Opening the Mail

October, 1974.

The pictures fell out of the envelope,

Time stopped again, and nothing had changed,

Again she was three, and her weight I felt in my arms,

And again she was gone, and nothing had changed.



"Thought you'd want these," my brother had written,

And I do, though it's happened again, the ambush of grief,

Years since her dying, and nothing has changed,

The world has moved on,

The earth has circled and circled the sun,

Everything's different, and nothing has changed.



I no longer know how to say it,

Keats' "true voice of feeling," what is it?

What can be written, what phrases co-joined?

This is only a man's common sorrow

Here in the world of all of us,

The place where, in the end,

We find our happiness, or not at all.


. . .

–upon reading Larkin, with analytical comment by Christopher Ricks.