'Be My Valentine This Monday'

“A formal memorial service took place later in Westminster Abbey, not inappropriately, on St Valentine’s Day 1986.” 

Philip Larkin had died more than two months earlier, on December 2, 1985. The nurse reported his whispered final words: “I am going to the inevitable.”

 

We don’t often rank Larkin among the love poets (despite “An Arundel Tomb”). One can cavil over their quality but Larkin certainly accumulated an impressive quantity of valentine recipients. Among them was Betty Mackereth, his longtime secretary at Hull University. On St. Valentine’s Day 1976, Larkin left a card on her desk. Having earlier given her a toy crocodile, Larkin wrote on the front of the card “See you later alligator,” and inside: “You tasty morsel!” The sentiment quotient picked up a little bit with the two samples of valentine’s doggerel also written in the card:

 

“Be My Valentine this Monday.

Even though we’re miles apart!

Time will separate us one day --

Till then, hyphen with my heart.”

 

And this, a little more interesting, poetically speaking:

 

“You are fine as summer weather,

May to August all in one,

And the clocks, when we’re together,

Count not shadows. Only sun.”

 

It was Mackereth, the anti-Max Brod, who followed Larkin’s instructions and shredded and burned the thirteen fat notebooks the poet had kept between 1949 and 1980. Reading Larkin’s verses to Mackereth, I feel better about my own feeble St. Valentine’s Day efforts over the years.

 

[The passage quoted at the top and other biographical information is drawn from James Booth’s Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (2014).]