Wants
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone
However the sky grows dark with invitation cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites
The costly aversion of the eyes from death—
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.


Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin is the greatest vernacular poet in English of the twentieth century. Or was he? Does being a miserable git (and a gravely ideologically challenged miserable git at that, one might add) prevent you from being a great poet?
The year Larkin died, the BBC, in their New Year's Eve retrospective of events of the preceding year, played a recording of Larkin reading this poem. He sounded as if he really meant it.
I'm sure there are many subtleties in this structure that I am missing. Is not the second line the most wonderful oxymoron to be found anywhere?* One subtlety that has only just occurred to me is a possible connection with the famous line of Greta Garbo's ``I want to be alone''. Is this an allusion or a coincidence? (Wasn't Larkin a film buff...?) Again, both stanzas consist of a list of items flanked by two occurrences of a motto. Notice how the items in the first stanza are each marked by a "However"; in contrast the items in the second stanza are piled one after the other in a headlong rush ending in the word "death". It's then capped off by the motto, as much as to say that life returns to normal and none of this matters. And indeed it does not: as J.M. Keynes correctly said: in the long run we are all dead.
* No, it isn't. The greatest oxymoron of all time is

Oh I could drink a case of you darling
And I would still be on my feet

But then she's an appalling depressive too, even if of a different stamp.


Tho' come to think of it, I'm not sure. The greatest oxymoron might yet be:

``The Americans are our friends, whether we like it or not''

attributed to a minor Canadian politician famous for his malapropisms


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