“Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.”
These are the opening lines of the poem "Church Going" by Philip Larkin. These lines suggests that the speaker enters the church only after making sure that no one was inside the church. Perhaps he does not like being there during mass or any other services. He enters the vacant church and closes the door behind him.
"what will survive us all is love."
This is one of the most famous line of Philip Larkin taken from his poem "An Arundel Tomb." It is the last line of the poem that tells that love conquers all including death. Though they are separated by death, their love is immortalized in the form of the tomb. As long as this tomb exists, their love does too.
‘“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’”
This is the last line of the poem "I Remember I Remember" by Philip Larkin. In this poem, the poet imagines a train journey which returns him unexpectedly to his birth place in the England Midlands. The given line is a powerful ending to the poem. It writes off the events described throughout the poem as “nothing”, and indicates that everything in the poem could have happened “anywhere”.
"Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time."
This is Larkin's ode to the fragility of life. When he woke up and the hedgehog did not, he observes how external to his own control the mysterious force of life manifests. He couldn't revive the hedgehog any more than he was responsible for his own waking up. Through this encounter with death, the narrator makes a promise to be more kind. He has learned something about the value of a life which unavoidably changes his view of people from ordinary and fixed to extraordinary and temporary.
