Collected Poems

by Philip Larkin, Anthony Thwaite (Editor)

Overview

One of the best-known and best-loved poets of the English-speaking world, Philip Larkin had only a small number of poems published during his lifetime. Collected Poems brings together not only all his books—The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows--but also his uncollected poems from 1940 to 1984.

This new edition reflects Larkin's own ordering for his poems and is the first collection to present the body of his work with the organization he preferred. Preserving everything he published in his lifetime, the new Collected Poems is an indispensable contribution to the legacy of an icon of twentieth-century poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374529208
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/01/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	166,496
Product dimensions:	5.35(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) grew up in Coventry, England. In 1955 he became librarian of the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, a post he held until his death. He was the recipient of innumerable honors, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

          Toads

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.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
    Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts —
    They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
    With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines —
    They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
    Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets — and yet
    No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
    To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
    That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
    Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
    And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
    My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money
    All at one sitting.

I don't say, onebodies the other
    One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
    When you have both.

16 March 1954 TLD

Mr Bleaney

'This was Mr Bleaney's room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.' Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,

Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. 'Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.'
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook

Behind the door, no room for books or bags —
'I'll take it.' So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try

Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
I know his habits — what time he came down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why

He kept on plugging at the four aways —
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister's house in Stoke.

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don't know.

May 1955 TWW

Aubade

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: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
— The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused — nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

29 November i977 Times Literary Supplement,

23 December 1977

Table of Contents

	Introduction	xi
	Acknowledgements	xiii
	The North Ship
I	'All catches alight'	3
II	'This was your place of birth, this daytime palace'	5
III	'The moon is full tonight'	6
IV	Dawn	7
V	Conscript	8
VI	'Kick up the fire, and let the flames break loose'	9
VII	'The horns of the morning'	10
VIII	Winter	11
IX	'Climbing the hill within the deafening wind'	13
X	'Within the dream you said'	14
XI	Night-Music	15
XII	'Like the train's beat'	16
XIII	'I put my mouth'	17
XIV	Nursery Tale	18
XV	The Dancer	19
XVI	'The bottle is drunk out by one'	20
XVII	'To write one song, I said'	21
XVIII	'If grief could burn out'	22
XIX	Ugly Sister	23
XX	'I see a girl dragged by the wrists'	24
XXI	'I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land'	26
XXII	'One man walking a deserted platform'	27
XXIII	'If hands could free you, heart'	28
XXIV	'Love, we must part now: do not let it be'	29
XXV	'Morning has spread again'	30
XXVI	'This is the first thing'	31
XXVII	'Heaviest of flowers, the head'	32
XXXVIII	'Is it for now or for always'	33
XXIX	'Pour away that youth'	34
XXX	'So through that unripe day you bore your head'	35
XXXI	The North Ship	36
XXXII	'Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair'	40
	The Less Deceived
	Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album	43
	Wedding-Wind	45
	Places, Loved Ones	46
	Coming	47
	Reasons for Attendance	48
	Dry-Point	49
	Next, Please	50
	Going	51
	Wants	52
	Maiden Name	53
	Born Yesterday	54
	Whatever Happened?	55
	No Road	56
	Wires	57
	Church Going	58
	Age	60
	Myxomatosis	61
	Toads	62
	Poetry of Departures	64
	Triple Time	65
	Spring	66
	Deceptions	67
	I Remember, I Remember	68
	Absences	70
	Latest Face	71
	If, My Darling	72
	Skin	73
	Arrivals, Departures	74
	At Grass	75
	The Whitsun Weddings
	Here	79
	Mr Bleaney	81
	Nothing To Be Said	82
	Love Songs in Age	83
	Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses	84
	Broadcast	85
	Faith Healing	86
	For Sidney Bechet	87
	Home is so Sad	88
	Toads Revisited	89
	Water	91
	The Whitsun Weddings	92
	Self's the Man	95
	Take One Home for the Kiddies	97
	Days	98
	MCMXIV	99
	Talking in Bed	100
	The Large Cool Store	101
	A Study of Reading Habits	102
	As Bad as a Mile	103
	Ambulances	104
	The Importance of Elsewhere	105
	Sunny Prestatyn	106
	First Sight	107
	Dockery and Son	108
	Ignorance	110
	Reference Back	111
	Wild Oats	112
	Essential Beauty	113
	Send No Money	114
	Afternoons	115
	An Arundel Tomb	116
	High Windows
	To the Sea	121
	Sympathy in White Major	123
	The Trees	124
	Livings	125
	Forget What Did	128
	High Windows	129
	Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel	130
	The Old Fools	131
	Going, Going	133
	The Card-Players	135
	The Building	136
	Posterity	139
	Dublinesque	140
	Homage to a Government	141
	This Be The Verse	142
	How Distant	143
	Sad Steps	144
	Solar	145
	Annus Mirabilis	146
	Vers de Societe	147
	Show Saturday	149
	Money	152
	Cut Grass	153
	The Explosion	154
Appendix I	Uncollected Poems 1940-1972
	Ultimatum	157
	Story	158
	A Writer	159
	May Weather	160
	Observation	161
	Disintegration	162
	Mythological Introduction	163
	A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb	164
	Femmes Damnees	165
	Plymouth	166
	Portrait	167
	The Dedicated	168
	Modesties	169
	Fiction and the Reading Public	170
	Oils	171
	'Who called love conquering'	172
	'Since the majority of me'	173
	Arrival	174
	Tops	175
	Success Story	176
	Continuing to Live	177
	Pigeons	178
	Breadfruit	179
	Love	180
	'When the Russian tanks roll westward'	181
	How	182
	Heads in the Women's Ward	183
Appendix II	Uncollected Poems 1974-1984
	The Life with a Hole in it	187
	Bridge for the Living	188
	Aubade	190
	1952-1977	192
	'New eyes each year'	193
	The Mower	194
	'Dear CHARLES, My Muse, asleep or dead'	195
	'By day, a lifted study-storehouse'	197
	Party Politics	198
Appendix III	Composition Dates and Dates of First Appearance
	Index of titles	211
	Index of first lines	215

Editorial Reviews

More often than any other English poet since the war, Larkin gave us lines that it is unlikely we'll be able to forget.” —Ian Hamilton, The Times (London)

“Larkin is resolute, forthright, witty, and gloomy. This is the man who famously said that deprivation was for him what daffodils were for Wordsworth. Yet surely the results of this life, in the shape of his poems, are gifts, not deprivations.” —Donald Hall, The New Criterion

From the Publisher

Thwaite has gathered all the poems Larkin wrote between 1946 and 1985, the year of his death; he also includes a generous selection of work written earlier, before Larkin found his characteristic voice. In all, there are some 240 poems, 83 of them never published before. The unpublished work comes from every period of Larkin's career and increases by half the number of poems in his canon. The poet we now have is considerably more prolific than the one who issued only three small, mature collections in his lifetime. With or without the new poems, Larkin is a major postwar British writer, and this is the best available collection of his poetry. An essential addition to both academic and general libraries.-- Michael Hennessy, Southwest Texas State Univ., San Marcos

Library Journal