Love Songs in Age

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

She kept her songs, they took so little space,

The covers pleased her:

One bleached from lying in a sunny place,

One marked in circles by a vase of water,

One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,

And coloured, by her daughter -

So they had waited, till in widowhood

She found them, looking for something else, and stood

Relearning how each frank submissive chord

Had ushered in

Word after sprawling hyphenated word,

And the unfailing sense of being young

Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein

That hidden freshness, sung,

That certainty of time laid up in store

As when she played them first. But, even more,

The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,

Broke out, to show

Its bright incipience sailing above,

Still promising to solve, and satisfy,

And set unchangeably in order. So

To pile them back, to cry,

Was hard, without lamely admitting how

It had not done so then, and could not now.