Sunday, January 10, 2010

Long Sight in Age

. . . the title of a Philip Larkin poem.

Feeling like I don't know anything any more and Philip Larkin comes to mind, for instance Ignorance, one of the very few poems which I've half memorized. A couple of pages before it there's Long Sight in Age (1955) ending in these five lines which suit my mood:

The long soft tides of grass
Wrinkling away the gold
Wind-ridden waves -- all these,
They say, come back to focus
As we grow old.

In Philip Larkin's Collected Poems