'Love Songs in Age' by Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is considered one of the greatest English poets of the later twentieth century. Throughout his remarkable career, he display a deep insight into the pain of the human condition and the shortcomings of modern society. He often combines a strong note of cynicism with a profound sympathy for human suffering. He was also a novelist.
The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,
And coloured, by her daughter -
So they had waited, till, in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood
Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
That hidden freshness sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,
The glare of that much-mentionned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.
(From 'The Oxford Book of English Verse')
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