For me, this be the Larkin where quiet despair assumes, as it seems to in all the great poems of quiet despair (like Wordsworth's Intimations Ode), magnificence and momentous significance and infinite possibility, and shows how the dark night of the soul, which is how I'd define 'quiet despair' builds the courage to die, to give over, to let go. Paradoxically, when everything seems gone, everything seems there.
Love, We Must Part Now by Philip Larkin
Love, we must part now: do not let it be
Calamitous and bitter. In the past
There has been too much moonlight and self-pity:
Let us have done with it: for now at last
Never has sun more boldly paced the sky,
Never were hearts more eager to be free,
To kick down worlds, lash forests; you and I
No longer hold them; we are husks, that see
The grain going forward to a different use.
There is regret. Always, there is regret.
But it is better that our lives unloose,
As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,
Break from an estuary with their courses set,
And waving part, and waving drop from sight.
And bring out Josh Menhigan! One of my all-time faves:
Cold Turkey
They’re over now forever, the long dances.
Our woods are quiet. The god is gone tonight.
Our girls, good girls, have shaken off their trances.
They’re over now forever, the long dances.
Only the moonlight, sober and real, advances
over our hills to touch my head with white.
They’re over now forever, the long dances.
Our woods are quiet. The god is gone tonight.
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