If Larkin had stopped here and not gone onto the excellences of The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows (and "Aubade", his freestanding final masterpiece), he would still have gone down as a Great Poet. For a Great Poet only has to write one Great Poem. Thomas Gray lives in every literate mind on the sole strength of his "Elegy";* Larkin could have done the same with "Church Going".
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.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, 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.
We would know that, even if alternate-Larkin only did it once, he could do everything. His light-stepping iambs are as natural as his use of the word randy. The rhyme, inevitable in its perfection as any of Keats's Odes, fades into the background, leaving only engendered order. You can hear the heavy church door redound from its frame in thud shut. The hyperbaton in see walking a dead one embodies the reversal of nature and expectation he's portraying. He is lofty, colloquial and dialectical all in seamless harmony. Lofty especially. A serious house on serious earth it is,/ In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,/ Are recognised, and robed as destinies./ And that much never can be obsolete... In the 20th Century, who else could write in the noble register, rhymed and metred, with comparable ease and un-self-consciousness? Wallace Stevens maybe, but that's it. I love Larkin because he gives me pleasures no-one else can these days.
Best of the Rest
*Another meditation on meaning and futility prompted by a church, coincidentally.