Larkin: Always an agnostic - but an Anglican agnostic

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Larkin's muse gives the last laugh to God

Philip Larkin's attitude to religion was ostensibly dismissive, even derisive. He obeyed his father's injunction: "Never believe in God!"

Late in his life, he bought an expensive Bible and read it daily while shaving. After he finished it, he observed: "It's absolutely bloody amazing to think that anyone ever believed any of that. Really, it's absolute balls. Beautiful, of course. But balls."

What's interesting about this episode is that such a tight-fisted man should have splashed out on a book he was not likely to believe. It's also striking that Larkin placed the Bible on an office lectern in his bedroom, as though concerned that at least the proper forms should be observed.

But even though religion was "beautiful", it had no power to alter his terror of death. And in his last major poem, "Aubade", published in 1977, Larkin described it dismissively as: "That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/Created to pretend we never die."

However, Larkin valued the place of the Church as an institution. In 1943, he wrote the poem "A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb". He begins by seeing it as "planted deeper than roots" and admits: "I have worshipped that whispering shell". The building, we note, not the God it stands for.

It is a muddled, botched poem, but it contains in embryo what was to emerge in 1954 as "Church Going", arguably Larkin's most famous poem on religion. Here, what matters is that "this special shell" was built to house "marriage, and birth/And death, and thoughts of these". It can be mocked as an "accoutred frowsty barn", but it is also "a serious house and serious earth", a place "proper to grow wise in/If only that so many dead lie round". It is the house of memory.

Larkin, who said he was "bored, uninformed" by and about religion, could never give his experiences of the numinous a developed framework.

Rather, his visions of absence and emptiness are of the places where God might have been, as he acknowledges in the poem "Water", published in 1964. If he had to "construct a religion" (how loaded "construct" is), he would "raise in the east/A glass of water/Where any-angled light/Would congregate endlessly". The object of adoration would be a sheer, meaningless beauty. It would also offer an image of congregating, of coming together, which might warm human loneliness even if it could offer no transcendent hope.

Disbelieving, but nostalgic for the Church as an embodiment of tradition and community, Larkin was, as he said, "an agnostic, I suppose, but an Anglican agnostic, of course". I suspect Monica Jones's will would have pleased him.

Lachlan Mackinnon is a poet and teacher of English