Philip Larkin: Likeness

“So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.”

“I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.”

“Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.”

“Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.”

“On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.”

“You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.”

“But, o, photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing! That records
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
And will not censor blemishes,
Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards”

“And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.”

“You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.”

“Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.”