So much for memory: I’ve just discovered that I’ve posted this Larkin poem once already-in June. https://acairnofpoems.com/2024/06/13/aubade-by-philip-larkin/ But, hey, it’s such a great poem that I’ll post it again—with some different words at the beginning.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is undoubtedly one of England’s greatest poets of the past century, and yet he is almost embarrassing, certainly out of fashion. Like many of the English of his time—and now—he was xenophobic, misogynist, and curmudgeonly. I was about to write “narrow minded,” which is certainly an English characteristic, bur his poems show that he was far from narrow minded, although his poems are domestic rather than heroic. He is at an opposite pole from Byron.

I don’t know of a poem that expresses the fear of death better than Larkin’s poem “Aubade,” although fear of death is a great inspirer of artists. Indeed, all writing, all art might be seen as throwing a pot of paint in the face of death, ultimately an empty gesture.

Larkin had a gift for great lines, and few are better known than “They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to but they do” and “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.” The second quote, which I misremembered in a simplified version “Sexual intercourse was invented in nineteen sixty-three between Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Beatles’ first LP,” is completely untrue, not least for Larkin with his blonde in a flat, and yet captures the feel of the 60s.

Aubade too has great lines: “Unresting death, a whole day nearer now”; “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”; “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/Created to pretend we never die” (whenever I’m in church I think of those lines); “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”; and “Postmen like doctors go from house to house.”

Fear of death and fear of dying are not the same thing, and Larkin’s poem is mostly about fear of being dead not dying, although he does mention “the dread of dying.” He spells out what it will lie to be dead and dismisses the attempts to avoid the fear by both religion and the Stoics: “Death is no different whined at than withstood.” He recognises the power of “unresting death,” which might inspire admiration—as with Henry James’s “that distinguished thing”—but doesn’t for Larkin. For him it’s simply to be feared, and the fear cannot be avoided. It’s there in the night and is still there at dawn despite all the activity.

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.