Philip larkin church going wikipedia

March 2006

Nomination: Church Going [28 July 1954. From The Less Deceived]

‘Church Going’, from Larkin’s 1955 collection The Less Deceived, stands out as a masterpiece of rhetoric, introducing a facility with register that launched a thousand imitations.

Many readers are encouraged to read ‘Church Going’ as an example of Larkin’s ambivalent relationship with the spiritual.

There is little doubt that the everyman persona-narrator who takes us on this by turns solemn and irreverent guided tour experiences both a sense of futility and mystique in equal measure. An overload of sensory impression confronts our narrator upon his arrival, inspiring both bewilderment and that particular quality of ‘hunger’ for understanding he imagines will continue to draw men in.

Objects here are represented as finite in their quality and, as such, they possess bathos and pathos in equal measure in this spiritual context. And yet, similarly, the environment gives rise to wonder, a sense of time