Extract

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

A man wakes at four in the morning and lies in the dark, watching the curtain edges grow light. Philip Larkin wrote this poem in 1977, and it is perhaps the most terrifying lyric in the English language, a poem that stares at death without flinching and without consolation, finding neither faith nor philosophy sufficient to quiet the dread of extinction. The diction is colloquial, almost conversational, yet each line lands with the weight of stone. Religion gets its paragraph of dismissal, and so does rationalism, and what remains is the pure horror of not being, unreachable by argument. Then daylight comes, postmen move like doctors from house to house, and work begins again. The terror does not resolve. It simply waits while we dress.