Poet's Choice

Beyond the light stand failure and remorse

Whispering Dear Warlock-Williams: Why of course --

My favorite poems by Larkin aren't his jokey snide ones, but the more introspective lyrics that find a tragic failure to love in his urge to isolate. In "No Road," the lost lover is also a next-door neighbor.

Since we agreed to let the road between us

Fall to disuse,

And bricked our gates up, planted trees to screen us,

And turned all time's eroding agents loose,

Silence, and space, and strangers -- our neglect

Has not had much effect.

Leaves drift unswept, perhaps; grass creeps unmown;

No other change.

So clear it stands, so little overgrown,

Walking that way tonight would not seem strange,

And still would be allowed. A little longer,

And time will be the stronger,

Drafting a world where no such road will run

From you to me;

To watch that world come up like a cold sun,

Rewarding others, is my liberty.

Not to prevent it is my will's fulfillment.

Willing it, my ailment.

These last lines sound squeezed through clenched teeth -- the phrases growing shorter and shorter, as if losing steam. So as the poet's self-knowledge becomes more like an indictment of inadequacy, the poem tightens till it snaps shut, leaving us out, as Larkin willed it.

(These poems are from "Collected Poems of Philip Larkin," edited by Anthony Thwaite . Copyright 1988 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted with permission of Farrar Straus Giroux. )

Mary Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.