He asked me what my father did, and I told him he was a brewer. Overweight, balding, death-suited, watch chain, all those kinds of things. “He was 53 but seemed a great deal older. “We were drinking beer at lunchtime, which was sort of routine back then,” Motion remembers. The pair became close friends after an awkward first encounter in 1976. Motion, too, had first read Larkin at school, and applied for the job in Hull partly in the hope of catching sight of the reclusive poet. That gloomy iambic beat is similar to things that we’ve seen in earlier poems by him, but it’s also out there on its own as a candid statement of fearfulness.” Even though that fear of death and the squaring up to it is absolutely central to his bones from the get-go, it’s so much less adorned.

It’s a strange poem, though, in some respects. “I remember seeing Philip a few weeks later, when the spring term began back at Hull, and saying that he’d ruined my Christmas for me in the best possible way!” Motion tells me from his book-lined office in Baltimore.

I fell in love with “An Arundel Tomb” not because of its famous final words, “What will survive of us is love”, but for the morbid way he moderates that epigrammatic thought in the preceding lines, “to prove / Our almost-instinct almost true…” On his original manuscript draft, Larkin scrawled a cynical rejoinder to himself: “Love isn’t stronger than death just because statues hold hands for 600 years”.Īt the time, the poet Andrew Motion was also working at the university.

Like generations of British school kids, I first read his poems in GCSE English class. To me, Larkin is a writer worthy of sodden pilgrimage.

By the time I arrived the gates were locked, which is how I found myself scrambling over a low stone wall, drenched to the skin by the pouring Yorkshire rain, looking for a poet’s tombstone. The trail ended a bus ride away in the village of Cottingham, at the Municipal Cemetery on Eppleworth Road. It took me to the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, where he was librarian for 30 years, and the nearby house on Newland Park where he lived until his death in 1985 at the age of 63. I wanted to walk The Larkin Trail, a tour of various workaday locations that held some significance to the poet Philip Larkin. A few years ago, for a birthday treat, I went to Hull.

Andrew motion philip larkin