Nov 222002
 

I was beaten to this by Allan and Elizabeth, in that order, but I don’t mind — really! — because the poem is very good, as undiscovered poems almost never are. The artist can generally be trusted to publish his best stuff. It was awfully sentimental of old Larkin not to have published this:

We met at the end of the party
When all the drinks were dead
And all the glasses dirty:
‘Have this that’s left’, you said.
We walked through the last of summer,
When shadows reached long and blue
Across days that were growing shorter:
You said: ‘There’s autumn too’.
Always for you what’s finished
Is nothing, and what survives
Cancels the failed, the famished,
As if we had fresh lives
From that night on, and just living
Could make me unaware
Of June, and the guests arriving,
And I not there.

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