I don’t quite know what to make of Philip Larkin’s poems these days. They strike me just now as too relentlessly gloomy. That might be to do with my current circumstances, health worries and so on, and the strange dislocation of normality we have all endured over the last year. Perhaps he looks at life more directly than I am comfortable with.
It’s not an exact science, though, one’s taste in poetry. It feels slightly absurd to say that I find Larkin too gloomy, when Thomas Hardy is a real favourite of mine.
I chose this poem because it is May and I was looking for a poem to celebrate the coming of spring, which seems to have been rather delayed this year. I find that I had rather mis-remembered it. Only Larkin could write a poem about spring featuring the words “grow old”, “die” and “grief”. I suppose he is talking about the cycle of life.
That said, I cherish the poem for its use of “f” and “s” sounds to represent the leaves swaying in the wind. I think the last verse is one of the finest marriages of sound and meaning in the whole of poetry in English. To get the full effect, just read it aloud to yourself.
The Trees by Philip Larkin
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.
The Good Reader 