Philip Larkin - Love Again

Love Again

Love again: wanking at ten past three 

(Surely he’s taken her home by now?),

The bedroom hot as a bakery,

The drink gone dead, without showing how

To meet tomorrow, and afterwards, 

And the usual pain, like dysentery.

Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt,

Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare, 

And me supposed to be ignorant, 

Or find it funny, or not to care, 

Even ... but why put it into words? 

Isolate rather this element 

That spreads through other lives like a tree 

And sways them on in a sort of sense 

And say why it never worked for me. 

Something to do with violence 

A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity.


20 September 1979

From The Complete Poems (2012)
© The Estate of Philip Larkin

COMMENT
Reviewing Anthony Thwaite's 1988 edition of Larkin's Collected Poems, the late, great poet and critic Ian Hamilton grouped 'Love Again' with a handful of previously unpublished poems he termed 'desperately miserable, indeed inconsolable.' It's hard to disagree. Even though 'Love Again' has its faults — what Hamilton was apt to call 'wonky' moments as poetry — its searing power makes such blemishes seem negligible. And while some critics resist a purelyautobiographical reading of Larkin's work, the poem's roots seem painfully, fallibly human. Sexual jealousy makes for unforgettable imagery: 'Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt,/Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare...' (Hardy would have cherished that heart-stopping, hyphenated image of the loved one.) But as Martin Amis and others have observed, Larkin also seemed to enter a poetic No Man's Land in this late, self-probing, almost stunted lyric from 1979; as with the similarly late and inquisitional 'Aubade,' Larkin was posing questions about his own nature he was unable to answer, perhaps triggering his final poetic silence. The poem's raw intimacies can make us feel like voyeurs, but we read on. 'Love Again' is a final, angry burst of lyrical power from a great poet.

TERRY KELLY

Terry Kelly works as a journalist in South Tyneside. He contributed to AL 15; a review of Early Poems and Juvenilia to AL 19 and an interview with Larkin biographer Richard Bradford and a review of his First Boredom Then Fear:The Life of Philip Larkin to AL 20. Another passion is Bob Dylan and he is a regular contributor to the UK fanzine The Bridge: www. two-riders.co.uk

And he's a dyed-in-the-wool, fully paid-up member of the FNB. Busy guy.