Church Going Time Quotes

Notice in this passage that the speaker doesn't say "if" churches fall out of use, but "when" they do. He therefore treats the decline of churches as unavoidable. He does this by suggesting (though never directly saying) that time is always around us, endlessly slipping away, and though it might not happen in the near future, all human institutions will one day be swept away by the ravaging force of time.

The phrase "must die" again reflects the inevitability of time passing. And with this inevitability comes the fact that everything that exists will one day not exist, and this is the future era that the speaker is wondering about. On the one hand, he might actually be interested in playing out these future scenarios. But on the other hand, he also constantly implies that just as religious faith will eventually disappear from Earth, so will humans. What is fascinating about this is that the fact that time actually destroys the same thing that it creates. In other words, time sweeps away all of our attempts to create something permanent and human-made, but the temporary nature of human life is also what causes us to seek out this higher sense of permanence. What time takes away with one hand, it gives with the other. For Larkin, it might be both the creator and destroyer of faith at the same time? How's that for mind-bending?

As time passes, we see the church beginning to decay in both a physical and symbolic way. As it decays, we can almost see its edges getting eroded by the rain, the roof collapsing, the spire tumbling over, until we no longer know what we're even looking at. Well this is exactly the same thing that will happen with people's religious faith as the passing of time continues to erode religious belief in everyday life. This will eventually take religion to the point where people can just barely remember what it was supposed to be in the past. By this point though, its true purpose will be forgotten.

Toward the end of the poem, the speaker really starts saying some nice things about religion and spirituality, probably because he needs to make sense of the urge that keeps bringing him back to churches. But on top of that, the speaker feels drawn to religion not just because it gives an outlet to human spiritual yearnings, but because it has done so for such a long time. The speaker can't help but find significance in the fact that religion has been around for so long, because even while he knows that religion is not a permanent thing, it's still been around for an impressive amount of time. By going into a church, the speaker also feels connected to all of the people over the centuries who've found meaning in church, and this gives him a sense of community that modern life doesn't.

Larkin chooses to end the poem with a direct reference to human mortality, mentioning all of the dead people who lie around in churchyards all over the world. But he's not just mentioning them because he has some sort of belief in the power of dead bodies. Rather, he's paying homage to the fact that even though he might not find anything compelling about Christianity, he definitely respects the fact that so many people have over the years. One of the things religion does is connect us to the experience of people who came before us by giving us access to all of the same beliefs that governed those people's lives. Larkin doesn't necessarily share these beliefs, but his speaker definitely seems to have a sense of envy for people who really get to feel this sort of connection across time.