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?

View of Larkin

Nihilistic, Bleak or Gloomy Outlook

Described by Eric Homberger as ‘the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket’ due to the darker aspects of life such as isolation, alienation and death, Philip Larkin is often dismissed as bleak or gloomy in outlook. His pessimistic approach is deeply rooted in the predicament of human life on which based the poem “Mr. Bleany,” wherein the central figure is leading a sub-standard life in his apartment. ‘Deceptions’ somehow privileges the suffering of the rapist, whilst letting the victim’s suffering slide into insignificance. The ‘Afternoons’ reflected the pessimism of a young couple that is pushing them to the side of their own lives. This dissatisfaction is part and parcel of Larkin’s poetic ability. Instead of directly describing the massacre and destruction of WW-II, he crafted pain, suffering and helplessness of a man under the impact of these destructive forces.

Life and Relationship, and Realism (Socio-Economic)

Larkin, in the reconstructive post war era, gave the run-around to God, religion and religious creeds. In spite of this non-sentimental and agnostic approach, he had earned a reputation of a great poet of his time as one who deals with the stark and harsh realities of his time with great realism. In fact, it is his non-romantic approach towards the precarious conditions of life that has given his poetry a long lasting popularity.

Besides giving plenty of space to his pessimistic and agnostic approach, he delineates a crystal clear picture of his society where the differences of class and culture emerge from the advancement of industrial revolution.

Anti-Myth

The poems on the course feature such ordinary occurrences as a lonely life in a room of Mr. Beaney, rapist and rape in “Deceptions,” boring wedding life of “Afternoons” remains the subject of poetry, instead of myth and allusion frequently finds in Eliot, Auden and others. Larkin said of his work: ‘I write about experiences, often quite simple everyday experiences which somehow acquire some sort of special meaning for me, and I write poems about them to preserve them’. Thus, there is less space for myth and more to realism. Larkin describes very realistically the truth of our social life, wherein a person’s character is judged by his style of living.

Even his love poems describe an utterly unromantic view of human life in the backdrop of the sexual act, which is generally believed to bring about fulfillment and sexual relief. 

Conclusion

In Larkin’s poems, the sexual act is altogether a deception and a sense of dissatisfaction attached to hopelessness that seems to penetrate everything with a feeling of emptiness. Thus, Larkin’s poetry is greatly reinforced by the cataclysmic scenario of post-war England. Intentionally and deliberately, he does avoid deceptions and through his perceptions, he presents the facts as they actually exist. If Christopher Ricks finds in him “a deep and true feeling for human loneliness and longing,” then Donald Davie described him as a poet of “lowered sights and diminished expectations.” His poems are marked by what Andrew Motion calls “glum accuracy about emotions, places, and relationships.”

The age of Larkin was an age of disaster and chaos on a social and moral level all over the world. The flames of Second World War were still burning in the late nineteen-fifties and there was a decline in the values cherished by societies. People had seen much destruction in the wake of first and second world wars and they had started raising questions about the existence of God. That was a scenario where Philip Larkin was born and brought up.

Mr. Bleany is a lonely person, isolated from others; there is nothing neither charming nor attractive in his life and in his apartment.. But

Larkin’s poetry is greatly overwhelmed by one single thought and that is death, which eventually leads the human mind to decline and deprivation.

Larkin’s so-called love poetry, devoid of any romantic passions and emotions by focusing on the peripheral issues of human life reveals tragic aspects and tragedies that have been inseparable to man, since time immemorial. This has been Larkin’s approach that altogether shuns superficial treatment of human suffering and presents pathetic, realistic pictures of human life.

They were described by Jean Hartley, the ex-wife of Larkin’s publisher George Hartley (The Marvell Press), as a “piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent.”

Church Going

Some Questions with Answers

1. Answering bigger and smaller questions—for example, why is the air “blent”?
2. Who is recognizing “our compulsions”?
3. And why are they “robed as destinies”?
4. And by whom are they robed? And to what is “that” referring in the line “that much can never be obsolete”?
5. The final two lines baffle as well.

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, 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.

Answers:

1) The air is blended in the sense that it holds, in solution, a mixture of smells and associations (see stanza five). But why “blent”? Why such an archaic, literary word? At the very beginning of the poem, when the speaker walks into the church, he finds a “tense, musty, unignorable silence / Brewed God knows how long.” (Get it, God knows?) By the end of the poem, that defensive, jokey tone is gone. The speaker is trying to make his language live up to the dignity he sees in the church. That’s how it strikes me, anyway.

(Here and throughout, Larkin makes a big deal of the church as container. He starts off by wondering about the roof, how old it is and whether it’s in good repair. He associates the end of “superstition” with the caving-in of the roof, when all that’s left is “Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky.” He calls the church a “special shell,” and so on.)

2) Who is recognizing our compulsions? Yes. Exactly. I think this question goes straight to the heart of the poem. If there is no one in the church (no God, no clergy, no belief, no superstition), then there is no one to recognize our compulsions. There is no one to call them sins and forgive them. No one to take them seriously. No promise that we will be rewarded or punished for what we do or given a “destiny” that is special to ourselves.

3) Why “robed”? We tend to think of robes as royal or ceremonial garments and as symbols of redemption: “Lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9-10). To take our compulsions (a quasimedical term borrowed from psychiatry) and robe them as destinies is to ... well, you can decide what that might mean, no?

4) By “that much,” I think Larkin means the feeling that the church is “a serious house on serious earth.” In the last lines of the poem he tries to explain this feeling—or at least say where it comes from.

Again, these are just places you might start. My next question would probably have to do with the tone of that last stanza. Is there something not quite serious about that line “A serious house on serious earth it is”? Is there something wishful, and ironic, about “blent”? And so on. Another reader might ask how much the last lines had to do with churches and how much with poems about churches. Both readers would be asking questions, not just about what’s on the page, but about their own biases and interests and ... compulsions.

So, as for your most general question—how to read poetry well—I have no idea, except to pay attention to the specific words on the page, and the implied tone of voice, and to think about what you read. Just what you’re doing. It sounds childish to say, but one thing I like about poems is that you are allowed to stare at them, and think about them, for as long as you like. In this sense, they resemble slow movies, or portraits, or nudes, or most of what we think of as art: poems give you permission to pay attention to a degree that would be rude or embarrassing face to face with, for example, a person.