Philip Larkin — The Vale of Soul-Making

Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses:

To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget,
That there is always a changing at the root,
And a real world in which time really passes.

— Philip Larkin, from “New Year Poem,” Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989)

Philip Larkin — The Vale of Soul-Making