On 'Church going' by Philip Larkin

Once I am sure there's nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church: matting, seats, and 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 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 or other 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 unspilt So long and equably what since is found Only in separation - marriage, and birth, And death, and thoughts of these - for whom 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 recognised, 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.

Characteristically, Larkin’s ‘Church Going’ begins in cynicism, hints at something more profound, even emotional or spiritual, but veers away from sentimentality, and ends in pragmatism, but seriously, and ambiguously.

The title is ambiguous. Church-going, hyphenated, would denote going to (attendance at) church, whilst unhyphenated the phrase suggests that it is the church that is going. There is further ambiguity in that the word ‘church’ in English can be apply to any building in which services are held, and, as in the phrase ‘Anglican Church’ (or ‘Church of England’), to a religious group in general. The church which the narrator enters is, we infer, old, probably medieval. The Church to which this church belonged has already gone. Following the Reformation, Catholicism ceased to be the official religion of English Christians, and Catholic churches housed Anglican services. (Though there are Catholics and Catholic masses are held in Britain now.) Now Larkin charts another step in the ‘going, going, gone’ of the Church, and church, as it ceases to be a vital part of English life.

That there is nothing going on in the church and that the flowers haven’t been changed suggests that it has long ceased to be the centre of the life of the parish it serves. Instead of the daily round of the offices: Matins, Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline, and baptisms, communions, confirmations, confessions, installations and funerals, it is used for perhaps a weekly Sunday service held for a few older people, and as a stage-set for an occasional wedding. That the narrator assures himself that nothing is going on before he goes in conjures an image of a certain kind of middle-class Englishman who fears embarrassment more than anything else. Instead of hoping to find the church full of people engaged in using it for its purpose, he hopes to find it empty, silent, and redundant, because to go inside whilst only a few people were present would be to call attention to himself. It was customary for men to remove their hats on entering a church (whilst a woman would keep her head covered). The ingrained gesture of respect is displaced. Without a hat to remove, the narrator removes the clips that keep his trouser hems from tangling in his bicycle chain.

The building is unremarkable, its fittings and furnishings are like those of a hundred others. The tone is disparaging, irreverent: the area beyond the rood screen, which includes the altar, becomes the ‘holy end’. The act of reading verses of the Bible (probably the Old Testament, since the verses are ‘hectoring’ and ‘large-scale’) left on a lectern, and intoning ‘Here endeth’ (the lesson) in a mock-priestly tone, is an act of ridicule in defiance against the reverence that the place seems to expect, but the narrator is likely to be embarrassed by the loud echo of his own sniggering (a kind of behind-the-hand mocking laughter).

Again, the narrator makes an empty gesture which is an echo of a more respectful, or at least purposeful, one. An Irish sixpence would have been worthless to an English church, so why give it? No one is there to be fooled by the sound of the coin dropping into the box. It is as if he needs to go through the motion of making a donation. This in turn is echoed in his reflection that the place was not ‘worth’ stopping for, and yet he did, and in fact often does. ‘Going’ and ‘stopping’, then, become both oppositional and interchangeable.

Others still visit the church as well, and will continue to do so, the narrator imagines, even after it is no longer used for services and people forget what its original purpose was. It won’t become a People’s Palace, a homeless shelter, or a clinic; it won’t be converted to any of the useful functions we might expect of a large and solid building. A focus on small specific items which become characterising features, not quite synecdochal, but representative and evocative, brings vividly to mind those elements of a church which will cease to be functional and become mere exhibits: parchment, plate, and pyx will be in locked cases. Whole buildings (the largest and most ornate, the cathedrals) will be ‘on show’, degraded into tourist destinations like other no-longer functioning ancient monuments. The word ‘chronically’ is brilliantly placed here. More usually employed to denote lingering illnesses, in colloquial English it can also have connotations of something irritatingly continuous, as chronic nagging.

Even when it is no longer consecrated to worship, however, the church will retain a mystique; superstition will cling to it. As he envisages the fabric of belief dissolving and no longer supporting the material fabric, and both Church and church crumbling, the narrator becomes ever more cynical and scathing. In posing the question of who will be the last people to understand the original purpose of the building, he dismisses the imagined characters as ‘ruin-bibbers’ (the analogy is with those who imbibe (drink) alcohol, so these are addicted to ancient monuments as alcoholics are to alcohol), ‘randy’ for antique (the analogy is with someone who quite indis er iminatingly wants sex). Education and knowledge, as so often in Larkin's poetry, are treated as some kind of embarrassing, nerdish attribute. ‘One of the crew / That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were’ is simply someone who can identify the architectural features of an old church, and who tests (taps the walls) to find out what is hollow and what solid, and makes (jots down) notes. (Taps and jots auditorily charts the progress of such a person along the stone floor.) Even his own kind, bored and uninformed, just stopping anyway, is disparaged, yet - there is a yet. The tone changes. There is something worth stopping for, after all.

The ghostly silt (invisible yet tangible accumulations like the layers of mud and pebble and sand that gradually build up under a slow-moving stream) will be dispersed, but even when the suburbs have grown outwards from the city to surround the once-rural church, and the shape is unrecognisable, and it is just a piece of ground in the cruciform shape of English churches, something will remain. The dismissive lexicon is still present; the place is just a ‘frowsty’ (stuffy and stale-smelling) barn with accoutrements (the connotation there is of pointless trappings), but it is a ‘special shell’. The form of the poem, with its many variant feet and many slant, half, and eye-rhymes in its interlaced rhyme-scheme, like the content of the poem, resists the pat, the glib, and the over-simplified but this line is remarkable for its directness and lack of cynicism, and is made complete in thought by its iambic pentameter:

U ‘ | U ‘ | U ‘ | u ‘ | u ‘ It pleases me to stand in silence here.

At this point, we have been moved out of an imagined future of ruin and insignificance, and back to the present. In the final stanza the narrator no longer seems as resolutely arming himself against possible hints of sentimentality, and is prepared to be serious; to allow the significance of this place. It is a serious place; a place made serious by our need for social acts, for ritual and the trappings of ritual. The blent (blended) air of this place has seen so many thousands of Sunday services; so many thousands of rituals and prayers and purposeful acts. Even cynics whose habitual response is to mock might surprise themselves by a desire to be serious; even an unregenerate materialist might surprise themselves by a desire for the immaterial, ideal, or spiritual, and this is a place for that. Not necessarily because of the architectural features or their accoutrements, but perhaps because like all country churches, this is set in a churchyard and thus within loose concentric rings of graves; the people who believed in the Church, and used the church for its original purpose.

The final lines seem to end on that note of seriousness that the stanza approaches, but as always with Larkin, he giveth and he taketh away. The dead are not buried, they ‘lie’ round. The words on their tombstones, often variations on ‘not lost but gone before’; ‘departed in peace’; and other messages indicating ‘in heaven’ are part of the illusion we embrace in Church and church. And yet...