In honour of yesterday - Blue Monday, allegedly the most depressing day of the year - our first post of 2024 celebrates (if that is the right word) the morose, misanthropic, melancholic and often downright downbeat Philip Larkin.
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| Philip Larkin (photo: Rogers/RBO) |
4C have been studying Larkin's poetry, and capturing his bleak vision and disenchanted voice beautifully in their own writing. Many thanks to Mr Harris for curating their contributions.
'Fair England Falls'
by Vivaan Sharma
I don’t really listen to LBC
Until one day, someone denser than me,
Was let on, and said:
‘Ain’t it a first, in our glorious land:
We’ve won back the countryside,
But only with a green belt, a grey belt, and spots
Which no-one dare touch, in case they’re shot!
Instead England’s been swallowed by an epidemic,
Where no-one listens- they instead insist
On spreading their disease, their perceived bliss!
We’re dyed with the blood of hours passed,
And have raised a generation where
The slightest offence invites,
Retribution, from an ‘Army Fair’
Of martyrs: a weird mix of Brexiteers
And Just Stop Oil all fighting to be seen as our
Saviours, never mind their appalling behaviour.
The memories of a country famed for their
Democracy, Manners, Tea and Queen,
Are all swallowed up by whirlpools
Of selfish voices and a grim economic scene.
Tart as it sounds, I think it’s true,
That England is going,
And before it does, so should you.’
On hearing this I pondered,
How people decided and wondered,
When Rome would finally fall-
And if it really ever did at all.
Maybe only when Emperor Constantine,
Was criticised on LBC.
'Farmer Joe'
by Noah Shin
He stood on my lawn,
His sight blurry, thinking
Eyes jumping, darting about
Body shaking weakly, finally
They say he died on the weekend.
His body was skinny and lost.
No one attended his funeral,
His pains and sorrows evaporated.
He left his farm alone,
A barren, dead plot of building land.
The place leaks sadness to
Onlookers puzzled by what happened.
With his farm tornado-struck
He gave up on his life with
All relatives dead, nothing to expect,
Depression always looming.
But if he looked back,
And breathed in the fresh air,
If his eyes rested on the fresh soil,
Things might have been different.
'Now'
by Tiger Wang
When I look to the scoundrels in government:
The cow-handed pillocks and cretins;
The excess of the elite,
With their posh-boy Etonian upbringing,
That failed to teach them good judgement;
The tycoons in Silicon Valley, and the
Greasy-haired fools on Wall Street,
Who tap away on their keyboards,
Reducing the world to numbers;
It feels uncanny. As if
The little world of old:
The honesty,
The simplicity,
The peaceful, civilised, sensible world,
Has finally gone cold.
A bag of sweets for a ha’penny,
Little Henry Hoover and family,
Cobbled streets,
Squat little Minis,
Glistening black Bentleys,
Family excursions to Blackpool,
With little Arthur and Mary sitting in the back.
Sunday roast dinner with the neighbours,
And the little post office on the street corner,
Where moustachioed Jim sat on that stool…
It’s all gone so fast
Jim lies cold in his grave
Arthur and Mary — now ACCA qualified —
Captives to the monstrous machine of money.
But how can this last?
An Economist writer
In an insane asylum somewhere scribbles:
“Scrap the green belts: Britain’s green leash.”
And I see the nature around me:
Sloping plains, plants, flowers,
Kissing gates, babbling brooks,
Wildflowers bobbing in the breeze,
Trees young and old,
Reduced to merely a distraction,
An overtightened string,
Against the raving, ravenous
Jaws of “Progress”.
And when I see through their soft, empty words,
The world seems blind to their lies.
Or is it just age?
Have I become the
Knobble-kneed, grey haired,
Fusty ancient that we despised in our youth?
I don’t know.
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