the million-petalled flower of being here

Here's Philip Larkin's famous poem about age and death ...

... both brutal and beautiful, in equal measure:


The Old Fools

What do they think has happened, the old fools, 
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose 
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools, 
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember 
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose, 
They could alter things back to when they danced all night, 
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September? 
Or do they fancy there's really been no change, 
And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight, 
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming 
Watching the light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange; 
Why aren't they screaming? 

At death you break up: the bits that were you 
Start speeding away from each other for ever 
With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true: 
We had it before, but then it was going to end, 
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour 
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower 
Of being here. Next time you can't pretend 
There'll be anything else. And these are the first signs: 
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power 
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they're for it: 
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines - 
How can they ignore it? 

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms 
Inside you head, and people in them, acting 
People you know, yet can't quite name; each looms 
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning, 
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting 
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only 
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning, 
The blown bush at the window, or the sun's 
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely 
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live: 
Not here and now, but where all happened once. 
This is why they give 

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there 
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving 
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear 
Of taken breath, and them crouching below 
Extinction's alp, the old fools, never perceiving 
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet: 
The peak that stays in view wherever we go 
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell 
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night? 
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout 
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well, 
We shall find out.

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Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985)

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