Lyrics If, My Darling - Philip Larkin

If, My Darling

If my darling were once to decide
Not to stop at my eyes,
But to jump, like Alice, with floating skirt into my head,
She would find no table and chairs, No mahogany claw-footed sideboards,
No undisturbed embers;
The tantalus would not be filled, nor the fender-seat cosy,
Nor the shelves stuffed with small-printed books for the Sabbath,
Nor the butler bibulous, the housemaids lazy:
She would find herself looped with the creep of varying light, Monkey-brown,
fish-grey, a string of infected circles Loitering like bullies,
about to coagulate;
Delusions that shrink to the size of a woman’s glove, Then sicken inclusively
outwards.
She would also remark The unwholesome floor, as it might be the skin
of a grave,
From which ascends an adhesive sense of betrayal, A Grecian statue kicked in
the privates, money,
A swill-tub of finer feelings.
But most of all
She’d be stopping her ears against the incessant recital Intoned by reality,
larded with technical terms,
Each one double-yolked with meaning and meaning’s rebuttal:
For the skirl of that bulletin unpicks the world like a knot, And to hear how
the past is past and the future neuter Might knock my darling off her
unpriceable pivot.