Our friend is dead
We rarely write letters to editors, but, Sir, our friend is dead. He was words, and You, the Editor of his being, You, who decreed his decade of dumbness, his death of ingrown poetry and pain, • have a duty to readers: to explain.
We do not question Your editorial judgment, but why Larkin, Sir? Why should he be chosen for self-fulfilling prophecy?
Briefly though he appeared in Your pages, we cannot read them without recalling how he elucidated Your august works think of his steamer stuck in Your afternoon, a clarifying comma in Your prose of oceanic depths and deeps star-strewn.
Think of his silence laid like carpet stilling us before cosmic paragraphs.
We do not question Your editorial judgment, but we hope Your acceptance was gentle. From his tight perch at the top of the slide, frozen teetering ten years, wings folded, we hope You so sweetly loosened his claw that he swooped down like a free bloody bird. Post tenebras lux! Bright lighted surprise: `This, then, how one dies!'
We hope he swooped like a free bloody word through high windows, sun-comprehending glass, straight through into that blue, and his polite (we fear, dubious) encounter with You.
Like Housman's, his thoughts were ready, steady, his eye on Death looming over the plain while he sang for sorrow.
For our Larkin, Sir, was a bird, a lark, singing with a thorn in his throat, singing most admirably, from despair and dark and every day, to our condition.
We are, Sir, gratefully Yours, though in grief, bereft of his tonic balm and brimstone brief.
Yet not bereft: Philip Larkin was words, and You, the Editor of his being, You, who decreed his decade of dumbness, his death of ingrown poetry and pain, left us unfleshed words, like free bloody birds singing. His words Your answer? They explain? Elspeth Dune
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