Morning, noon

Philip Larkin

Tags: poetry humour letters-to-monica



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I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.

Philip Larkin

Tags: art poetry children youth poem poet letters-to-monica philip-larkin



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A stationary sense . . . as, I suppose,
I shall have, till my single body grows
        Inaccurate, tired;
Then I shall start to feel the backward pull
Take over, sickening and masterful —
        Some say, desired.

And this must be the prime of life . . . I blink,
As if at pain; for it is pain, to think
        This pantomime
Of compensating act and counter-act,
Defeat and counterfeit, makes up, in fact,
        My ablest time.

- Maturity

Philip Larkin

Tags: maturity exhaustion stasis



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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.

Philip Larkin

Tags: innocence war sadness change expectation



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Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
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

Tags: love poetry time death poem



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I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others

Philip Larkin

Tags: death



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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

Philip Larkin

Tags: poetry impulse



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He [Samuel Butler] made a practise of doing the forks last when washing up, on the grounds that he might die before he got to them. This is very much his principle of 'eating the grapes downwards', so that however many grapes you have eaten the next is always the best of the remainder.

Philip Larkin


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Originality is being different from oneself, not others.

Philip Larkin


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Why can't one stop being a son without becoming a father?

Philip Larkin


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