THE CHURCH AT AUCTION

Philip Larkin—Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Another church: matting, seats, 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?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come

To make their children touch a particular stone;

Pick simples for a cancer; or on some

Advised night see walking a dead one?

Power of some sort will go on

In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;

But superstition, like belief, must die,

And what remains when disbelief has gone?

Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky.

A shape less recognizable each week,

A purpose more obscure. I wonder who

Will be the last, the very last, to seek

This place for what it was; one of the crew

That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?

Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,

Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff

Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?

Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt

Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground

Through suburb scrub because it held unsplit

So long and equably what since is found

Only in separation—marriage, and birth,

And death, and thoughts of these—for which was built

This special shell? For, though I've no idea

What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,

It pleases me to stand in silence here.

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

The more times I read this poem the more profound it seems to me. It seems to speak to me in a number of ways. First of all it is a story, a narrative of the poet's experience inside a church. It is a narrative of an inner voice exploring what it is to be alone in the church and to be open to its “purposes.” And it is a soft narrative about where we find ourselves often in the presence of a power we can't define, wrapped as it is in what we see and what we don't see, but feel or sense. Perhaps the best way to tackle the challenge of responding to this poet's experience is to go stanza by stanza in the story but first noting the words that stand out for me, words that are repeated for the emphasis the poet wants to place on them in different parts of his story.

The words I notice are:

silence

reverence

stop

loss

found

dead ones

ghosts

power

purpose

shell, house, barn

serious

The title invites some interpretation, given the tone of the first stanza. In “Church Going,” I hear “going, going, gone,” as if this were an auction and the auctioneer is signaling the final bid. But is it?

In the first stanza the poet is outwardly apologetic and somewhat nonchalant maybe insouciant (and maybe a bit embarrassed) about stopping by on his bicycle, on his way to somewhere else. He acknowledges the reverence of the place by removing his cycle-clips as a gesture of respect. This seems like a pro forma gesture, as if this were expected of anyone entering such a place, a habit observed by anyone entering a sacred house.

The second stanza has the poet focused on those structures, almost absent mindedly, structures that are more like an assessment of its strength and reacting almost with affront to the verses he sees carved into the stone, a portion of one ('here endeth') that emphasizes his impression that this is a place out of place in his modern world of business and action and maybe a foretelling of a silent end. He leaves a token sixpence, signs the guest register, and tells himself this stop was not worth his time, after all.

But he is caught up short in the third stanza by the realization that this is not the first time he has stopped here with the same similar results of pondering what the attraction is for him. He wonders what will happen to this ancient structure when all its “purposes” are spent. Will they be museum pieces, tourist stops, or even shelter for sheep?

The fourth stanza begins his “serious” consideration of what deeper and more profound purposes there might be for people of his generation attempting to make some sense of the history of the church's power in times past, even reflecting on the possibility that there might be ghosts appearing in the night or other visitors coming to satisfy their superstitions about the healing from disease. This superstition he derides as “random” games. But he believes that superstitions will die with belief and then the church will revert to the forces of nature.

Stanza five: Now, with this natural deterioration, the purposes will fall farther and farther into the past and then obscurity. And what will be left for the people of the street, homeless and addicted, who will come because they have always come for the reasons he has derided. And will they be his surrogates in such obedience (does he think of himself now as damaged)?

Stanza six: These wretched few will be as uninformed as he is but still seeking what there has always been within the structure built on the pattern of the cross and standing sturdily for ages and representing a mockery of the separations that define human life, the separations and losses. Our poet is at once comfortable in the silence he experiences among the aging bones of the church.

Stanza seven: Here the poet comes down to being serious about his stop. He sees that what drives people, like him, to come to this church is for comfort in the face of what each believes is an individual destiny. “And that much never can be obsolete.” He speaks about his own “hunger” to be serious about his own purposes within what he experiences to be the purposes of this place. And he finishes his visit by reflecting on the wisdom that such a church can teach and finding the sources of wisdom in the dead, those who have found similar wisdom here over the centuries of the church's life.

Could all the dead, the ghosts, have been wrong about the purposes of this place? Could he in his uninformed state be one who will connect in some way with the wisdom of the dead? This brings to mind what meanings there are in the honoring of a lineage. Even though the poet comes alone and is met with the silence of the church (only emphasizing his solitary presence), he becomes aware of the ghosts of those who have worshiped here in times past, a community of spirit that extends across all time.

The implication in the title that this is a building on the auction block, a building that will be sold for new purposes and maybe even for demolition ('this accoutred frowsty barn', 'a shape less recognizable each week') and perhaps becoming only “serious ground” eventually lost to “grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky.” Such musings beg the question about where people will go for the silence and serious purposes and wisdom where reverence can be expressed. The poet doesn't give an answer except to let us know from the beginning that he has come to this church often, always wondering what to look for, always seeking among the ruins and empty pews the one thing that will satisfy his serious search. Is this his way of being spiritual but not religious, as it is the custom to affirm in our times? Is this really an expression of what the heart wants and needs as it hungers for something more serious? Can the poet find this satisfaction in the ground that has been sanctified? Can he find it in the sacred moment, in Nature, in the community of saints now dead but alive in spirit?

This poem is more profound than what a once-through might reveal. I think that the poet was himself surprised at the end of the poem for the serious world he discovered after beginning his visit with such a casual and take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Yet, he had the feeling from the beginning that this might be a visit of revelation, calling from him upon entering an “awkward reverence.” The awkwardness doesn't dissipate entirely by the end of the poem but, in fact, defines the experience of how God's purposes through the formal structures of an ancient place emerge over time, in an enlarging lineage of those who have sought the ground with similar intentions. Here is a place that has held “so long and equably” even in (especially in) the face of death, as death separates us from the very structures that have gifted us comfort and wisdom. Where and how can we satisfy our hunger?

There seems to be a distinction made in the poem between what is heritage and what is lineage. In some ways objects, structures, icons, statutes, churches will eventually give in to the ravages of time and deterioration, as sacred as they may have been at some point in time. Lineage, on the other hand, is the vast community of the faithful (ghosts, maybe) who have found within the walls of churches, such as the one in this poem, a certain consolation and comfort focused on eternal and transcendent meanings. And it is in this eternal community that the poet finds what will last of the church's remains. Out of the ruins of time there will persist and even endure what is eternal, mysterious and yet available.