Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word- the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
The final line repeats for emphasis the first in the stanza, the reference to innocence irreversably lost. The word “again” reinforces it, as does the only full stop in the poem. So Larkin ends with a masterpiece of understated drama.
MCMXIV re-transcribed