Poet Philip Larkin.
Philip Larkin, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, was an atheist. Australian poet John Foulcher*, who has a deep Christian faith, reflects on how Larkin’s poetry has been a source of nourishment for him, how it has helped him to face his darkest fears, and how, with all good poetry, it lays bare our common humanity.
When I as invited to reflect on a poet who had been a spring of living water for me, a constant source of sustenance and encouragement, there were many names that came to mind: that spiritual visionary Les Murray, for instance, or English country priest, RS Thomas; William Blake, who saw ‘an eternity in a grain of sand’ or Mary Oliver, for whom spirit and the natural world were interchangeable.
But the name that I immediately thought of was an unlikely one: Philip Larkin, curmudgeonly, misanthropic English atheist who concluded, in his poem ‘Dockery and Son’, that ‘life is first boredom, then fear’. Dockery and Son is typical of Larkin’s poetry: it explores the ‘everydayness’ of alienation and loneliness, the restlessness that marks our ordinary lives, and it does so in the most mundane but resonant language.
In the poem, Larkin returns to his alma mater, the college where he lodged while at university. He finds the door to his student lodgings ‘locked’, catches up with the dean of the college and in a cordial conversation discovers one of his ex-classmates, Dockery, who he recalls as thoroughly unremarkable, now has a son at the college. He reflects, then, on the ways in which lives diverge, encompassing ‘For Dockery a son, for me nothing,/Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage’.
Both of these paths, he concludes, lead to dissatisfaction. We never quite manage the things we want: they ‘warp tight shut, like doors’. Life, the poem seems to conclude, is a constant yearning with little hope of fulfilment, in which we mask our fear of death with routines of stultifying boredom.
Philip Larkin was born in Coventry in 1922. After graduating from university, he became a librarian, spending the better part of his life as head librarian at the University of Hull. When asked why he lived in such an isolated city, he replied, ‘I love all the Americans getting on the train at King’s Cross and thinking they’re going to come and bother me and then looking at the connections and deciding they’ll go to Newcastle and bother [the poet] Basil Bunting instead’.
He never married, never had children and never travelled. ‘Deprivation is for me,’ he once said, ‘what daffodils were for Wordsworth’. He was very right wing in his politics (he says he ‘adored’ Mrs Thatcher) and he wrote only four slim volumes of poetry, the longest of which is about 60 pages. And yet, despite this frugal output, he’s regarded by many as the greatest English post-war poet. Once asked if he would like the position of Poet Laureate, the ‘official’ poet of England, he replied: ‘I often dream about it. And wake up screaming.’ Indeed, when he was offered the post in 1983, he declined it. He died in 1985, aged 63.
I have almost nothing in common with Larkin. I’ve spent most of my life in the maelstrom of the classroom as a secondary school teacher (and loved it), I’m married with children, have a deep Christian faith and would describe myself as an old style socialist. Why, then, do I find reading Larkin so nourishing?
Well, firstly, he gives voice to my darkest fears, he makes it admissible, even desirable, to express them. He helps me face the deep ennui that lurks below the surface of lives. When the alarm would wake me to go and face my students over my 40 years in the classroom, I would often think of the famous question from his poem, ‘Toads’: ‘Why should I let the toad work/Squat on my life?’ When I thought about trying to inject more excitement into my life, his poem ‘Poetry of Departures’ came to mind.
There’s an extraordinary tension in this poem: it centres on the desire to break free, a desire which most of us hold somewhere deep within us. As Henri David Thoreau said: ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ ‘Surely I can, if he did?’ Larkin suggests. Why not then? The poem answers with another, unstated question: What would it really change? We can run away from our circumstances, but we can’t run away from ourselves; a change of life would not escape the crippled, yearning self within us. No, we’re left with our little lives that are ‘reprehensively perfect.’
We all know someone who’s ‘chucked it all in’ like this, don’t we? The people who’ve cast off their lives and begun again, only to find the next morning they’re looking at the same face in the mirror. In his subject matter, his sardonic tone and his beautifully plain language, Larkin’s poetry suggests that if we can’t find meaning in the ordinary detail of our lives, however unsatisfying they are, we won’t find it anywhere.
This is a concern of the title poem of Larkin’s fourth book of poetry, ‘High Windows’. Every generation, the poem suggests, thinks the next has got it made, and every generation ultimately finds we’re only tiny pieces in the flow of an eternity that holds ‘nothing, and is nowhere.’
But this is only part of the Larkin story. Just when I think I’ve nailed him down, something wonderful happens. Consider this, my favourite Larkin poem, ‘Church Going’, in which the poet stops at a country church on a cycling trip:
Church Going
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 how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
‘A serious house on serious earth it is.’ This poem, for me, shows the best of what poetry can do. In the final stanza of the poem, the narrator – the Larkin figure – is forced by the poem itself to move beyond his prejudices and to concede that he may not know everything.
If Larkin’s poetry helps me face my own darkness, it also constantly surprises me – just as I suspect it surprises its creator – with hope, life and joy. Larkin may see religion as superstition, he may think it’s destined for oblivion, but he also sees it as the guardian of seriousness in an increasingly frivolous world. The poem challenges the poet, and it’s where Larkin and I meet, on the neutral ground of discovery.
Larkin’s poetry shows me the value of poetry – as a place where our common humanity is laid bare. It’s a place of understanding, and acceptance. In these digital times where people read only what will leave their worldviews reinforced and unchallenged, poetry refuses to go down that path. It brings us down to earth, it tells us we have so much to learn.
Whatever we believe, when we write a poem, we would be wise to consider ourselves as poets first, and Christians, Buddhists, atheists, socialists and so on second. Similarly with readers of poetry. Otherwise, the poem won’t be able to do its job, which is to interrogate us at our deepest level, to hold us to account. A poem is an act of unbridled honesty. It has no time for self-deception and it refuses to be manipulated.
I’d like to conclude with Larkin’s beautiful ‘First Sight’ which led my friend the poet Robert Gray, also an atheist, to suggest that he suspected Larkin was actually a ‘crypto-Christian’:
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,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasureable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.
*John Foulcher has written twelve books of poetry. His latest book, Dancing with Stephen Hawking (Pitt Street Poetry 2021), was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Poetry Prize in 2022. His work has appeared in Australian magazines and anthologies over nearly forty years, and he has received many awards. In 2010-11 he was the Literature Board of the Australia Council’s resident at the Keesing Studio in Paris. His books can be purchased from pittstreetpoetry.com.
*This article is based on a talk John Foulcher gave at The Well on Sunday 13 October 2024. A recording of the talk is available by clicking here: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/ZCB_OJvZNg3kzAwkCkZclUv8QDXgwV9B1rzRUkBNlAY1NvUMXEp10rRfXKLSwgc.h3NvHwXfkVUaxYhQ
(Please Note: Copy and paste passcode: x$QT8=ix. Please also note that at a couple of points the speaker temporarily drops out of transmission. We apologise for this and thank you for your patience.)
The Well provides an online opportunity to drink deeply from the Well of Living Water offered by the mystics and poets. These monthly Sunday night sessions consist of a reading, a 20 minute silent meditation, and a talk in which the speaker reflects on how a mystic or poet has been life-giving, a source of Living Water, in their lives.
The next talk in the series will be on Sunday 10 November at 7.30pm. Roland Ashby, Contributing Editor of Living Water and Coordinator of the World Community for Christian Meditation in Victoria, Australia, will be reflecting on how the founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius of Loyola, has been a source of Living Water for him.
You can join the event by clicking on this Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84040088292?pwd=enE3Q0riwnLAO4h9OgyIk5Dwg8gWTc.1
There is no charge, but a donation towards an honorarium for our speakers would be greatly appreciated. See: https://www.thelivingwater.com.au/checkout/donate?donatePageId=5f20c979af12d14916e8f57a
The Well is a joint initiative of Benedictus Contemplative Church (https://benedictus.com.au/)
The Victorian branch of The World Community for Christian Meditation in Australia
(https://wccmaustralia.org.au/),
and the blog Living Water (https://www.thelivingwater.com.au)