“MCMXIV" by Philip Larkin:
And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word–the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
The poem in its entirety is here. Francis-Noël Thomas remembers the poet and his work:
Whatever Larkin’s personal faults may have been, they do not compromise a poem like “MCMXIV” in the least. We may recall a line from Auden’s elegy for William Butler Yeats: “You were silly like us; your gift survived it all.”
(Photo by Phillip Capper)
The Dish 