Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
Philip Arthur Larkin CH CBE FRSLwas an English poet, novelist and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jilland A Girl in Winter, and he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddingsand High Windows. He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, articles gathered in All What Jazz: A...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 August 1922
distance white clouds
My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
party thinking years
One of the sadder things, I think, Is how our birthdays slowly sink: Presents and parties disappear, The cards grow fewer year by year, Till, when one reaches sixty-five, How many care we're still alive?
money
Clearly money has something to do with life....
sleep loving-others
In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
weed beach distance
Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
attitude age stones
Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone finality They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
being-different different originality
Originality is being different from oneself, not others.
different
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
be-kind should be-careful
We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
night drunk half
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night,
photography art faithful
But O, Photography! as no art is, Faithful and disappointing!
drinking giving musical
The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
sanity affair poetry-is
Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.
kind difficult stills
It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.