A Larkin epiphany

I have discovered Philip Larkin, the poet. I mean, discovered. I had always thought of PL as a bit of a miserable old git but this is something else.

Larkin,cycling, came across a church out in the countryside somewhere, stopped to look and was moved by the experience, perhaps unexpectedly. The poem begins:

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.

and ends:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

- the last stanza from Church Going by Philip Larkin

Full text 

The credit for this late epiphany must go to Richard Holloway and Andrew Motion and the BBC Radio 4 programme Honest Doubt: the history of an epic struggle, episode 19/20, On presence and absence; broadcast at 13.45h on Thursday 21st June 2012.

From the BBC web page:

In a series of personal essays, Richard Holloway considers the tensions between faith and doubt over the last 3000 years.

In today's programme, Richard Holloway focuses on an enduring paradox ... that God can be experienced both as present and absent at the same time. He explores the idea with the help of three post-war poets - Philip Larkin, John Betjeman and RS Thomas.

He talks to Larkin's friend and literary executor, Sir Andrew Motion, about Larkin's complex attitude to religion and reads from Larkin's seminal poem 'Aubade'. Larkin himself introduces his poem, 'Churchgoing' [sic], which expresses the nostalgia of what we lose when we lose our faith.

John Betjeman's religious struggle is discussed with Betjeman's biographer AN Wilson. And for the Welsh priest poet RS Thomas, the theme of God's absence and presence is compared to finding a [hare's form empty but recently vacated] on the hillside - 'we find the place still warm with his presence, but he is absent'.

Producer: Olivia Landsberg
A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.

Brilliant radio. Brilliant poet.

 Ends