Poem of the week: Ambulances by Philip Larkin

We will all have to deal with the ambulances one day, if we have not already. My first collision with the dread and shock they can inspire came when I was a young man, as I recounted in my introduction to the first Poetry Pharmacy. Suffice to say, I witnessed an accident and, by the time the ambulance pulled away, I was extremely shaken. Yet I happened to know Philip Larkin’s “Ambulances” by heart; and when his lines came back to me then, they brought with them a gift of fellow feeling at a time when no words of simple comfort would have helped.

Larkin is not a man to make your heart sing with hope and possibility. What makes him such an important poet is his ability to home in on some of life’s most difficult feelings and help us to express them, rather than running away. In this poem, he makes stark the generalised sorrow we feel when we are confronted with the death of a stranger, someone we may know only to pass on the way to the shops.

In that poor soul’s death, we hear the threat that the life we have known on this corner, this road, may likewise be nearly at an end. We are reminded that we, too, will be dissolved and sink into the nothingness that yawns beneath. With cruel insight, Larkin points out the hypocrisy of our sorrow: even if we feel true empathy, it is overwhelmed by our fear for ourselves. The reminder of our own mortality burns us – and we look away.

Yet Larkin is not judging us for this instinct, just as he is not judging himself (for how could anyone write so incisively about an emotion he has not felt?). Instead, he is making it plain for us – holding our hand not in comfort, but in solidarity. We all feel this way, he reminds us. We will all confront the loneliness of death eventually; but until then, we need not be alone in our fear.

Ambulances by Philip Larkin

Closed like confessionals, they thread

Loud noons of cities, giving back

None of the glances they absorb.

Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,

They come to rest at any kerb:

All streets in time are visited.

Then children strewn on steps or road,

Or women coming from the shops

Past smells of different dinners, see

A wild white face that overtops

Red stretcher-blankets momently

As it is carried in and stowed,

And sense the solving emptiness

That lies just under all we do,

And for a second get it whole,

So permanent and blank and true.

The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,

They whisper at their own distress;

For borne away in deadened air

May go the sudden shut of loss

Round something nearly at an end,

And what cohered in it across

The years, the unique random blend

Of families and fashions, there

At last begin to loosen. Far

From the exchange of love to lie

Unreachable inside a room

The traffic parts to let go by

Brings closer what is left to come,

And dulls to distance all we are.

From Collected Poems by Philip Larkin (Faber). The Poetry Pharmacy Returns is published by Particular (£12.99)