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A lyric called “Epithalamion” — a term, from the Greek, for a poem read after a wedding — spends its first page on a robin who keeps colliding with her reflection in a window, “relentless as/the warming earth.”

While that celebratory epithalamion, “The Whitsun Weddings,” has been voted the most popular English poem of the previous half-century, I myself would have opted for “Aubade,” Larkin’s last and most terrifying meditation on death.

Recognition is followed by the wonderfully silent and graceful invitation: "Come, my eyes/ said…" The poem becomes an epithalamion, with a pre-lapsarian freshness shining through the little scene.

If my Muse were onely out of fashion, and but wounded and maimed like Free-will in the Roman Church, I should adventure to put her to an Epithalamion.

My poor study having lyen that way, it may prove possible that my weak assistance may be of use in this matter, in a more serious fashion, then an Epithalamion.