Church Going – Philip Larkin Poem

by
  1. Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
  2. I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
  3. Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
  4. And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
  5. For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
  6. Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
  7. And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
  8. Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
  9. My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,
  10. Move forward, run my hand around the font.
  11. From where I stand, the roof looks almost new—
  12. Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
  13. Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
  14. Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
  15. ‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant.
  16. The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
  17. I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
  18. Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
  19. Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
  20. And always end much at a loss like this,
  21. Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
  22. When churches fall completely out of use
  23. What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
  24. A few cathedrals chronically on show,
  25. Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
  26. And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
  27. Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
  28. Or, after dark, will dubious women come
  29. To make their children touch a particular stone;
  30. Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
  31. Advised night see walking a dead one?
  32. Power of some sort or other will go on
  33. In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
  34. But superstition, like belief, must die,
  35. And what remains when disbelief has gone?
  36. Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
  37. A shape less recognisable each week,
  38. A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
  39. Will be the last, the very last, to seek
  40. This place for what it was; one of the crew
  41. That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
  42. Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
  43. Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
  44. Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
  45. Or will he be my representative,
  46. Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
  47. Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
  48. Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
  49. So long and equably what since is found
  50. Only in separation—marriage, and birth,
  51. And death, and thoughts of these—for which was built
  52. This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
  53. What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
  54. It pleases me to stand in silence here;
  55. A serious house on serious earth it is,
  56. In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
  57. Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
  58. And that much never can be obsolete,
  59. Since someone will forever be surprising
  60. A hunger in himself to be more serious,
  61. And gravitating with it to this ground,
  62. Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
  63. If only that so many dead lie round.