Poems by Philip Larkin
Sorted by title, showing title and first line
When getting my nose in a book
Closed like confessionals, they thread
Side by side, their faces blurred,
Sexual intercourse began
Morning, a glass door, flashes
The eye can hardly pick them out
Delay, well, travellers must expect
When I was a child, I thought,
Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit,
Once I am sure there's nothing going on
Continuing to live -- that is, repeat
Thinking in terms of one
Cut grass lies frail:
What are days for?
"Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain
'Dockery was junior to you,
Down stucco sidestreets,
In frames as large as rooms that face all ways
Slowly the women file to where he stands
Beyond the dark cartoons
Lambs that learn to walk in snow
That note you hold, narrowing and rising, shakes
Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
There is an evening coming in
If grief could burn out
For C.G.B.
When I see a couple of kids
Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
How distant, the departure of young men
I have started to say
Coming up England by a different line
If hands could free you, heart,
Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Is it for now or for always,
Like the train's beat
At last you yielded up the album, which
They say eyes clear with age,
Love again: wanking at ten past three
She kept her songs, they kept so little space,
Love, we must part now: do not let it be
Marrying left yor maiden name disused.
A stationary sense... as, I suppose,
Those long uneven lines
Words as plain as hen-birds' wings
Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
My mother, who hates thunder storms,
'This was Mr Bleaney's room. He stayed
Caught in the center of a soundless field
New eyes each year
Always too eager for the future, we
At one the wind rose,
Since we agreed to let the road between us
For nations vague as weed,
Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
The trumpet's voice, loud and authoritative,
Groping back to bed after a piss
Standing under the fobbed
Since the majority of me
Obedient daily dress,
Suspended lion face
Tired of a landscape known too well when young:
Come to Sunny Prestatyn
On shallow straw, in shadeless glass,
Talking in bed ought to be easiest
Higher than the handsomest hotel
On the day of the explosion
Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,
The little lives of earth and form,
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
Legend
What do they think has happened, the old fools,
The cloakroom pegs are empty now,
Once I believed in you,
The trees are coming into leaf
That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
This is the first thing
You do not come dramatically, with dragons
Choice of you shuts up that peacock-fan
To put one brick upon another,
Why should I let the toad work
Walking around in the park
In this dream that dogs me I am part
This empty street, this sky to blandness scoured,
My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
If I were called in
The wind blew all my wedding-day,
At once whatever happened starts receding.
When first we faced, and touching showed
Why did I dream of you last night?
About twenty years ago
The widest prairies have electric fences,