What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often? Is it that never the ease, even the hardness, of rain falling will have for me something other than this, something not […]
The Mirror by Robert Creeley
The Mirror by Robert Creeley Seeing is believing. Whatever was thought or said, these persistent, inexorable deaths make faith as such absent, our humanness a question, a disgust for what we are. Whatever the hope, here it is lost. Because we coveted our difference, here is the cost. ————— The End And that’s the End […]
The Innocence by Robert Creeley
The Innocence by Robert Creeley Looking to the sea, it is a line of unbroken mountains. It is the sky. It is the ground. There we live it, on it. It is a mist now tangent to another quiet. Here the leaves come, there is the rock in evidence or evidence. What I come to […]
The Conspiracy by Robert Creeley
The Conspiracy by Robert Creeley You send me your poems, I’ll send you mine. Things tend to awaken even through random communication Let us suddenly proclaim spring. And jeer at the others, all the others. I will send a picture too if you will send me one of you. ————— The End And that’s the […]
The Carnival by Robert Creeley
The Carnival by Robert Creeley Whereas the man who hits the gong dis- proves it, in all its simplicity — Even so the attempt makes for triumph, in another man. Likewise in love I am not foolish or in- competent. My method is not a tenderness, but hope defined. ————— The End And that’s the […]
Song by Robert Creeley
Song by Robert Creeley What I took in my hand grew in weight. You must understand it was not obscene. Night comes. We sleep. Then if you know what say it. Don’t pretend. Guises are what enemies wear. You and I live in a prayer. Helpless. Helpless, should I speak. Would you. What do you […]