Gosh, it’s been a while since I came in here, hasn’t it? *blows dust off*
Now, apparently yesterday was National Poetry Day in the UK. I know I’m a day late, but I wanted to post my favourite piece of poetry for your delectation. It’s a poem that I first read aged 16, on a mock GCSE English Lit paper. The first time that I read it through it didn’t make much of an impact – in fact, as usually happens the first time I read a poem, it didn’t really go into my brain at all. On the second reading, however, I started to realise that it was worth reading again, and so I did. The third time I read it it brought tears to my eyes, I started scribbling copiously and got an A for the paper, as I remember. So anyway, it’s a poem that I’ve loved for nearly half of my life. It is bittersweet and beautiful and I really hope that you enjoy reading it.
Love Songs in Age by Philip Larkin
She kept her songs, they took so little space,
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-mentioned 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.
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