Aubade

There are few poets I admire as much as Philip Larkin. His use of language was always so precise and clean. He wasn't one who was overly verbose, his poems never postured in anyway. They flowed smoothly on from one line to the next, without a break in rhythm. He made poetry seem so effortless and as natural as breathing.

And yet there was this grimness about his poems as well. As a man, he was an isolated fellow. A lecturer at school once commented that he was one who detested crowds and people and yet was at the same time intensely lonely.

Sometimes I'm afraid that when I die, most people at my funeral will simply say that they never knew me well enough to be my friend. And sometimes at night when I think about death, I wonder with fear, what it must be like to not have any sensation at all, to not be breathing or feeling. And I think of that line from Hamlet that haunts me sometimes, 'For in this sleep of death what dreams may come'

What dreams indeed...

I'm tired today. And when I re read this poem, I finally understood, like I never did before, the heavy oppressive fear of losing my senses.

Aubade- a song of daybreak, one that signals new life and hope ... how ironic, in the context of this poem

Aubade



I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
-- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused -- nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear -- no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

By Philip Larkin

Love and hate the line ' most things may never happen:this one will'. The finality to it and its rhyming sequence adds to the gravity of the words. They drop like a stone to the heart.