Church going by philip larkin: summary and analysis

 Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

The poem begins with the speaker may be Larkin himself standing outside the church, waiting for a short while to ensure that nothing is going on inside the church as he doesn’t want to interrupt the ritual services. The speaker moves  inside and stops. keeps the door ‘thud shut’. It may reflect his attitude of disrespect towards religious institution. Once he is inside his boredom is quite discernible in the dismissive tone like “sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now”. The descriptions of the church moves from general to the more specific. We see the mattings, seats and stone like he captures all the visuals in the church. He can’t ignore the silence, he takes off his hat, may be an  indication of expressing the mark of respect. There is a gentle humorous and sarcastic expression is here, as Larkin says “musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows how long”. Everything constitute the indifferent attitude of the speaker.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
"Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Later Larkin explains the roof of the church suggests that some still take care of it. He moves to the lectern and reads a aloud then plays with his own mocking echo. Interestingly he signs the visitors book and donated a valueless ‘Irish sixpence’ for the church. It reflects his loss of faith and he says it was “not worth stopping for”. But often he stops at churches that ends in a loss each time. However he is still drawn to them and wonders, why this is like this?

 

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

He says the Cathedral and their parchment, plate and pyx are meant for exhibition. Just like the word of Nissim Ezekiel goes “a myth of light with darkness at the core”.  The casual language is intended to show the indifference rather than ignorance. A series of questions surround him like, what happens in the empty building?, that some may be preserved but some are fall into ruin. Again, there occurs a sarcastic tone that the church should be let ‘rent free to rain and sheep’.

 

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

Larkin wonders if churches will come to be viewed as ‘unlucky places’ and may be visited by people moved by superstition rather than religious belief. Some may consider them as haunted. It is indicated by the expression ‘dubious women’, reveals their superstitious nature. There is a fact in which Larkin is certain, that eventually all belief system whether it is based on religion or superstition will fade away, and the churches will fall into ruin. Finally what remains is “Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky”. These are the main hallmarks of the church according to Larkin.

 

A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

As the church degenerates, it comes to be less recognisable and its purpose gradually dwindle from the people’s mind. Larkin wonders who will be the last person to seek shelter in the church by keeping its significance intact. The possible visitors are portrayed here in the tone of mockery. One of the crews is interested in its architectural incredibility, another who fond of anything that is antique(ruin bibber). While the other one wants to be a part of the ceremonies, that once took place here. Perhaps it might be someone like Larkin’s version.

 

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

Larkin now acknowledge the fact that although churches are just an empty shell to him, they have played a significant  role. Churches give meaning to the key moments in life such as birth, marriage and death and link them through ceremonies, thereby giving a meaning and coherence to the peoples’ lives. Without the church, such events would not be linked and would exist only in separation from one another. Despite Larkin’s lack of interest in religion, he nonetheless acknowledges that it has given meaning and consistency to people’s lives and has treated all equally. Through the church, human ‘compulsions’ are acknowledged. The church takes people and their paths through life seriously. There is a part of most people that longs to be treated with such seriousness and respect: ‘that much can never be obsolete’. Without the church, people will be somewhat adrift in the world and may well ‘gravitate to this place where life was once given meaning.      

 

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

In the concluding stanza of the poem, the poet sums up that the process of going to church will never end and finds its resolution when he says that the bond between God and people can never be broken. The environment empowers us to find out the philosophy of life, if not from the church, then from the church graveyard and you find that your final destination lies here beneath the soil. This ambience promotes a serious thought in you. The church will perform its duties even in the future and give wisdom to the people to change their fate and destiny.

Ecocriticism: Literature goes green

“To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” – William Wordsworth (Intimations of immortality)

The world of literary theory in the latter part of twentieth century has been marked by the appearance of numerous innovative approaches to reading and studying works, both old and new. One of the most recent critical perspectives to gain substantial interest is called ecocriticism. The term was first used by William Rueckert in his 1978 essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” in reference to the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.

Ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. Both terms ‘ecocriticism’ and ‘green studies’ are used to denote a critical approach which began in USA in the late 1980s and in UK in the early 1990s. This critical field was earlier known as ‘the study of nature writing’. But it was Cheryll Glotfelty, who initiated this critical approach as a lasting movement. In 1992, Glotfelty and Harold Fromm co-founded the association for the study of literature and environment. This organization has its own journal called ISLE (Inter disciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment).

The movement in America took its inspiration from three major nineteenth-century transcendentalists, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau. They wrote about nature life force and the wilderness. Emerson’s long essay ‘Nature’ was first published in 1836. In this essay, he talks about the impact of the natural world on him. Fuller’s first book was ‘Summer on the Lakes (1843) is a powerful narrative of her encounter with the American Landscape. Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ is an account of his two year stay in a hut he had built on the shore of Walden pound. It is the classic account of his attempt to renew the self through ‘return to nature’. These three books can be treated as the foundational works of American ‘eco-centred’ writing.

The UK version of ecocriticism is better known as Green Studies, takes its inspiration from the romantic movement of late eighteenth century. However, its founding figure is the critic Jonathan Bate, the author of 'Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991). Raymond Williams' book  'The Country and the City' (1973) is also taken by some as articulating ecological concerns, the term 'ecocriticism' had not come into existence by that time. 

Laurence Coupe's essay entitled "The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to ecocriticism" (2000) is considered as a seminal work in the study of ecocriticism. 

Some of the debates within ecocriticism concern the crucial relationship between Nature and Culture. Ecocriticism rejects the major poststructuralist notion that everything is socially or linguistically constructed. As far as an ecocritic is concerned, nature exists in reality whether or not it is textualised or part of the social discourse.

Hence, ecocriticism variously referred to as ecological, environmental or green criticism it can be summed up as follows.

• It does not accept the social or linguistic constructedness of the world. The natural world exists in its own right and beings other than human have a will of their own.
• It is a reading of a literary text which incorporates environmental concerns and issues. The ecocritics, in their attempt to bring environmental issues into focus, by re-reading major literary works and pay special attention to the representation of nature. In doing so, they go by concepts like growth, energy, balance and symbiosis (interaction between two different organisms).
• The ecocritics also wish to find out what role has the physical- geographical setting played in the structure of a poem or a novel.
• The ecocritics discuss factual details impacting environment like entropy or loss of energy on the one hand and sustainable sources of energy on the other.
• They have tried to create a separate canon highlighting authors who foreground nature in their subject matter. Some of these writers are the English Romantic poets and the American Transcendentalists.
• Finally, the ecocritics explore the link between academic and actual practices on the issues of nature.

Ecocriticism is a critical mode that looks at the representation of nature and landscape in cultural texts, paying particular attention to the attitudes towards ‘nature’ and the rhetoric employed when speaking about it. It aligns itself with ecological activism and social theory.

Finally, ecocriticism can be concluded as the study of literature and environment from interdisciplinary point of view. At the same time, it may be pointed out that there is no single figure in the area of ecocriticism who can be considered as a dominant authority like freud in psychological criticism. Here, the disciplines join together to analyse the environment and find out solutions for the contemporary environmental situation such as global warming, etc. In comparison with other ‘political’ forms of criticism, there has relatively been little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism and its scope has broadened rapidly. As such, ‘nature writing’ or writing with consciousness nature is emerging as a distinct and substantial genre and ecocriticism has already made its place as a literary theory.