Dublinesque by Philip Larkin
Down stucco sidestreets, Where light is pewter And afternoon mist Brings lights on in shops Above race-guides and rosaries, A funeral passes. The hearse is ahead, But after there follows A troop of streetwalkers In wide flowered hats, Leg-of-mutton sleeves, And ankle-length dresses. There is an air of great friendliness, As if they were honouring […]
Dockery And Son by Philip Larkin
‘Dockery was junior to you, Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’ Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do You keep in touch with-‘ Or remember how Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight We used to stand before that desk, to give ‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’? I try the door of where […]
Days by Philip Larkin
What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields. End of the poem 15 random poems […]
Cut Grass by Philip Larkin
Cut grass lies frail: Brief is the breath Mown stalks exhale. Long, long the death It dies in the white hours Of young-leafed June With chestnut flowers, With hedges snowlike strewn, White lilac bowed, Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace, And that high-builded cloud Moving at summer’s pace. End of the poem 15 random poems […]
Counting by Philip Larkin
Thinking in terms of one Is easily done— One room, one bed, one chair, One person there, Makes perfect sense; one set Of wishes can be met, One coffin filled. But counting up to two Is harder to do; For one must be denied Before it’s tried. End of the poem 15 random poems […]
Continuing To Live by Philip Larkin
Continuing to live — that is, repeat A habit formed to get necessaries — Is nearly always losing, or going without. It varies. This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise — Ah, if the game were poker, yes, You might discard them, draw a full house! But it’s chess. And once you have walked the […]
Church Going by Philip Larkin
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 […]
Breadfruit by Philip Larkin
Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit, Whatever they are, As bribes to teach them how to execute Sixteen sexual positions on the sand; This makes them join (the boys) the tennis club, Jive at the Mecca, use deodorants, and On Saturdays squire ex-schoolgirls to the pub By private car. Such uncorrected visions end […]
Best Society by Philip Larkin
When I was a child, I thought, Casually, that solitude Never needed to be sought. Something everybody had, Like nakedness, it lay at hand, Not specially right or specially wrong, A plentiful and obvious thing Not at all hard to understand. Then, after twenty, it became At once more difficult to get And more desired; […]
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: […]
At Grass by Philip Larkin
The eye can hardly pick them out From the cold shade they shelter in, Till wind distresses tail and main; Then one crops grass, and moves about – The other seeming to look on – And stands anonymous again Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps Two dozen distances surficed To fable them: faint afternoons Of Cups […]
Arrival by Philip Larkin
Morning, a glass door, flashes Gold names off the new city, Whose white shelves and domes travel The slow sky all day. I land to stay here; And the windows flock open And the curtains fly out like doves And a past dries in a wind. Now let me lie down, under A wide-branched indifference, […]
Annus Mirabilis by Philip Larkin
Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP. Up to then there’d only been A sort of bargaining, A wrangle for the ring, A shame that started at sixteen And spread to everything. Then all at once the […]
An Arundel Tomb by Philip Larkin
Side by side, their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone, Their proper habits vaguely shown As jointed armour, stiffened pleat, And that faint hint of the absurd – The little dogs under their feet. Such plainness of the pre-baroque Hardly involves the eye, until It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still Clasped empty […]
Ambulances by Philip Larkin
Closed like confessionals, they thread Loud noons of cities, giving back None of the glances they absorb. Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque, They come to rest at any kerb: All streets in time are visited. Then children strewn on steps or road, Or women coming from the shops Past smells of different dinners, […]
A Study Of Reading Habits by Philip Larkin
When getting my nose in a book Cured most things short of school, It was worth ruining my eyes To know I could still keep cool, And deal out the old right hook To dirty dogs twice my size. Later, with inch-thick specs, Evil was just my lark: Me and my coat and fangs Had […]
You Can Have It by Philip Levine
You Can Have It by Philip Levine My brother comes home from work and climbs the stairs to our room. I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop one by one. You can have it, he says. The moonlight streams in the window and his unshaven face is whitened like the face of […]
Wisteria by Philip Levine
Wisteria by Philip Levine The first purple wisteria I recall from boyhood hung on a wire outside the windows of the breakfast room next door at the home of Steve Pisaris. I loved his tall, skinny daughter, or so I thought, and I would wait beside the back door, prostrate, begging to be taken in. […]
Where We Live Now by Philip Levine
Where We Live Now by Philip Levine 1 We live here because the houses are clean, the lawns run right to the street and the streets run away. No one walks here. No one wakens at night or dies. The cars sit open-eyed in the driveways. The lights are on all day. 2 At home […]
What Work Is by Philip Levine
What Work Is by Philip Levine We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. You know what work is–if you’re old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to […]
Waking In March by Philip Levine
Waking In March by Philip Levine Last night, again, I dreamed my children were back at home, small boys huddled in their separate beds, and I went from one to the other listening to their breathing — regular, almost soundless — until a white light hardened against the bedroom wall, the light of Los Angeles […]
Told by Philip Levine
Told by Philip Levine The air lay soffly on the green fur of the almond, it was April and I said, I begin again but my hands burned in the damp earth the light ran between my fingers a black light like no other this was not home, the linnet settling on the oleander the […]
They Feed They Lion by Philip Levine
They Feed They Lion by Philip Levine Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, Out of black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, They Lion grow. Out of the gray hills Of industrial barns, out of rain, […]
Then by Philip Levine
Then by Philip Levine A solitary apartment house, the last one before the boulevard ends and a dusty road winds its slow way out of town. On the third floor through the dusty windows Karen beholds the elegant couples walking arm in arm in the public park. It is Saturday afternoon, and she is waiting […]
The New World by Philip Levine
The New World by Philip Levine A man roams the streets with a basket of freestone peaches hollering, “Peaches, peaches, yellow freestone peaches for sale.” My grandfather in his prime could outshout the Tigers of Wrath or the factory whistles along the river. Hamtramck hungered for yellow freestone peaches, downriver wakened from a dream of […]
The Helmet by Philip Levine
The Helmet by Philip Levine All the way on the road to Gary he could see where the sky shone just out of reach and smell the rich smell of work as strong as money, but when he got there the night was over. People were going to work and back, the sidewalks were lakes […]
The Distant Winter by Philip Levine
The Distant Winter by Philip Levine from an officer’s diary during the last war I The sour daylight cracks through my sleep-caked lids. “Stephan! Stephan!” The rattling orderly Comes on a trot, the cold tray in his hands: Toast whitening with oleo, brown tea, Yesterday’s napkins, and an opened letter. “Your asthma’s bad, old man.” […]
Gangrene by Philip Levine
Gangrene by Philip Levine Vous êtes sorti sain et sauf des basses calomnies, vous avey conquis les coeurs. Zola, J’accuse One was kicked in the stomach until he vomited, then made to put back into his mouth what they had brought forth; when he tried to drown in his own stew he was recovered. “You […]
Noon by Philip Levine
Noon by Philip Levine I bend to the ground to catch something whispered, urgent, drifting across the ditches. The heaviness of flies stuttering in orbit, dirt ripening, the sweat of eggs. There are small streams the width ofa thumb running in the villages of sheaves, whole eras of grain wakening on the stalks, a roof […]
Making Light Of It by Philip Levine
Making Light Of It by Philip Levine I call out a secret name, the name of the angel who guards my sleep, and light grows in the east, a new light like no other, as soft as the petals of the blown rose in late summer. Yes, it is late summer in the West. Even […]
Making It Work by Philip Levine
Making It Work by Philip Levine 3-foot blue cannisters of nitro along a conveyor belt, slow fish speaking the language of silence. On the roof, I in my respirator patching the asbestos gas lines as big around as the thick waist of an oak tree. “These here are the veins of the place, stuff inside’s […]
Magpiety by Philip Levine
Magpiety by Philip Levine You pull over to the shoulder of the two-lane road and sit for a moment wondering where you were going in such a hurry. The valley is burned out, the oaks dream day and night of rain that never comes. At noon or just before noon the short shadows are gray […]
Mad Day In March by Philip Levine
Mad Day In March by Philip Levine Beaten like an old hound Whimpering by the stove, I complicate the pain That smarts with promised love. The oilstove falls, the rain, Forecast, licks at my wound; Ice forms, clips the green shoot, And strikes the wren house mute. May commoner and king, The barren bride and […]
M. Degas Teaches Art & Science At Durfee Intermediate School–Detroit, 1942 by Philip Levine
M. Degas Teaches Art & Science At Durfee Intermediate School–Detroit, 1942 by Philip Levine He made a line on the blackboard, one bold stroke from right to left diagonally downward and stood back to ask, looking as always at no one in particular, “What have I done?” From the back of the room Freddie shouted, […]
Late Moon by Philip Levine
Late Moon by Philip Levine 2 a.m. December, and still no mon rising from the river. My mother home from the beer garden stands before the open closet her hands still burning. She smooths the fur collar, the scarf, opens the gloves crumpled like letters. Nothing is lost she says to the darkness, nothing. The […]
Late Light by Philip Levine
Late Light by Philip Levine Rain filled the streets once a year, rising almost to door and window sills, battering walls and roofs until it cleaned away the mess we’d made. My father told me this, he told me it ran downtown and spilled into the river, which in turn emptied finally into the sea. […]
Last Words by Philip Levine
Last Words by Philip Levine If the shoe fell from the other foot who would hear? If the door opened onto a pure darkness and it was no dream? If your life ended the way a book ends with half a blank page and the survivors gone off to Africa or madness? If my life […]
Philip Levine – Philip Levine
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Philip Levine – Philip Levine
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Philip Levine – Philip Levine
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