he walked into the echo.

Far too little time today - have to go to the library in a minute & print tomorrow's lecture notes before the drama social tonight, AUGH - but I didn't want to miss a week. So here, long-promised, is a bit of Larkin. For a while, I thought this was my favourite poem; these days I'm dreadful at picking a favourite anything, and don't have one, but if I bothered to make lists it would definitely still be up there.

Love Songs in Age

by Philip Larkin

She kept her songs, they kept so little space, 
  The covers pleased her: 
One bleached from lying in a sunny place, 
One marked in circles by a vase of water, 
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her, 
  And coloured, by her daughter - 
So they had waited, till, in widowhood 
She found them, looking for something else, and stood 

Relearning how each frank submissive chord 
  Had ushered in 
Word after sprawling hyphenated word, 
And the unfailing sense of being young 
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein 
  That hidden freshness sung, 
That certainty of time laid up in store 
As when she played them first. But, even more, 

The glare of that much-mentionned brilliance, love, 
  Broke out, to show 
Its bright incipience sailing above, 
Still promising to solve, and satisfy, 
And set unchangeably in order. So 
  To pile them back, to cry, 
Was hard, without lamely admitting how 
It had not done so then, and could not now.