"Next, Please" by Philip Larkin (poetry reading)

The only time we ever experience is now. The future and the past contaminate the present with anticipation and reminscence which are the reasons for our absentmindedness. If we lived in the present then we'd remember where we left our keys.

Some people are perpetual optimists, living in a state of hopeful expectation - "something will turn up" as Mr. Micawber said in David Copperfield. It has been said that the normal state of mind is one of a mild and unrealistic optimism. The future didn't look so rosy to Philip Larkin.

The expectation of winning money in the lottery is not much different from the "cargo cult" of some primitive peoples. They did not believe that the goods their visitors had were manufactured but instead bestowed on them by the gods, and therefore if they built fake harbours and airfields then the gods would give them the same goods too. All it takes, apparently, is patience and good luck.

"When my boat comes in" is a familar expression in the north of England and it means, "When my luck changes for the better."

"Peace - Burial at Sea" was painted in 1842 by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851).

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[jonno52]

I like how - it's especially evident on the page - the word "we" is left hanging for a moment at the end of the first line (instead of where it might more naturally fall, as the first word of the second line) which leaves an unresolved sense of "expectancy" - the subject of the poem. The careful timing in this reading captures this exactly.

Despite his own terror, a "lonely old courage-teacher" perhaps, though he'd have had little time for such a conceit.

[SpokenVerse]

I agree that the first line shows Larkin at his best, in the way "We" catches the stress. Larkin is always master of structure or rhyme and he makes them serve his purpose.

I'd better explain that "lonely ond courage teacher" was said by Allen Ginsberg about Walt Whitman.

[thallassocracy]

It has always intrigued me how this most land-lubberly of poets had such an obsession with his Ship of Death. Here, of course, but also the North Ship, Plymouth, I am washed upon a rock.

The best poets always show us something we wouldn't otherwise be able to see for ourself. Before I discovered just how inextricably paralysed Larkin was with his fear of death - I never fully realised just how comfortable I am with my own mortality.

[SpokenVerse]

Larkin told the world what it was like to be him. What protects the rest of us from his obsessions is the people around us whose welfare matters more than our own. Children are as close as we will get to immortality The anodyne seems to be to help others to survive and maybe that's why writing poetry helped him.

Larkin's real problem was not fear of death (we will all die) but lack of life - or lack of love. Dostoevsky said, "The true Hell is being incapable of loving"

[IsisSlovenska]

GREAT!!

[scifiwritir]

I so hope we aren't entirely wrong. Thanks for the poem, Spoken!

[jonno52]

As you say, Ginsberg was writing about Whitman. I meant Larkin might have felt uncomfortable cast as a "courage teacher" at the whim of a poster on YT! He'd probably have had time for Whitman, but distrusted someone as "bohemian" as Ginsberg. Larkin had his "conservative" side but I feel he speaks to us more directly than say Eliot or Pound, without recondite allusions or dubious politics: for me he does transcend such things & talks in a way we can all understand about what really matters.

[Apollonianone]

Pure existentialism.