a small unfocused blur, a standing chill

Today is poems about death day! "But Olivia," you may ask, "didn't you post a poem about death yesterday?" I did; did I mention that there might be more poems about death than usual, this year? I picked this one out in advance, though, because although it is depressing as hell, it's also a classic, and it's such a powerful, effective, brilliant kind of poem (the enjambment alone, good lord, and don't even get me started on the rhyme scheme) that I thought maybe it was time to post it. Warnings for anxiety, depression, drinking, and the terrifying awareness of mortality, which may feel especially close right now, as does, I think, this poem; please take care of yourselves.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

—Philip Larkin (1922-1985), "Aubade," originally published in the Times Literary Supplement, 23 December 1977, and written between 1974 and 1977; Larkin completed the poem after his mother's death in 1977. The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett (New York, 2012), has phenomenal notes, and one of my favorites on this poem is from a letter where Larkin told a friend, "I get up at 6 when I can and try to add to a poem about DEATH. Not making much progress, but one can only hope—to finish the poem, I mean." Anyway, this poem resonates with me a lot, and so does the way he describes it, with delightfully morbid humor.