Unless there is a cache of poems secreted somewhere in Hull, which we may doubt, the poet Philip Larkin died before the man. As far as I know, his last poem was “Aubade,” published in the Times Literary Supplement almost a decade ago. It begins:
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.
The fear of dying, daily companion of many, found its Homer, Dante, and Milton in Philip Larkin. His post-religious, almost Roman skepticism looks forward only to “total emptiness for ever,/The sure extinction that we travel to.” As in his early “Church Going,” his language acknowledges religious feeling without diluting skepticism, sentimentalizing loss, or asking for pity. Larkin is resolute, forthright, witty, and gloomy. This is the man who famously said that deprivation was for him what daffodils were for Wordsworth. Yet surely the results of this life, in the shape of his poems, are gifts, not deprivations.
The fear of dying, daily companion of many, found its Homer, Dante, and Milton in Philip Larkin.
The Less Deceived announced Philip Larkin in 1955. As a young man he had published The North Ship, poems lyrical and Yeatsian and not yet Larkinesque. The early work
