Sacred Routines, Mundane Rituals: Philip Larkin’s “Serious” “Stuff”

In the poems “Church Going” and “Faith Healing”, Philip Larkin visits religious spaces not to profess religious belief, but to repeat and revise old patterns of action and speech; in doing so, he attempts to capture what it means to be alive in his England – an England no longer defined by the cathedrals of the Medievals or the sublime pastoral landscapes of the Romantics, but instead by the precarious rationalism of postwar modernity. This essay will show how “Church Going” and “Faith Healing” put Larkin in ambivalent, ever-evolving relation to poetic and religious convention; he wanders and warps both the Church and the iamb, pondering the adequacy of each as the container for life’s most “serious” “stuff”. By entwining the poetic ritual of iambic pentameter with spiritual rituals, Larkin explores how each might emerge in the godless registers of the twentieth century.