The Philip Larkin Society

Water - June 2008

Chosen by Christopher Reid

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

© The estate of Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin wrote the unlike poems 'Skin' and 'Water' on two consecutive days in 1954: the first on 5 April, the second on the 6th. They are so dissimilar they are almost antithetical: one day's cheerless prognosis followed, without warning, by the next's up-lifting vision.

'Skin' regrets the failure to participate in a carnally 'brash festivity', while 'Water' looks forward to the possibility of a 'liturgy', or rite, that has elements of the Eucharist, but none of the bodily associations - 'This is my body, this is my blood' - that the Christian sacrament carries with it. 'Skin' has a rhyme-scheme, more palpable in the first stanza than in the third, where the final, very loose connection of 'changes' with 'such as' lends expression to the bathos that is the poem's theme; 'Water', doing without rhyme, takes the reader to mystical heights equal to those of the 'sun-comprehending glass' in 'High Windows'. No coincidence, surely, that the final word of 'High Windows' is 'endless', and that of 'Water', 'endlessly'.

It's more than the concluding image, though, that gives 'Water' its elevation. I hear the poem's meaning in its beautifully calculated chime of 'any-angled' and 'endlessly', where the absence of consonants at the beginning of each word somehow aerates and opens wider the prospect of a thoroughly cleansing ritual. Larkin had a particular genius for double-barrelled adjectival constructions, and the luminosity of 'any-angled light' could be read as a direct answer to 'the sand-laden wind, time' in the previous poem. The gritty attrition of experience can be washed away, and a moment of transcendence offered as light and water meet.

Or so it feels, provisionally.

- Christopher Reid

Christopher Reid is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull. He has been a practising poet for over thirty years, among his recent publications being Mermaids Explained: Selected Poems 1976-1996 (Harcourt Brace, New York, 2001), Alphabicycle Order (Ondt & Gracehoper, London, 2001), For and After (Faber and Faber, London, 2003) and Mr Mouth (Ondt & Gracehoper, London, 2006). He edited Faber and Faber's celebrated poetry list between 1991 and 1999, and his edtion of the Letters of Ted Hughes was published by Faber in November 2007.

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