The Sunday press has its fill of Hitchness. My own tribute, alas, is pay-walled at the Sunday Times. Simon Schama has the best single passage:
Hitch lived for the word. It could as easily be said that English in all its muscular, jubilantly performative splendor lives on for such as him to make hay, make enemies, and make waves with.
Ross grapples with how old-fashioned Hitch was, in literature and argument, and how that befuddled and yet also beguiled the contemporary right. But I wonder if he's right about this:
In his very brave and very public dying, though, one could see again why so many religious people felt a kinship with him. When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”
Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.
But it wasn't Aubade he turned to in the final days. It is that other blessed poem of Larkin's, The Whitsun Weddings. Ian McEwan explains:
I set the poem up and read it, and when I reached that celebrated end, "A sense of falling, like an arrow shower/Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain," Christopher murmured from his bed, "That's so dark, so horribly dark."
I disagreed, and not out of any wish to lighten his mood. Surely, the train journey comes to an end, the recently married couples are dispatched towards their separate fates. He wouldn't have it, and a week later, when I was back in London, we were still exchanging emails on the subject.
One of his began: "Dearest Ian, Well, indeed – no rain, no gain – but it still depends on how much anthropomorphising Larkin is doing with his unconscious … I'd provisionally surmise that 'somewhere becoming rain' is unpromising."
Listen to Larkin's own speaking of the poem. It remains ambiguous at the end. But there is within it both light and dark:
there swelled/ a sense of falling, like an arrow shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
It swells, it falls, it precipitates. Out of sight. But somewhere.
The Dish 