A reading of one of Larkin’s most famous poems

We’ve analysed a fair few Philip Larkin poems over the last year or so, and had largely said everything we had to say about his work. But we’ve been inspired to write about ‘Going, Going’ because of popular demand, of a kind. Another of our posts, an analysis of another Larkin poem titled simply ‘Going’, has been receiving a great deal of traffic, but people have reached it by searching for an analysis of ‘Going, Going’. Which is a completely different poem. Since ‘Going, Going’ is fine late Larkin, we thought we’d offer some thoughts on this poem, which you can read here.

‘Going, Going’: the title immediately summons the third, unspoken word in the usual auctioneer’s phrase: ‘Going, going, gone.’ Britain is not quite gone altogether, but it is going, and it is being auctioned off, sold to…

Further to my blog linking post on 15th March

Facebook doesn’t make it easy to delete your account – Here’s How to do it

Please also read the following  from Mike Murphy  on Quartz Media LLC:

If you’ve been on Facebook for a while, you’ve probably installed games or given sites permission to log into your Facebook account. You may even use Facebook to log into services like Spotify, Netflix, or Tinder.

But if you’ve been following the news around Cambridge Analytica, the data consultancy firm hired by the Donald Trump campaign for the 2016 US election that harvested the data of up to 50 million Facebook users without their permission through data collected from third-party apps, you may want to know how to make sure that something similar isn’t happening to you.

Here’s what you need to do

i have stopped by woods on a snowy evening.
it’s a sublime slanting sun, and,
camera in hand,
i come upon the hoped-for scene.

the reaching trees, silhouettes of bareness.
the furnace of the sun,
a smudge of burnt orange behind the ridge,
imparts the hue, the twilight blue
to the mile long shadows
these striations in the crunchy glitter.

i click and click with frantic abandon,
not wanting to lose this singular zenith of beauty.
how many shots? a hundred? a thousand?
i will take them home
enhance them, adobe them, candy coat them
until they look, they look…
like those coffee table books that no one reads.

so, i turn to go, my anticipation tempered now.
i look back once more, in regret.
the deep blue shadows slowly lengthen
as the sun pours dark red lava down the hillside.

i stop. upon a stump i sit.
there is…