A Criticism of Philip Larkin's Lines on a Young Lady's Photo

A Criticism of Philip Larkin’s "Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album"

I come from a place up north
Speeding along the great cold surface
Of the Atlantic,
As I near the plastic shores of Long Island
With their shit-hawk gulls and strippers
Trailing singles, loose panties, and one
Fuzzy pink pair of dice—
I see humanity, its degenerates and misfits,
And I see more truth here
Than in any two-shoed youth of a by-gone era
Begging to go home, to face it once more.
Your eye swivels between poses
And misses, glances, seeking
To make some arrest of the soul.

Always, it seems always it happens
There is more truth in the cum
That drips between his alabaster thighs
Than in the most resolute of congregations—
Against tides of crippling beauty
And terrible new ways of loving,
Against the passionate attempts of healers
They are standing, objecting. What for? And what gives,
I am always asking, what gives
For these poor ecclesiastics? I too am a monk,
Silent as a barrow, praying mad
For every woman’s violent orgasm,
For every man’s shaking release.

I pray for deliverance from an era
Of unwillingness in the face of destruction
Beyond earthly compare.
In a time that we now ask
What is here? And from the trick of the eyes
We see nothing, happily blind and ready
To fake a performance; you do this,
You do it well. It suits.