uncontradicting solitude

When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.

Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired—though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it's just
A compensating make-believe.

Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on—in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.

Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

—Philip Larkin (1922-1985), "Best Society," unpublished in the poet's lifetime, but I quote from the textual note (because I love textual notes) in The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, Ed. Archie Burnett (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012): "Wkbk 3 (1/3/19) contains five and a half pages of drafts of four stanzas and an additional fifth .... The copy-text is Hull DPL 2/3/17: t.s., with a title, a comma after 'Then' in l. 9, and a quotation from Wordsworth ('Prelude II, 298, 'solitude more active even than "best society"') in holograph. At the end of the text, in t.s.: 'unfinished'" (607). I sometimes worry when I start to overidentify with Philip Larkin, but I do love this poem, unfinished or not.