Published in the Times Literary Supplement two days before Christmas Day 1977, it is a moving and openly terrified meditation on the prospect of death, that ‘sure extinction that we travel to’. He cannot say how, where, or when he will die, but that doesn’t stop him from contemplating his own demise – a horrifying thought. In summary, ‘Aubade’ is about the poet waking at four in the morning to ‘soundless dark’ and being gripped by the terror of his own death which, with the dawning of a new day, is ‘a whole day nearer now’. Yet the poem is about Larkin’s death first and foremost, and offers a stark and harrowing vision of human mortality. He had begun the poem in 1974, the year that his final collection High Windows appeared, but he laid it aside and returned to it three years later, in the summer of 1977.īut it was the death of Larkin’s mother, in November of that year, that seems to have inspired him to finish the poem. Larkin completed ‘Aubade’ in November 1977, and the poem was published in the Times Literary Supplement on 23 December – ruining quite a few Christmas dinners, as Larkin himself predicted. It’s also one of Larkin’s rare unrhymed poems (see his meditation on religion, ‘Water’, for another). Not in the Homeric sense perhaps, but we echo the sentiment. Bloomfield A6.As the commenter on one website which quotes the poem puts it, ‘This poem is epic man’. Both the first and second issue are now most uncommon, but this first issue somewhat more so. This first issue sold out swiftly and the remaining 400 were then bound, these later examples produced with rounded spines and so easily identifiable as the second issue. The first edition comprised a total of 700 copies, and just 300 of those were initially bound. A respectable copy of the author's third major collection of verse. The wrapper split into two parts and with about half of the spine panel now absent.

A good copy in dust wrapper, with the price 6/- nett printed to the base of the front panel, as required for this first state. Damp marking to the corners of the boards. Poet Dannie Abse's copy, with his inked ownership signature to the front free endpaper. Printed on Abbey Mills antique laid paper. Green cloth lettered in gold at the spine.

The misprint 'floor' for 'sea' in the first line of the poem 'Absences'. First Edition, first issue with the flat spine.

Larkin the less deceived