All Poems

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It is these sunless afternoons, I find
Install you at my elbow like a bore
The chestnut trees are caked with silence. I'm
Aware the days pass quicker than before,
Smell staler too. And once they fall behind
They look like ruin. You have been here some time.

Love, We Must Part Now

© Philip Larkin

There is regret. Always, there is regret.
But it is better that our lives unloose,
As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,
Break from an estuary with their courses set,
And waving part, and waving drop from sight.

Mother, Summer, I

© Philip Larkin

My mother, who hates thunder storms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;

House-Hunting

© Edgar Albert Guest

Time was when spring returned we went
To find another home to rent;
We wanted fresher, cleaner walls,
And bigger rooms and wider halls,
And open plumbing and the dome
That made the fashionable home.

At Grass

© 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

Ghosts

© Francis Ernley Walrond

I walk in a garden of roses,
'Twixt lawn and shaven lawn,
And I think of the wild free spaces,
And the rose of a breathless dawn.

Water

© Philip Larkin

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Song

© James Russell Lowell

TO M.L.

A lily thou wast when I saw thee first,

Best Society

© Philip Larkin

When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,

A Meditation On Rhode-Island Coal

© William Cullen Bryant

I sat beside the glowing grate, fresh heaped
With Newport coal, and as the flame grew bright
--The many-coloured flame--and played and leaped,
I thought of rainbows and the northern light,
Moore's Lalla Rookh, the Treasury Report,
And other brilliant matters of the sort.

Love Songs In Age

© Philip Larkin

She kept her songs, they kept so little space,
The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,

Lines On A Young Lady's Photograph Album

© Philip Larkin

At last you yielded up the album, which
Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages
Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!
Too much confectionery, too rich:
I choke on such nutritious images.

The Minstrel; Or, The Progress Of Genius : Book I.

© James Beattie

I.
Ah! who can tell how hard it is to climb
The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar!
Ah! who can tell how many a soul sublime

Toads Revisited

© Philip Larkin

Walking around in the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on,

When First We Faced, And Touching Showed

When first we faced, and touching showed
How well we knew the early moves,
Behind the moonlight and the frost,
The excitement and the gratitude,
There stood how much our meeting owed
To other meetings, other loves.

Field Path

© John Clare

The beams in blossom with their spots of jet

Smelt sweet as gardens wheresoever met;

The Explosion

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead.
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Ambulances

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.

The Song Of Honour

I heard no more of bird or bell,
The mastiff in a slumber fell,
I stared into the sky,
As wondering men have always done
Since beauty and the stars were one,
Though none so hard as I.