There are many different reasons as to why someone reads ranging from a student reading a report for a class assignment, a mother reading a novel while her children are playing in the yard, or even a doctor reading the latest literature on a highly innovative procedure. While there are countless scenarios in which one reads, there are very few times that people choose to close read. This is the type of reading when one reads past the baseline meaning of the text, and invests time and thought into every line, verse, and idea that the writer puts before them. This lack of close reading causes people to extract a meaning other than what the author intended. This is exactly the case in Phillip Larkin’s, “Church Going.” This is an easy poem to misinterpret which makes the close reading of it extremely important, and in this case, the speaker’s experience is key in understanding the meaning. When we look at the speaker’s experience in Larkin’s, “Church Going”, we can see that the speaker has an appreciation for the church, which most people do not see. This is important because in the secular society that we live in today, people have lost the ability to approach sacred things and most of the time avoid the idea of sacred completely. Through different experiences that the speaker expresses in the poem, we can outline how the speaker appreciates the idea of sacred.

The poem begins with the speaker riding his bike when suddenly he is drawn to a church in which he enters. The speaker walks about the church seeing the things inside as objects that are nothing special. This is evident with the phrase, “Another church: matting, seats, and stone,” (Larkin 3) and the description of the “some brass and stuff” (Larkin 5) in the front of the church. This is the part of the first stanza where many readers get the idea that the speaker does not find the church as important or interesting. However, the last line gives a glimpse that there might be more. This line says, “I take off / My cycle-clips in awkward reverence” (Larkin 8-9). Reverence is the deep respect for someone or something which does not make sense as to why the speaker would do this if he does not associate anything special with this place. 

In the next stanza the speaker goes around the church performing tasks that people of the religion carry out on Sunday in their homage to their faith. The difference between the speaker and these people is that the speaker does them in a remedial way, just going through the motions. He ends the stanza saying, “Reflect the place was not worth stopping for” (Larkin 18). While this alone again reinforces the belief that the speaker does not see the purpose of this place, he immediately says, “Yet stop I did; in fact I do often” (Larkin 19). While the speaker does not have the knowledge or faith of one who regularly meets here, the speaker cannot deny that he is drawn to this place for some reason. 

The speaker then goes on to focus on the question as to what this church will become in the future when religion fades away. All of this proves that the speaker does not call himself religious, but for the first time the speaker thinks about the church as something that is worth thinking about and worth paying attention to. The turning point of the poem occurs when the speaker says, “For, though I’ve no idea / What this accoutered frowsty barn is worth, / It pleases me to stand in silence here” (Larkin 52-54). The speaker admits that he does not understand why this place is so special and as to what makes people gather here, but he understands the feeling that the people associate with this place. This feeling that the speaker associates with the church is the feeling of a sacred place. While most people label the speaker with a stamp of secularity, he does not let this stop him from feeling this sacred association with the church. He cannot explain his reason for feeling this way, but nevertheless he has a feeling of unworldliness when he is at that church. “A serious house on serious earth it is, / In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, / Are recognized, and clothed as destinies” (Larkin 55-57). The speaker describes the church as a serious house that stands on a serious earth which expresses importance to the church through the use of the word “serious.” By using the word “compulsions” the speaker is saying that everyone, including the speaker, is drawn towards the common place of the church without their control. Once we are there is when we begin to feel the sacred feeling that the speaker describes. When the speaker says that the compulsions of the people “are recognized and clothed as destinies” (Larkin 57) he describes his feeling that he had when he stands in the church. He describes himself as feeling important and isolated which is different from outside the walls. The speaker also says, “A hunger in himself to be more serious, / And gravitating with it to this ground. / Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in” (Larkin 60-62). With these lines, the speaker expresses the idea that everyone on the earth wants to know more and wants to feel more than what the world has to offer. The last line is one that many secularists in today’s society would disagree with, but the speaker says that in the hunger to satisfy these desires and feelings, the only way to do that is to go to the church. This is why the speaker makes his point very clear in saying, “And that much never can be obsolete” (Larkin 58). With this, the speaker simply says that no matter what the world turns to in terms of religious belief, there will never be a place where one can ask the questions that cannot be answered.

Again, the speaker may not be confessing his religious obsession or stating that he has the unnerving desire to convert this second, but instead saying that he appreciates what the church stands for. Also the speaker expresses his belief that the world cannot survive without a place such as the church because no other place is associated with this all knowing entity. This is the difference between the speaker and the secularists that are a part of today’s society. Secularists today do not just believe that there is no God or religious entity to describe any event or feeling, but they dismiss all ideas of unworldly things all together. While the speaker is clearly a nonbeliever of traditional religious practices, like secularists today, the speaker appreciates the feeling and the idea of the church instead of dismissing it in its entirety. This appreciation is an idea that not many people today can understand and in turn can cause many outbreaks that can result in suffering. The speaker is a perfect example of a nonbeliever that instead of dismissing the idea, chooses to accept it for a purpose of his own.
