Larkin, Uncensored (On Human Bondage, Donald Davie, and Barbara Pym)

Philip Larkin wrote this poem -- which he characterized as a "cri du cock" -- in 1943, when he was 21:

I would give all I possess
(money, keep, wallet, personal effects, and articles of dress)
To stick my tool
Up the prettiest girl in Warwick King's High School.

*

To the tune of "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do," Larkin penned this 1974 epistle (unsent) to Professor Donald Davie:

Davie, Davie,
Give me a bad review;
That's your gravy,
Telling chaps what to do.
Forget about style and passion,
As long as it's in the fashion --
But let's be fair, it's got you a chair,
Which was all it was meant to do.

The last lines are the poem's weak link and Larkin 's friend Kingsley Amis suggested that he change them to "But it's got you a chair, which, let's be fair, / Was the most that you had in view."

*

Larkin had a flair for limericks. He had a high regard for Barbara Pym's writing, but that didn't prevent him from composing these lines:

The chances are certainly slim
Of finding in Barbara Pym
      (I speak with all deference)
      The faintest of reference
To what in our youth we called quim --

The three poems are from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012

Good old Phil, / Over the hill / From the start. / Bless his heart. 

[from the archive; posted March 20, 22 and 23, 2013]

I would give all I possess
(money, keep, wallet, personal effects, and articles of dress)
To stick my tool
Up the prettiest girl in Warwick King's High School.

*

To the tune of "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do," Larkin penned this 1974 epistle (unsent) to Professor Donald Davie:

Davie, Davie,
Give me a bad review;
That's your gravy,
Telling chaps what to do.
Forget about style and passion,
As long as it's in the fashion --
But let's be fair, it's got you a chair,
Which was all it was meant to do.

The last lines are the poem's weak link and Larkin 's friend Kingsley Amis suggested that he change them to "But it's got you a chair, which, let's be fair, / Was the most that you had in view."

*

Larkin had a flair for limericks. He had a high regard for Barbara Pym's writing, but that didn't prevent him from composing these lines:

The chances are certainly slim
Of finding in Barbara Pym
      (I speak with all deference)
      The faintest of reference
To what in our youth we called quim --

The three poems are from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012

Good old Phil, / Over the hill / From the start. / Bless his heart. 

[from the archive; posted March 20, 22 and 23, 2013]