The poem
When first we faced, and touching showed How well we knew the early moves, Behind the moonlight and the frost, The excitement and the gratitude, There stood how much our meeting owed To other meetings, other loves.
The decades of a different life That opened past your inch-close eyes Belonged to others, lavished, lost; Nor could I hold you hard enough To call my years of hunger-strife Back for your mouth to colonise.
Admitted: and the pain is real. But when did love not try to change The world back to itself--no cost, No past, no people else at all-- Only what meeting made us feel, So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?
I love Larkin's poetry. I encountered one or two while still at school, and they always stuck in my mind. This one however, has to be my favourite of all of his poems, as it's one that makes so much sense to me personally, and I feel as if it were almost written for me!