Aubade BY Philip Larkin
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Philip Larkin
,
Poetry
Aubade
BY PHILIP LARKIN
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.
Philip Larkin,
"Aubade" from Collected Poems. Copyright © Estate of Philip
Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.
Source: Collected
Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2001)
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