Philip Larkin

That was Philip’s room

For you, it was always the lonely interior
At nine o’clock the curtains would be drawn
On the starched damask and flock wallpaper

Note the imprisoned begonias and the neat lawn
A study in sepia, some Highland scene –
Antlers and crepuscular melancholy

Everything here is cream or mushroom brown
Nature is subdued by suburban irony
Such houses have been lost to history

Old sheet music curls on the piano stand
If only the wild notes of some New Orleans band
Could impose upon this Victorian gentility

Through an open doorway I can picture you:
The tea-rings, the ash-burned coverlet
The stacked discs, your well-thumbed library

That was Philip’s room. I can imagine

Your history – faded and nicotine yellow
The dog-eared porn, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury

Phil and Ted

The church authorities are to place a memorial to Philip Larkin in poet’s corner in Westminster Abbey, close to Ted Hughes, the last poet to be so honoured

Why would they put your slab next to his?
You the melancholic librarian
He, the bludgeon, the contrarian
Come on dean, you’re taking the piss!

He had one good trick, his blood and gore
With his nervy wives and his cruel menagerie
You viewed your companion for eternity

As a curmudgeon – the pub bore

You had little time for the old sod
Now frowned over by feminists

Who think you were both misogynists

You must share a cold stone bed

With the laureate, your enemy

In the draughty antechamber of God

Two lonely old men, Phil and Ted

Locked together in perpetuity