Poor chap, he always loved larking
	And now he’s dead
	It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
	They said.

	Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
	(Still the dead one lay moaning)
	I was much too far out all my life
	And not waving but drowning.

STEVIE SMITH Magna est Veritas

	With my looks I am bound to look simple or fast I would rather look simple
	So I wear a tall hat on the back of my head that is rather a temple
	And I walk rather queerly and comb my long hair
	And people say, Don’t bother about her.
	So in my time I have picked up a good many facts,
	Rather more than the people do who wear smart hats
	And I do not deceive because I am rather simple too
	And although I collect facts I do not always know what they amount to.
	I regard them as a contribution to almighty Truth, magna est veritas et praevalebit,
	Agreeing with that Latin writer, Great is Truth and will prevail in a bit.

1959 GEOFFREY HILL A Pastoral

	Mobile, immaculate and austere,
	The Pities, their fingers in every wound,
	Assess the injured on the obscured frontier;
	Cleanse with a kind of artistry the ground
	Shared by War. Consultants in new tongues
	Prove synonymous our separated wrongs.

	We celebrate, fluently and at ease.
	Traditional Furies, having thrust, hovered,
	Now decently enough sustain Peace.
	The unedifying nude dead are soon covered.
	Survivors, still given to wandering, find
	Their old loves, painted and re-aligned –

	Queer, familiar, fostered by superb graft
	On treasured foundations, these ideal features.
	Men can move with purpose again, or drift,
	According to direction. Here are statues
	Darkened by laurel; and evergreen names;
	Evidently-veiled griefs; impervious tombs.

TED HUGHES Pike 1960

	Pike, three inches long, perfect
	Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
	Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
	They dance on the surface among the flies.

	Or move, stunned by their own grandeur
	Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
	Of submarine delicacy and horror.
	A hundred feet long in their world.

	In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads –
	Gloom of their stillness:
	Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.
	Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

	The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs
	Not to be changed at this date;
	A life subdued to its instrument;
	The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

	Three we kept behind glass,
	Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
	And four and a half: fed fry to them –
	Suddenly there were two. Finally one.

	With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
	And indeed they spare nobody.
	Two, six pounds each, over two feet long,
	High and dry and dead in the willow-herb –

	One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:
	The outside eye stared: as a vice locks –
	The same iron in this eye
	Though its film shrank in death.

	A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
	Whose lilies and muscular tench
	Had outlasted every visible stone
	Of the monastery that planted them –

	Stilled legendary depth:
	It was as deep as England. It held
	Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
	That past nightfall I dared not cast

	But silently cast and fished
	With the hair frozen on my head
	For what might move, for what eye might move.
	The still splashes on the dark pond,

	Owls hushing the floating woods
	Frail on my ear against the dream
	Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
	That rose slowly towards me, watching.

PATRICK KAVANAGH Epic

	I have lived in important places, times
	When great events were decided: who owned
	That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
	Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
	I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul’
	And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
	Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
	‘Here is the march along these iron stones’
	That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
	Was most important? I inclined
	To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
	Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind
	He said: I made the Iliad from such
	A local row. Gods make their own importance.

PATRICK KAVANAGH Come Dance with Kitty Stobling

	No, no, no, I know I was not important as I moved
	Through the colourful country, I was but a single
	Item in the picture, the namer not the beloved.
	O tedious man with whom no gods commingle.
	Beauty, who has described beauty? Once upon a time
	I had a myth that was a lie but it served:
	Trees walking across the crests of hills and my rhyme
	Cavorting on mile-high stilts and the unnerved
	Crowds looking up with terror in their rational faces.
	O dance with Kitty Stobling I outrageously
	Cried out-of-sense to them, while their timorous paces
	Stumbled behind Jove’s page boy paging me.
	I had a very pleasant journey, thank you sincerely
	For giving me my madness back, or nearly.

PATRICK KAVANAGH The Hospital

	A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward
	Of a chest hospital: square cubicles in a row
	Plain concrete, wash basins – an art lover’s woe,
	Not counting how the fellow in the next bed snored.
	But nothing whatever is by love debarred,
	The common and banal her heat can know.
	The corridor led to a stairway and below
	Was the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard.

	This is what love does to things: the Rialto Bridge,
	The main gate that was bent by a heavy lorry,
	The seat at the back of a shed that was a suntrap.
	Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge;
	For we must record love’s mystery without claptrap,
	Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.

1961 R. S. THOMAS Here

	I am a man now.
	Pass your hand over my brow,
	You can feel the place where the brains grow.

	I am like a tree,
	From my top boughs I can see
	The footprints that led up to me.

	There is blood in my veins
	That has run clear of the stain
	Contracted in so many loins.

	Why, then, are my hands red
	With the blood of so many dead?
	Is this where I was misled?

	Why are my hands this way
	That they will not do as I say?
	Does no God hear when I pray?

	I have nowhere to go.
	The swift satellites show
	The clock of my whole being is slow.

	It is too late to start
	For destinations not of the heart.
	I must stay here with my hurt.

ROY FISHER from City

	from By the Pond
	Brick-dust in sunlight. That is what I see now in the city, a dry epic flavour, whose air is human breath. A place of walls made straight with plumbline and trowel, to dessicate and crumble in the sun and smoke. Blistered paint on cisterns and girders, cracking to show the priming. Old men spit on the paving slabs, little boys urinate; and the sun dries it as it dries out patches of damp on plaster facings to leave misshapen stains. I look for things here that make old men and dead men seem young. Things which have escaped, the landscapes of many childhoods.
	Wharves, the oldest parts of factories, tarred gable ends rearing to take the sun over lower roofs. Soot, sunlight, brick-dust; and the breath that tastes of them.
	At the time when the great streets were thrust out along the old high-roads and trackways, the houses shouldering towards the country and the back streets filling in the widening spaces between them like webbed membranes, the power of will in the town was more open, less speciously democratic, than it is now. There were, of course, cottage railway stations, a jail that pretended to be a castle out of Grimm, public urinals surrounded by screens of cast-iron lacework painted green and scarlet; but there was also an arrogant ponderous architecture that dwarfed and terrified the people by its sheer size and functional brutality: the workhouses and the older hospitals, the thick-walled abattoir, the long vaulted market-halls, the striding canal bridges and railway viaducts. Brunel was welcome here. Compared with these structures the straight white blocks and concrete roadways of today are a fairground, a clear dream just before waking, the creation of salesmen rather than of engineers. The new city is bred out of a hard will, but as it appears, it shows itself a little ingratiating, a place of arcades, passages, easy ascents, good light. The eyes twinkle, beseech and veil themselves; the full, hard mouth, the broad jaw – these are no longer made visible to all.
	A street half a mile long with no buildings, only a continuous embankment of sickly grass along one side, with railway signals on it, and strings of trucks through whose black-spoked wheels you can see the sky; and for the whole length of the other a curving wall of bluish brick, caked with soot and thirty feet high. In it, a few wicket gates painted ochre, and fingermarked, but never open. Cobbles in the roadway.
	A hundred years ago this was almost the edge of town. The goods yards, the gasworks and the coal stores were established on tips and hillocks in the sparse fields that lay among the houses. Between this place and the centre, a mile or two up the hill, lay a continuous huddle of low streets and courts, filling the marshy valley of the meagre river that now flows under brick and tarmac. And this was as far as the railway came, at first. A great station was built, towering and stony. The sky above it was southerly. The stately approach, the long curves of wall, still remain, but the place is a goods depot with most of its doors barred and pots of geraniums at those windows that are not shuttered. You come upon it suddenly in its open prospect out of tangled streets of small factories. It draws light to itself, especially at sunset, standing still and smooth faced, looking westwards at the hill. I am not able to imagine the activity that must once have been here. I can see no ghosts of men and women, only the gigantic ghost of stone. They are too frightened of it to pull it down.

Toyland

	Today the sunlight is the paint on lead soldiers
	Only they are people scattering out of the cool church

	And as they go across the gravel and among the spring streets
	They spread formality: they know, we know, what they have been doing,

	The old couples, the widowed, the staunch smilers,
	The deprived and the few nubile young lily-ladies,

	And we know what they will do when they have opened the doors of their houses and walked in:
	Mostly they will make water, and wash their calm hands and eat.

	The organ’s flourishes finish; the verger closes the doors;
	The choirboys run home, and the rector goes off in his motor.

	Here a policeman stalks, the sun glinting on his helmet-crest;
	Then a man pushes a perambulator home; and somebody posts a letter.

	If I sit here long enough, loving it all, I shall see the District Nurse pedal past,
	The children going to Sunday School and the strollers strolling;

	The lights darting on in different rooms as night comes in;
	And I shall see washing hung out, and the postman delivering letters.

	I might by exception see an ambulance or the fire brigade
	Or even, if the chance came round, street musicians (singing and playing).

	For the people I’ve seen, this seems the operation of life:
	I need the paint of stillness and sunshine to see it that way.

	The secret laugh of the world picks them up and shakes them like peas boiling;
	They behave as if nothing happened; maybe they no longer notice.

	I notice. I laugh with the laugh, cultivate it, make much of it,
	But still I don’t know what the joke is, to tell them.

THOM GUNN In Santa Maria del Popolo

	Waiting for when the sun an hour or less
	Conveniently oblique makes visible
	The painting on one wall of this recess
	By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,
	I see how shadow in the painting brims
	With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out
	But a dim horse’s haunch and various limbs,
	Until the very subject is in doubt.

	But evening gives the act, beneath the horse
	And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl,
	Foreshortened from the head, with hidden face,
	Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul.
	O wily painter, limiting the scene
	From a cacophony of dusty forms
	To the one convulsion, what is it you mean
	In that wide gesture of the lifting arms?

	No Ananias croons a mystery yet,
	Casting the pain out under name of sin.
	The painter saw what was, an alternate
	Candour and secrecy inside the skin.
	He painted, elsewhere, that firm insolent
	Young whore in Venus’ clothes, those pudgy cheats,
	Those sharpers; and was strangled, as things went,
	For money, by one such picked off the streets.

	I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel
	To the dim interior of the church instead,
	In which there kneel already several people,
	Mostly old women: each head closeted
	In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.
	Their poor arms are too tired for more than this
	– For the large gesture of solitary man,
	Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.

THOM GUNN My Sad Captains

	One by one they appear in
	the darkness: a few friends, and
	a few with historical
	names. How late they start to shine!
	but before they fade they stand
	perfectly embodied, all

	the past lapping them like a
	cloak of chaos. They were men
	who, I thought, lived only to
	renew the wasteful force they
	spent with each hot convulsion.
	They remind me, distant now.

	True, they are not at rest yet,
	but now that they are indeed
	apart, winnowed from failures,
	they withdraw to an orbit
	and turn with disinterested
	hard energy, like the stars.

MALCOLM LOWRY [Strange Type] 1962

	I wrote: in the dark cavern of our birth.
	The printer had it tavern, which seems better:
	But herein lies the subject of our mirth,
	Since on the next page death appears as dearth.
	So it may be that God’s word was distraction,
	Which to our strange type appears destruction,
	Which is bitter.

CHRISTOPHER LOGUE from Patrocleia: an Account of Book 16 of Homer’s Iliad

	[Apollo Strikes Patroclus]
	His hand came from the east,
	And in his wrist lay all eternity;
	And every atom of his mythic weight
	Was poised between his fist and bent left leg.
	Your eyes lurched out. Achilles’ bonnet rang
	Far and away beneath the cannon-bones of Trojan horses,
	And you were footless… staggering… amazed…
	Between the clumps of dying, dying yourself,
	Dazed by the brilliance in your eyes,
	The noise – like weirs heard far away –
	Dabbling your astounded fingers
	In the vomit on your chest.
	And all the Trojans lay and stared at you;
	Propped themselves up and stared at you;
	Feeling themselves as blest as you felt cursed.
	All of them lay and stared;
	And one, a hero boy called Thackta, cast.
	His javelin went through your calves,
	Stitching your knees together, and you fell,
	Not noticing the pain, and tried to crawl
	Towards the Fleet, and – even now – feeling
	For Thackta’s ankle – ah! – and got it? No…
	Not a boy’s ankle that you got,
	But Hector’s.

	Standing above you,
	His bronze mask smiling down into your face,
	Putting his spear through… ach, and saying:
	‘Why tears, Patroclus?
	Did you hope to melt Troy down
	And make our women fetch the ingots home?
	I can imagine it!
	You and your marvellous Achilles;
	Him with an upright finger, saying:
	“Don’t show your face to me again, Patroclus,
	Unless it’s red with Hector’s blood.’ ”
	And Patroclus,
	Shaking the voice out of his body, says:
	‘Big mouth.
	Remember it took three of you to kill me.
	A god, a boy, and, last and least, a hero.
	I can hear Death pronounce my name, and yet
	Somehow it sounds like Hector.
	And as I close my eyes I see Achilles’ face
	With Death’s voice coming out of it.’

	Saying these things Patroclus died.
	And as his soul went through the sand
	Hector withdrew his spear and said:
	‘Perhaps.’

1963 CHARLES TOMLINSON The Picture of J. T. in a Prospect of Stone

	What should one
	wish a child
	and that, one’s own
	emerging
	from between
	the stone lips
	of a sheep-stile
	that divides
	village graves
	and village green?
	– Wish her
	the constancy of stone.
	– But stone
	is hard.
	– Say, rather
	it resists
	the slow corrosives
	and the flight
	of time
	and yet it takes
	the play, the fluency
	from light.
	– How would you know
	the gift you’d give
	was the gift
	she’d wish to have?
	– Gift is giving,
	gift is meaning:
	first
	I’d give
	then let her
	live with it
	to prove
	its quality the better and
	thus learn
	to love
	what (to begin with)
	she might spurn.
	– You’d
	moralize a gift?
	– I’d have her
	understand
	the gift I gave her.
	– And so she shall
	but let her play
	her innocence away
	emerging
	as she does
	between
	her doom (unknown),
	her unmown green.

R. S. THOMAS On the Farm

	There was Dai Puw. He was no good.
	They put him in the fields to dock swedes,
	And took the knife from him, when he came home
	At late evening with a grin
	Like the slash of a knife on his face.

	There was Llew Puw, and he was no good.
	Every evening after the ploughing
	With the big tractor he would sit in his chair,
	And stare into the tangled fire garden,
	Opening his slow lips like a snail.

	There was Huw Puw, too. What shall I say?
	I have heard him whistling in the hedges
	On and on, as though winter
	Would never again leave those fields,
	And all the trees were deformed.

	And lastly there was the girl:
	Beauty under some spell of the beast.
	Her pale face was the lantern
	By which they read in life’s dark book
	The shrill sentence: God is love.

LOUIS MACNEICE Soap Suds

	This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big
	House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open
	To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop
	To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

	And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;
	Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;
	A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;
	A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

	To which he has now returned. The day of course is fine
	And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,
	Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball
	Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

	Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn
	And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!
	But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands
	Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.

LOUIS MACNEICE The Taxis

	In the first taxi he was alone tra-la,
	No extras on the clock. He tipped ninepence
	But the cabby, while he thanked him, looked askance
	As though to suggest someone had bummed a ride.

	In the second taxi he was alone tra-la
	But the clock showed sixpence extra; he tipped according
	And the cabby from out his muffler said: ‘Make sure
	You have left nothing behind tra-la between you.’

	In the third taxi he was alone tra-la
	But the tip-up seats were down and there was an extra
	Charge of one-and-sixpence and an odd
	Scent that reminded him of a trip to Cannes.

	As for the fourth taxi, he was alone
	Tra-la when he hailed it but the cabby looked
	Through him and said: ‘I can’t tra-la well take
	So many people, not to speak of the dog.’

AUSTIN CLARKE Martha Blake at Fifty-One

	Early, each morning, Martha Blake
	Walked, angeling the road,
	To Mass in the Church of the Three Patrons.
	Sanctuary lamp glowed
	And the clerk halo’ed the candles
	On the High Altar. She knelt
	Illumined. In gold-hemmed alb,
	The priest intoned. Wax melted.

	Waiting for daily Communion, bowed head
	At rail, she hears a murmur.
	Latin is near. In a sweet cloud
	That cherub’d, all occurred.
	The voice went by. To her pure thought,
	Body was a distress
	And soul, a sigh. Behind her denture,
	Love lay, a helplessness.

	Then, slowly walking after Mass
	Down Rathgar Road, she took out
	Her Yale key, put a match to gas-ring,
	Half filled a saucepan, cooked
	A fresh egg lightly, with tea, brown bread,
	Soon, taking off her blouse
	And skirt, she rested, pressing the Crown
	Of Thorns until she drowsed.

	In her black hat, stockings, she passed
	Nylons to a nearby shop
	And purchased, daily, with downcast eyes,
	Fillet of steak or a chop.
	She simmered it on a low jet,
	Having a poor appetite,
	Yet never for an hour felt better
	From dilatation, tightness.

	She suffered from dropped stomach, heartburn
	Scalding, water-brash
	And when she brought her wind up, turning
	Red with the weight of mashed
	Potato, mint could not relieve her.
	In vain her many belches,
	For all below was swelling, heaving
	Wamble, gurgle, squelch.

	She lay on the sofa with legs up,
	A decade on her lip,
	At four o’clock, taking a cup
	Of lukewarm water, sip
	By sip, but still her daily food
	Repeated and the bile
	Tormented her. In a blue hood,
	The Virgin sadly smiled.

	When she looked up, the Saviour showed
	His Heart, daggered with flame
	And, from the mantle-shelf, St Joseph
	Bent, disapproving. Vainly
	She prayed, for in the whatnot corner
	The new Pope was frowning. Night
	And day, dull pain, as in her corns,
	Recounted every bite.

	She thought of St Teresa, floating
	On motes of a sunbeam,
	Carmelite with scatterful robes,
	Surrounded by demons,
	Small black boys in their skin. She gaped
	At Hell: a muddy passage
	That led to nothing, queer in shape,
	A cupboard closely fastened.

	Sometimes, the walls of the parlour
	Would fade away. No plod
	Of feet, rattle of van, in Garville
	Road. Soul now gone abroad
	Where saints, like medieval serfs,
	Had laboured. Great sun-flower shone.
	Our Lady’s Chapel was borne by seraphs,
	Three leagues beyond Ancona.

	High towns of Italy, the plain
	Of France, were known to Martha
	As she read in a holy book. The sky-blaze
	Nooned at Padua,
	Marble grotto of Bernadette.
	Rose-scatterers. New saints
	In tropical Africa where the tsetse
	Fly probes, the forest taints.

	Teresa had heard the Lutherans
	Howling on red-hot spit,
	And grill, men who had searched for truth
	Alone in Holy Writ.
	So Martha, fearful of flame lashing
	Those heretics, each instant,
	Never dealt in the haberdashery
	Shop, owned by two Protestants.

	In ambush of night, an angel wounded
	The Spaniard to the heart
	With iron tip on fire. Swooning
	With pain and bliss as a dart
	Moved up and down within her bowels
	Quicker, quicker, each cell
	Sweating as if rubbed up with towels,
	Her spirit rose and fell.

	St John of the Cross, her friend, in prison
	Awaits the bridal night,
	Paler than lilies, his wizened skin
	Flowers. In fifths of flight,
	Senses beyond seraphic thought,
	In that divinest clasp,
	Enfolding of kisses that cauterize,
	Yield to the soul-spasm.

	Cunning in body had come to hate
	All this and stirred by mischief
	Haled Martha from heaven. Heart palpitates
	And terror in her stiffens.
	Heart misses one beat, two… flutters… stops.
	Her ears are full of sound.
	Half fainting, she stares at the grandfather clock
	As if it were overwound.

	The fit had come. Ill-natured flesh
	Despised her soul. No bending
	Could ease rib. Around her heart, pressure
	Of wind grew worse. Again,
	Again, armchaired without relief,
	She eructated, phlegm
	In mouth, forgot the woe, the grief,
	Foretold at Bethlehem.

	Tired of the same faces, side-altars,
	She went to the Carmelite Church
	At Johnson’s Court, confessed her faults,
	There, once a week, purchased
	Tea, butter in Chatham St. The pond
	In St Stephen’s Green was grand.
	She watched the seagulls, ducks, black swan,
	Went home by the 15 tram.

	Her beads in hand, Martha became
	A member of the Third Order,
	Saved from long purgatorial pain,
	Brown habit and white cord
	Her own when cerges had been lit
	Around her coffin. She got
	Ninety-five pounds on loan for her bit
	Of clay in the common plot.

	Often she thought of a quiet sick-ward,
	Nuns, with delicious ways,
	Consoling the miserable: quick
	Tea, toast on trays. Wishing
	To rid themselves of her, kind neighbours
	Sent for the ambulance,
	Before her brother and sister could hurry
	To help her. Big gate clanged.

	No medical examination
	For the new patient. Doctor
	Had gone to Cork on holidays.
	Telephone sprang. Hall-clock
	Proclaimed the quarters. Clatter of heels
	On tiles. Corridor, ward,
	A-whirr with the electric cleaner,
	The creak of window cord.

	She could not sleep at night. Feeble
	And old, two women raved
	And cried to God. She held her beads.
	O how could she be saved?
	The hospital had this and that rule.
	Day-chill unshuttered. Nun, with
	Thermometer in reticule,
	Went by. The women mumbled.

	Mother Superior believed
	That she was obstinate, self-willed.
	Sisters ignored her, hands-in-sleeves,
	Beside a pantry shelf
	Or counting pillow-case, soiled sheet.
	They gave her purgatives.
	Soul-less, she tottered to the toilet.
	Only her body lived.

	Wasted by colitis, refused
	The daily sacrament
	By regulation, forbidden use
	Of bed-pan, when meals were sent up,
	Behind a screen, she lay, shivering,
	Unable to eat. The soup
	Was greasy, mutton, beef or liver,
	Cold. Kitchen has no scruples.

	The Nuns had let the field in front
	As an Amusement Park,
	Merry-go-round, a noisy month, all
	Heltering-skeltering at darkfall,
	Mechanical music, dipper, hold-tights,
	Rifle-crack, crash of dodgems.
	The ward, godless with shadow, lights,
	How could she pray to God?

	Unpitied, wasting with diarrhea
	And the constant strain,
	Poor Child of Mary with one idea,
	She ruptured a small vein,
	Bled inwardly to jazz. No priest
	Came. She had been anointed
	Two days before, yet knew no peace:
	Her last breath, disappointed.

1964 PHILIP LARKIN Mr Bleaney

	‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He stayed
	The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
	They moved him.’ Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
	Fall to within five inches of the sill,

	Whose window shows a strip of building land,
	Tussocky, littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took
	My bit of garden properly in hand.’
	Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook

	Behind the door, no room for books or bags –
	‘I’ll take it.’ So it happens that I lie
	Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
	On the same saucer-souvenir, and try

	Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
	The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
	I know his habits – what time he came down,
	His preference for sauce to gravy, why

	He kept on plugging at the four aways –
	Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
	Who put him up for summer holidays,
	And Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke.

	But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
	Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
	Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
	And shivered, without shaking off the dread

	That how we live measures our own nature,
	And at his age having no more to show
	Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
	He warranted no better, I don’t know.

(written 1955)

PHILIP LARKIN Here

	Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
	And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
	Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
	And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
	Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
	Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
	And the widening river’s slow presence,
	The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

	Gathers to the surprise of a large town:
	Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
	Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
	And residents from raw estates, brought down
	The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
	Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires –
	Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
	Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers –

	A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
	Where only salesmen and relations come
	Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
	Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
	Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
	And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
	Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
	Isolate villages, where removed lives

	Loneliness clarifies. 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.