On a Lark

This past Monday, we puzzled through Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" and eventually considered that death might be both the "miraculous birth" for which the aged hope and the "it" that the children don't want to happen. That moment in class reminded me that someone once said that the subject of every great poem is, in some way, death. I'm not sure to what extent I believe that's true, but it certainly gives me something to ponder. Philip Larkin was an individual and a poet who in various ways testified to a lifelong dread of death; this is probably nowhere more apparent than in possibly his most famous poem, "Aubade" (which should be in your anthologies), which refers to "the sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere, / And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true" (l. 17-20). There may be no other poem I can think of that faces death (and the fear of death) in such a bluntly direct and honest way: "most things may never happen:" the speaker continues, "this one will" (l. 34).

Anyway, I wanted to create this invitation to get some conversation going, in advance of tomorrow's class, about Larkin's "Church Going." What do you think about the (possibly) multiple connotations of the poem's title? And what about those opening stanzas, which reveal to us, among other things, that the speaker has a kind of fascination with churches and visits them often -- despite his attempt to make us think he's rather indifferent to churches and religion. What details in those opening stanzas stand out to you? For example, that the speaker lets "the door thud shut" (l.2) suggests a kind of alienation, isolation, and entrapment.

And then what do you make of the final 2/3 of this poem? In what ways does the speaker seem to contradict what he sets us up to think in the very opening of the poem? Why does he, in fact, tend often to go into churches? What brings him back? What do he and the poem eventually conclude about churches and religious experience? Is he as "bored" and "uninformed" as he says he is (l. 46)? Maybe if we can get a few modest observations and passages circulating here in this space we can make more efficient work of this tomorrow ...