The following are poems quoted in the text.
| Philip Larkin (1922-85) | |
| To My Wife | 5 |
| Spring | 11 |
| Love Songs in Age | 41 |
| ‘Long roots moor summer to our side of earth’ | 56 |
| Days | 105 |
| Strangers | 117 |
| Maiden Name | 222 |
| Deceptions | 227 |
| Louis MacNeice (1907-63) | |
| Autobiography | 11, 153, 214, 219 |
| Prayer before Birth | 145, 156 |
| Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74) | |
| The Village Schoolmaster | 29, 117 |
| Wilfred Wilson Gibson (1878-1962) | |
| Flannan Isle | 133 |
| Seamus Heaney (1939-) | |
| Exposure | 154 |
| Follower | 154 |
| Sunlight | 154 |
The quote on page 216 is from Edmund Spenser (1552-99); that on page 233 is from Anthony Robbins (1960-); the final quote on page 245 is taken from Salut au Monde by Walt Whitman (1819-92).