solution to a complex pressure of needs

"I've never been didactic, never tried to make poetry do things, never gone out to look for it. I waited for it to come to me, in whatever shape it chose."

. . .

"But I did write slowly, partly because you're finding out what to say as well as how to say it, and that takes time."

. . .

"You must realize I've never had "ideas" about poetry. To me it's always been a personal, almost physical release or solution to a complex pressure of needs -- wanting to create, to justify, to praise, to explain, to externalize, depending on the circumstances."

-- Philip Larkin (Paris Review - The Art of Poetry)

Modesties

Words as plain as hen-birds' wings
Do not lie,
Do not over-broider things -

Are too shy.

Thoughts that shuffle round like pence

Through each reign,

Wear down to their simplest sense,

Yet remain.

Weeds are not supposed to grow,

But by degrees

Some achieve a flower, although

No one sees.

- Philip Larkin

The Dancer

    Butterfly
    Or falling leaf,
    Which ought I to imitate
    In my dancing?

And if she were to admit

The world weaved by her feet

Is leafless, is incomplete?

And if she abandoned it,

Broke the pivoted dance,

Set loose the audience?

Then would the moon go raving,

The moon, the anchorless

Moon go swerving

Down at the earth for a catastrophic kiss.

Aubade

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.

And interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

- The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because 

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stand plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can't escape,

Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too.

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

- Philip Larkin