Why I Like Philip Larkin

One of my favorites quoted Larkin a couple of weeks ago and it sent me on a search for these:

First, the amusing one…

They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

-Philip Larkin, "This Be The Verse" (1971

And now the serious one:

"The Old Fools" by Philip Larkin (1974)

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this?  Do they somehow suppose
It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember
Who called this morning?  Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there’s really been no change,
And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching the light move?  If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange;
Why aren’t they screaming?

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see.  It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here.  Next time you can’t pretend
There’ll be anything else.

 And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone.  Their looks show that they’re for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines–;
How can they ignore it?
       
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting
People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening.

 That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give
An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here.  For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction’s alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. 

This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground.  Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end?  Not at night?
Not when the strangers come?  Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood?  Well,
We shall find out.

QUOTATIONS:

"Step by step. I can’t think of any other way of accomplishing anything."

Michael Jordan

None will improve your lot If you yourself do not.

Bertolt Brecht, 1933