Larkin's "Church Going"

By Bijay Kant Dubey

Church Going by Philip Larkin

Church Going by Philip Larkin is a poem of crisis in faith and belief, angst and bewilderment we are confronted with, the age of anxiety we are born in with so many questions resolved and unresolved, we do not know which way to follow, what to do, but cleared of false notions and assumptions doing the rounds for so long. A pessimist, a loner in life, living singly without any romance, Larkin tries to dig the church surface with his existential tool of curiosity and search. Why is faith so reverent and where is it faith? What is it in church going? What is it that makes a church really a church? Is it that not a house? Why do the people go there? Such an inquisitive mind is essential for knowing the hidden facts of life and the world. Why to bemoan the loss of ideals? Why not to question them with an inquisitive mind and heart? What has it happened to faith and where are we going? What is faith? Why is it held so sacrosanct in good belief? What is it holy, unholy? Why is the church so holy? Is it the place of God? Does God live in here really? Are the psalms and hymns from the heart full of feeling?

Since the start the poet is stoical and skeptical about rather than reverent and sacred and sacrosanct. His pessimistic attitude is known world over. But his style of narration is extraordinary no doubt. In a lively manner he starts the poem with the words that he is sure of it that there is nothing going on. The church is empty and he is stepping inside, letting the door thud shut.

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
"Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

After the dark or when the congregations are over, the space lying thinned or almost empty, some dubious women will come to make their children touch a particular stone or pick simples for a cancer, believing in hocus-pocus or holy cure, so much conventional and faithful that they are not sure of what they are doing. It may be that she may on some night be advised to see a dead one walking. This is how the things keep going. What is religion? Religion is but faith; a matter of one’s faith. But the things are not so as we assume or presume to be. There is nothing like a place of God, but we like to give a shape to that to mean our supposition with the mat, book, dais, altar and other relics. Some neurotic and psychotic people too add to the story. The God-fearing hypocrites and whispering lady personae too add to the suspense.

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

The poem is autobiographical and ironical too when he says:

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

The poet stops near the house riding the bicycle:

                               Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Church Going is a poem of ecclesiastical realization and existential search. Where is God?

Why do the people go to church? A poet of the fifties, a Movement man, a pessimist and an iconoclast, a nihilist and an existentialist, an agnostic and an atheist, Larkin is monotonous, full of dull, dry and dreary thoughts and ideas. Only ideas are therein in him, the thesis and the anti-thesis Shavian and Galsworthyian.

Philip Larkin as a poet of the fifties, a Movement man, a pessimist dull and dreary and drab, lost and bewildered, monotonous and tasteless, an iconoclast, an idol-breaker, a nihilist, an existentialist, an agnostic, an atheist here in this poem questions what others have left for. Why is faith so reverent? Why the house so special? What is it that makes a church church-like? Is it faith or the make-believe stuffs? His pessimism dislodges it all seeing everything but with skepticism and suspense. His is a belief in disbelief as he sees everything but with askance. The ecclesiastical people have made the church hierarchal. The religious order seems to be pontifical and hypocritical. How to dispense with and dislodge them all? How to disapprove of?