Annuls Mirabilis’, an old man’s sing-song ballad, sees the paperback publication of Lawrence’s book as part of a wider shift in popular culture and manners: ‘Sexual intercourse began | In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) -| Between the end of the Chatterley ban | And the Beatles’ first LP.

What has since become Larkin’s most quoted line “They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ opens This Be the Verse’, a poem which at first sight appears to be a neat summary of Freudian theory and Hardpan pessimism, but one which moves into an intensely private disillusion: ‘Man hands on misery to man It deepens like a coastal shelf | Get out as early as you can| And don’t have any kids yourself.

In a later poem, To the Sea’, Larkin looks back far more gaily to the seaside’s of his parents’ courtship and of his own boyhood, but the line expressive of the continuities that the poem I recalls (‘Still going on, all of it, still going on’) scarcely suggests a sense of liberation in or from time. An Arundel Tomb’ describes a medieval funerary monument to a husband and wife who are shown lying side by side and hand in hand.