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Arrival by Philip Larkin

7/24/2008 5:31:53 AM
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Philip Larkin Philip Larkin
(1922 - 1985 / England)
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102 poems of Philip Larkin

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Arrival
 
  Morning, a glass door, flashes
Gold names off the new city,
Whose white shelves and domes travel
The slow sky all day.
I land to stay here;
And the windows flock open
And the curtains fly out like doves
And a past dries in a wind.

Now let me lie down, under
A wide-branched indifference,
Shovel-faces like pennies
Down the back of the mind,
Find voices coined to
An argot of motor-horns,
And let the cluttered-up houses
Keep their thick lives to themselves.

For this ignorance of me
Seems a kind of innocence.
Fast enough I shall wound it:
Let me breathe till then
Its milk-aired Eden,
Till my own life impound it-
Slow-falling; grey-veil-hung; a theft,
A style of dying only.

Philip Larkin


Read poems about / on: innocence, travel, city, wind, sky, life, house

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Lucy Simpson (12/31/2007 10:57:00 AM)
I love the idea of dessicating doves as a metaphor for the past. I like his hyphenated words, especially shovel-faces. The idea of a milky innocence that will get wounded by life is beautiful.

Lucy
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7/24/2008 5:31:53 AM. You Are Here: Arrival by Philip Larkin

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