Read Philip Larkin’s little poem below, and if you like it, scoot back and we can schmooze. If you don’t, take the day off.

Pause.

So you liked it, eh? Me too. Sticks with you. It’s called “Homage to a Government” and while it’s almost intolerably bleak in outlook, it’s funny, too, in its way, and curiously encouraging. Why, I can’t help wondering.

While it looks like a poem, with its three six-line stanzas, it’s almost an anti-poem. Try teasing out the rhythm of the verse. It has none. It drones on beatless, almost robotic – too exhausted to dance. And its rhymes aren’t rhymes but repetitions of the same word (all but the homonym “here” and “hear”) as if the poet were too glum to even try to make a poem.

And the way he repeats phrases! – that killer especially, “is all right.” Does the speaker mean it really? Well, yes, sort of – the way a loving parent might murmur to a sobbing child, “It will be OK” – that is, We’ll get past this, life will go on. It will be OK because we’ll still be alive, and where there’s life there’s hope, but really OK? Hardly. The catastrophe is acknowledged and mollified by the same sort-of-true threadbare assurance.

The government which Larkin’s eying is Great Britain’s in the mid-nineteen-sixties, when the empire was shrinking back into an island, shriveling like a popped balloon. World War Two may well have been England’s “finest hour” – right up there with Agincourt – but it drained its strength, depleted its resources, and knocked the stuffing out of its strut. The “great” in Great Britain became a kind of grim joke. It’s like when someone has a stroke – they’re the same person after, but not the same, dwindled, weaker, with less to live for.

The homage is sardonic. A less great Britain would no longer be the keeper of the world’s order – can’t afford it – and maybe they didn’t do such a hot job anyway. Besides, no crying over spilt milk or spilt blood, the world will go on and it will be all right. Such a transition – into a has-been – is rough – for persons or nations. One does one’s best to put a smiley face on it, but it hurts – like hell – but who can you admit this too, not even your spouse. No one likes to hear old people grumble, the old included.

And yet… there is a future, which we must meet – “next year” – and though our country will have been lessened we’ll still be here, lessoned, less proud, shrouded somehow (don’t those “tree-muffled squares” give you the creeps?), but with kids who will enter a still farther future, where they will never have known about their nation’s former glory, never have felt it in their blood. The last line stings like a lash: “All we can hope to leave them now is money.” That’s the speaker’s conclusion – but is it the poem’s?

I’d argue not. By satirizing the speaker’s ennui – how he keeps repeating his bromidic, tuneless, arhythmic, weary cliches – the poem encourages us to think differently, to seek for ourselves a hope beyond “just money” – the hope, perhaps, of beauty in art and grace among the peoples of earth.

America is suffering through its depleting moment – lessening, lessoning – and it hurts like hell – but hope still flickers – doesn’t it? We can always hope.

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedNext year we are to bring all the soldiers homeFor lack of money, and it is all right.Places they guarded, or kept orderly,Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderlyWe want the money for ourselves at homeInstead of working. And this is all right.

It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,But now it's been decided nobody minds.The places are a long way off, not here,Which is all right, and from what we hearThe soldiers there only made trouble happen.Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a countryThat brought its soldiers home for lack of money.The statues will be standing in the sameTree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.Our children will not know it's a different country.All we can hope to leave them now is money.