Phillip Larkin,Anthony Thwaite, Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Reviews, 1952-85

Rooms and lonely evenings are scattered like dismal confetti throughout Larkin's Collected Poems.They testify to his recurring sense of the individual's lostness even in the midst of the community, the family. Here in 'Aubade', the drunken insomniac faces the inevitability of extinction, as dawn indifferently arrives illuminating bleakly that which we all pretend to deny; we live from day to day on the cusp of nothingness.

I have always admired the devasting simplicity of Larkin's:

'this is a special way of being afraid.'

For what is Larkin acknowledging here? Our wasted anxieties over trivia and the falsity of our earlier fears? The tone of Aubade, like so mnay of Larkin's poems, itself seems exhumed from the depths of human experience so that like Macbeth in his last Act, all is known, all is lost. We go on. We wait. 'A small unfocused blur.' Something just there, within vision, yet unseen...stalking us all...