Continuing to Live by Philip Larkin
Continuing to live—that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries—
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.
This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise—
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it's chess.
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
And what's the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,
On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.
A habit formed to get necessaries—
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.
This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise—
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it's chess.
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
And what's the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,
On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.
posted by jw at
9:32 PM
1 Comments:
Two things: yay for poems; and I'm sad that I'm such an editor I want to tell you all the typos in here. I don't really want to tell you, though.
Are you neti-ing yet?
(check me out: beingamaker.blogspot.com)
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