Water: Lovely Poem

I should make use of water.

Water plays an important role in our lives and is often used as a tribute to poetry. Here is a poem of water we want to share with you.

If I were called in

To construct a religion

I should make use of water.

Going to church

Would entail a fording

To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ

Images of sousing,

A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east

A glass of water

Where any-angled light

Would congregate endlessly.

In the first stanza, we are told a matter-of-fact declarative. As the stanzas progress, it describes several different uses for the water. The images of water grow more intense as the poem moves forwards. From the “fording” of the second stanza, we are presented with “sousing” and “furious devout drench”.

In the final stanza, the intensity is lost, because of the still “glass of water”. “East”, and the rising sun, are symbols for beginnings and awakenings that is compounded by the gentle and lazy rhythm, flowing like water itself, somewhat irregularly.

The poem’s final image of ‘any-angled light’ suggests, furthermore, that its intention would not be about division and exclusion, but would welcome everyone, since water brings us all together by our common need for it.

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Reference:

A Short Analysis of Philip Larkin’s ‘Water’