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,” making the close reading of it extremely important. 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 understand sacred things, and most of the time avoid the idea of sacred all together. Through different experiences that the speaker expresses in the poem, we can outline the speaker’s appreciation for the idea of sacred.

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.

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 say, “I take off / My cycle-clips in awkward reverence” (Larkin 8-9). This again shows how the speaker is drawn to the church and even once he arrives he is not sure why he is there or what he is looking at. He just knows that there is something different about this place and he feels a bit “awkward” because this is the first time that he cannot explain the reasons for his actions.

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.

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. The speaker can be related to many people in today’s society that struggle with this same question the speaker keeps asking himself. That question is what is so special about this church that so many people see, and what is the right thing to believe. With the rise of science growing in importance in our generation, people are becoming more and more determined to find the concrete answers to questions and dismissing anything that could not be factually reinforced. While this is the case, there are still those undeniable feelings that overcome everybody at some point in their life, as represented with the speaker in the poem. There are people in our society today that, like the speaker, ask themselves the question if there is something that they are missing in those big beautiful cathedrals. People, the speaker included, seek what’s indeed meaningful in the world hidden within the plain. This is hard for many people today, this poem proves that if you go through the world and do not fight your feelings, as the speaker did, you will always find the meaningful things that are unique to you.  
