critical appreciation or analysis of the church going by philip larkin

Philip Larkin, a contemporary poet, wrote ‘Church Going’
in the early 1950’s, after World War II, when the shattering influence of war was at its
peak and there were constant social changes. Poet noticed the people’s dependence on the
church was fading, which leads us to the two possible meanings of the title ‘Church
Going’, the first being the weekly act of going to a church, or the fading away of the
church. The poet himself wasn’t a believer in the church, he was agnostic and
indifferent, and the speaker in the poem could be the poet himself or a persona adopted
by him. The poem talks about the speaker’s thoughts as he enters a vast, empty church
and wonders what will happen when the churches fall into disuse. At a deeper level the
poem becomes an inquiry into the role of religion in our lives
today.

The speaker stops at a church when he is
on a cycling trip, entering it only after he has made sure that no prayer service is on.
The church is just a convenient stop-off for the speaker and there is no sense of
religiosity in him. The speaker sees the matting, seats and books much like any other
church, and flowers from the Sunday mass which, “brownish now”, are dead. There is a
“musty, unignorable silence” and a feeling of staleness in the church, and the lack of
use and life in it is apparent. The speaker has no hat to take off as a mark of respect,
so he takes off his cycle clips instead in “awkward reverence”, indicating that he poet
feels a grudging respect for the church but is uncomfortable about
it.

In a casual, detached tone the speaker moves
around the church, running his hand around the receptacle of holy water and reading a
few verses from the bible at the lectern, saying ‘Here endeth’ more loudly than he had
intended too. The words echoed in the room, as though joining the mockery, tired of the
same mechanical practice day after day. On his way out the speaker donated a worthless
Irish sixpence, reflecting that the church was not worth stopping
for.

Yet the speaker says that despite that he
did stop at the church and he often does, each time feeling the same way; at a loss and
wondering what will happen to the churches when they fall out of use completely. He
wonders if a few will be forever on display like exhibition pieces while the rest are
given to rain and sheep for use rent-free, or if we shall avoid them as unlucky places. 
He wonders if at night “dubious women” will come to make their children touch a stone
with hearing powers, pick our herbs of medicinal value or whether they would be used as
the haunts of dead people.

He goes on to say
that while the church may not have religious power, it will continue to have some
mysterious power. He says religion is already dead, soon superstition too will die, and
when this too is dead then the physical building itself will fall to ruin.  The speaker
wonders that as the purpose of the church becomes more obscure with each passing week,
who will be the very last person to seek the church out for its religious purpose it
once served. He wonders if it’ll be a crew of archaeologists, a “ruin-bibber” lusting
for antiques, a Christmas addict wanting to absorb like a sponge the atmosphere of
yuletide or his “representative.” He wonders if it’ll be someone bored and uninformed
like him who, aware that the last dregs of religiosity in  church are dispersed, still
takes the trouble of making his way through the vegetation to get
there.