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Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin

I Have Started to Say

I have started to say
“A quarter of a century”
Or “thirty years back”
About my own life.
 
It makes me breathless
It’s like falling and recovering
In huge gesturing loops
Through an empty sky.
 
All that’s left to happen
Is some deaths (my own included).
Their order, and their manner,
Remain to be learnt.

#EnglishWriters

Autres oeuvres par Philip Larkin...
Room in Brooklyn, by Edward Hopper
Home Is So Sad

Home is so sad. It stays as it wa… Shaped in the comfort of the last… As if to win them back. Instead,… Of anyone to please, it withers so… Having no heart to put aside the t…
 3
Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, by John Constable
Absences

Rain patters on a sea that tilts a… Fast-running floors, collapsing in… Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Con… A wave drops like a wall: another… Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly…
Mother, Summer, I

My mother, who hates thunder storm… Holds up each summer day and shake… It out suspiciously, lest swarms Of grape—dark clouds are lurking t… But when the August weather break…
Farmhouse in Provence, by Vincent van Gogh
No Road

Since we agreed to let the road be… Fall to disuse, And bricked our gates up, planted… And turned all time’s eroding agen… Silence, and space, and strangers…
 3
Breadfruit

Boys dream of native girls who bri… Whatever they are, As bribes to teach them how to exe… Sixteen sexual positions on the sa… This makes them join (the boys) th…
An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone… Their proper habits vaguely shown As jointed armour, stiffened pleat… And that faint hint of the absurd—
 3
Love Songs in Age

She kept her songs, they kept so l… The covers pleased her: One bleached from lying in a sunny… One marked in circles by a vase of… One mended, when a tidy fit had se…
Love, We Must Part Now

Love, we must part now: do not let… Calamitious and bitter. In the pa… There has been too much moonlight… Let us have done with it: for now… Never has sun more boldly paced th…
He Hears That His Beloved Has Become Engaged

When she came on, you couldn’t kee… Fighting your way up through the o… Tup—heavy bumpkin, you confused yo… Fell in the drum —how we went ha h… But once you gained her side and s…
Poetry of Departures

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand, As epitaph: He chucked up everything And just cleared off, And always the voice will sound
 1
The Old Fools

What do they think has happened, t… To make them like this? Do they s… It’s more grown-up when your mouth… And you keep on pissing yourself,… Who called this morning? Or that,…
Mr Bleaney

‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He… The whole time he was at the Bodi… They moved him.’ Flowered curtain… Fall to within five inches of the… Whose window shows a strip of buil…
 1
For Sidney Bechet

That note you hold, narrowing and… Like New Orleans reflected on the… And in all ears appropriate falseh… Building for some a legendary Qua… Of balconies, flower—baskets and q…
Woman at a Window, by Caspar David Friedrich
High Windows

When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she… Taking pills or wearing a diaphrag… I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all th…
 4
Spring Dance, by Arthur Frank Mathews
Spring

Green-shadowed people sit, or walk… Their children finger the awakened… Calmly a cloud stands, calmly a bi… And, flashing like a dangled-looki… Sun lights the balls that bounce,…
 2



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