Poems- Not your own.

[Sundae]

Another Larkin for you.
Sky made me think of it, with the poem above.

Even as a teenager, who felt attractive and loved, the sheer desperation of this poem gripped me by the throat. Well, that and the lovely sounds of the words - read it out loud. Hear how the "love songs" are described in such drowsy dragging syllables and reality in sharp staccato sounds.

Knowing you had love - whatever that means - once, but now it is squandered, gone and nothing to take its place. Its horrible, but at the same time true and therefore beautiful in its starkness

Love Songs in Age

She kept her songs, they kept so little space,
The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,
And coloured, by her daughter -
So they had waited, till, in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood

Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
That hidden freshness sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,

The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.

Philip Larkin