Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
One of my favorite poems. Thanks!
The Spring issue of the Sewanee Review has several appreciative references to Larkin, including a moving, quite personal commentary by Mel Livatino titled ‘Church Going’ itself.
Finish reading the entire poem and you will see that Larkin has lost all belief in God and only stops in the church when its is simply a quiet building to ponder the eternal questions that, for him, will remain forever unanswered. Going to the Read it all link and the link to Larkin’s other works shows that he himself felt this and not merely the persona speaking in the poem. No wonder the Sewanee Review appreciates Larkin so!
On the contrary, read the poem from beginning to end and read Mr. Livatino’s essay, and then reflect on the prospective recovery of a relationship with the living, loving, liberating God, resisted yet irresistible. The poet is trumped by his own irony, divinely inspired. ‘Milton’ seems to confuse the Sewanee Review (a magazine still influenced by the discernments of Eliot, Lewis, Tate, Lytle, and Ralston) with the more heterodox members of that institition’s School of Theology.
I did read the entire poem from beginning to end, though I did not read Livatino’s essay. My comment #3 is based on the content of the poem and other links to Larkin’s poems. “Church Going” explicitly comes from a position of unbelief that still comes back to an empty church building when the unexplained and unsatisfied longings of the heart demand a moment out of the world. Sadly, the seeker looks for the living Christ the Lord and Saviour among the dead – people, buildings and dead churches.