Church Going Religion Quotes

These opening lines reveal that the speaker isn't all that comfortable with entering the church while actual churchgoers are inside. He prefers to explore the place when it's empty. While he doesn't know much about church stuff, he knows enough to avoid the place when real churchgoers are there. He might be afraid of offending them by doing something wrong, or he might want to explore the church with a sense of total freedom. In this opening line, Larkin sets the stage for the entire poem, which will concern the theme of feeling out-of-place among a community of true believers.

By referring to the building as "Another church," Larkin's speaker robs the church of its unique value as a holy place. In general, this first stanza really sets up an ironic distance between the speaker and the value that the church is supposed to have. The mention of "little books" and "sprawlings of flowers" that have gone brown reflect a certain pettiness and disarray to the insides of the church, which is only set up to look really nice for Sunday mass, and then left to sprawl and get dirty until the following mass. These images suggest a certain phoniness about the church, which is made to look good for the parishioners, but not treated in a holy way at all when no one's looking. You'd think that if the church were truly a holy place, someone would be taking care of it even when no one was looking.

Here, the speaker takes off the cycle-clips that keep his trousers from getting caught in his bicycle chain. He does this because he doesn't have a hat and feels like he should take off some article of clothing to show his respect. These lines might show the speaker's genuine attempt to show respect for the church, but, at this early point in the poem, the gesture seems like Larkin's sarcastic way of saying that church customs are superficial and meaningless—more a matter of habit than actual belief.

The speaker starts wondering about how people managed to get the roof of the church to look so new. Again, this lack of concern with holy things shows that the speaker has a very secular and practical focus. He figures that someone would know whether the roof has been cleaned or restored, but then admits that he doesn't. The statement is symbolic, as it also applies to the speaker's relationship to religious faith. It's almost like saying: "Someone probably knows why people believe in all this religious stuff, but I don't." This is the message of much of the poem in general, and Larkin makes it especially clear in this blunt, symbolic statement about the church's roof.

The poem's speaker muses about the decline of religious faith, and wonders who will be the last person to visit the church for "what it was" (39). This could be an ironic statement, because the speaker probably can't tell us what the church ever was to begin with. Nonetheless, he wonders if the last of the churchgoers will be someone interested in church architecture, or maybe someone who wants to throw on a bib and start drooling whenever he sees something old and antique. Finally, maybe the last visitor will be a "Christmas-addict," who can't get enough of the sights and smells of Christmas time. What this entire passage implies, though, is that all of these superficial characters supposedly celebrate the church "for what it was." In other words, the passage implies that people have always come to the church for superficial reasons.

The passage opens with a parallelism in the phrasing of "A serious house on serious earth," which has the overall effect of making the line sound overly serious in a mocking way. But in these late lines, the speaker has also changed his overall tone toward religion, and has admitted that he personally feels the same appeal that has led many people to become true believers. The speaker (and maybe even Larkin himself) tries to explain the feeling that keeps bringing him back to religion, and the best he can do is say that he has a desire to go to a serious place where people think seriously about life. This is an especially interesting thing for Larkin to write, since Larkin is famous for always uses humor to distance himself from what he's talking about. The speaker also suggests here that churches will continue to thrive because church has a way of taking the desires that are common to all humans, and dressing them up with cosmic labels like "sin" and "virtue" and "destiny." This gives our lives a very profound sense of meaning that we wouldn't have without religion. Ultimately, Larkin doesn't necessarily say that this makes him a believer, but he definitely sees the appeal.