Going, gone

"Let's be thankful that Philip Larkin can't see the English countryside as it is today", said Josephine Hart at her first British Library Poetry Hour of the year last night.

The actor, Mark Strong, was about to read 'Going, Going', Larkin's lament for vanishing national landscapes: "bricked in, except for the tourist parts  - first slums of Europe, a role it won't be so hard to win with a cast of crooks and tarts."

That was in 1972.

Curiously, Larkin's poem - with its abuse of "more houses, more parking allowed. . and that will be England gone" - was commissioned and first published by the British Government.

The idea that "there'll be books; it will linger on in galleries; but all that remains for us will be concrete and tyres" came in a report from the Conservatives' then new Whitehall toy, the Department of the Environment.

And Larkin's message was just not of destruction in some far distant future (no politician minds that too much) but of imminent disaster. His first line: "I thought it would last my time - the sense that, beyond the town, there would always be fields and farms'. His last line, almost always the kicker in this poet's work: "I just think it will happen soon".

"Going, Going", later published in the collection High Windows, seemed to grip the packed audience last night even more than Jeremy Irons' grim "Aubade" (a full realised performance, more than a reading, of a poem first published in the TLS in 1977) and Helen McCrory's dryly comic "They fuck you up, your mum and dad".

I'm not sure how many Secretaries of State would risk a "crooks and tarts" poetry commission for their bureaucratic masterpieces today. l

The last one that I can remember came from Tony Blair's first flush of government, in a 1998 report on national libraries which began with a poem by Ted Hughes.

While I’ve thrown away most of my Whitehall documents from the past thirty years (I was not a journalist in time to catch "Going, Going"), I have kept this one, just for the poem.

‘For this one’s dreams and that one’s acts,
For all who’ve failed or aged beyond
The reach of teachers, here are found
The inspiration and the facts.

As we all know and have heard all our lives
Just as we’ve heard that here.

Even the most misfitting child
Who’s chanced upon the library’s worth,
Sits with the genius of the earth
And turns the key to the whole world.

Hear it again.”

Safer than Larkin but sounder than any other way to begin such a work.

And, while I am sitting here amongst the "bleak high-risers" of east London, still niggling about the best way to introduce an ambitious book on libraries (see The Secret Miracle below), better too a Hughes or a Larkin than any Eco.