Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her buck
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

('Next Please', The Less Deceived)

To many readers this is the typical Larkinian theme. The ship is, of course, the ship of death, symbolically 'blck-Sailed' and familiar from long literary tradition, but 'unfamiliar', too, because of its strange accompaniments - not the usual dighy and birds earger for scraps of food behind it, but 'silence' and lifeless, motionless water. Larkin makes here one of the great commonplaces of poetry seem chillingly new to us, while remaining what it is - a universal human experience. Because he often dwells on this theme of mortality, as in 'Ambulances' (The Witsun Weddings), 'The Old Fools' and 'The Building' (High Windows) and 'Aubade', all of which are powerful, relentlessly honest poems about the inevitability of death, and because in poems like 'No Road' (The Less Deceived), 'Love Songs in Age' and 'Dockery and Son' (The Witsun Weddings) he seems to question the value of such things as love and family life which for many people are the necessary counterbalance to death, he is though of as a gloomy, despondant, negative poet.

UNFINISHED