Faith Healing - Analysis

A staged tenderness that still works on real pain

Larkin’s central claim is bracing: the miracle on offer in this faith-healing line is not medical but emotional, and it is powerful precisely because it touches a need nothing cures. The poem begins by looking almost clinically at the scene—women file forward, stewards tirelessly shepherd them—yet it ends inside a shared, private wound: a sense of life lived according to love that time itself has disproved. What makes the poem sting is that it refuses an easy debunking. The healer’s performance may be hollow, even coercive, but the ache he temporarily relieves is unmistakably human.

The healer as respectable machine

The healer is introduced as a figure of polished authority: rimless glasses, silver hair, dark suit, white collar. He looks like professionalism itself, and Larkin’s diction makes him feel almost mechanical in his efficiency. Each woman gets some twenty seconds in the warm spring rain of his attention—a beautiful phrase that also measures care like a rationed commodity. Even the prayer is described as managerial: he is Directing God about this eye, that knee. The implied contradiction is sharp: the ritual pretends to submit to divine will, yet the healer speaks like a supervisor issuing instructions, moving briskly from body part to body part.

Guided bodies, “exiled” minds

The crowd control matters. The stewards Persuade them onwards, suggesting pressure disguised as help. When the women’s heads are clasped abruptly, the touch is intimate but not tender; it’s sudden, almost confiscating. Afterward they are exiled / Like losing thoughts: the simile makes the women seem briefly displaced from themselves, as if the experience has evacuated their normal consciousness without replacing it with anything stable. The tone here is cool, watchful, and faintly disgusted—not at the women, but at how easily a human being can be moved along, handled, and sent away.

The “dumb and idiot child” that answers kindness

The poem’s emotional center arrives with the women who don’t simply leave. Some stand stiff, twitching and loud, crying deep hoarse tears, and Larkin risks an ugly phrase to name what has been awakened: a kind of dumb / And idiot child within them. It’s deliberately uncomfortable. He is not flattering their response; he is insisting it is primitive, preverbal, and bodily. Yet that harshness coexists with startling compassion: the child re-awake at kindness, believing a voice / At last calls them alone, believing hands have come / To lift and lighten. The contradiction is the poem’s engine: the response is both humiliating and true. It may be childish, but it is also the part of a person that most directly registers recognition.

When language fails: “thick tongues blort”

Larkin makes the women’s joy sound physically awkward: thick tongues blort, eyes squeeze grief. Their bodies try to speak what they cannot articulate: huge unheard answers jam and rejoice. The line breaks into a kind of traffic jam of feeling—answers to a question no one has fully asked. That question is repeated like a slogan: What’s wrong. Early on, it is the healer’s prompt, a set-up for the quick pivot into prayer. Later, it becomes an accusation the poem turns back on the whole crowd—and, by extension, on all of us.

The turn: from ailments to the deeper wrong

The poem’s hinge is the bitter punch of What’s wrong! ... By now, all’s wrong. At first, the wrong seems specific—this eye, that knee—a list of fixable parts. But Larkin broadens it into an existential diagnosis. The women are described with a flash of harsh comedy—Moustached in flowered frocks—as if embarrassment and physical decline have become part of the spectacle. The tone turns more openly judgmental here, yet it also becomes more universal. All’s wrong not because every body is broken in the same way, but because each person carries a private account of love not received, love not given, and time that will not be negotiated with.

The real illness: love imagined as a life-plan

Larkin names what the ceremony activates: In everyone there sleeps / A sense of life lived according to love. The line is tender and devastating because it treats this sense as both natural and dormant, like a faculty we keep under sedation to function. He then splits its meaning. For some, it is moral and outward: the difference they could make / By loving others. But for most, it is the ache of deprivation: all they might have done had they been loved. That phrasing matters. It implies love is not just comfort; it is a condition that makes action, confidence, and a different self possible. The tragedy is not only loneliness; it’s the suspicion that unloved people live a smaller version of their own lives.

“That nothing cures”: the bleak mercy of the voice

The poem’s bleakest line is also its clearest: That nothing cures. Faith healing cannot touch this, not because God is absent in a doctrinal sense, but because the wound is woven into time and memory. Larkin describes it as An immense slackening ache, like a thaw: the rigid landscape weeps. That image grants the women’s tears a kind of dignity; they are not simply gullible, they are thawing after long emotional frost. Yet the ending refuses consolation. Above them, the same practiced address continues—Dear child—and the poem lands on the chilling verdict: all time has disproved. The voice offers a momentary re-parenting, a warm lie of specialness, but time—through neglect, loss, and the plain evidence of one’s life—has already argued against it.

The poem’s hardest question

If the healer is performing, but the hunger he meets is real, what exactly is the moral failure here: the man’s manipulation, or the world that leaves people so starved that some twenty seconds of attention can unlock deep hoarse tears? Larkin doesn’t let us settle comfortably on either answer. He makes the scene feel tawdry and yet insists on the grandeur of the need it exposes.

What remains after the line dissolves

By ending not on the women but on the continuing voice above, the poem suggests the ritual will go on—endless Dear child offered into a crowd—because the true ailment is not an isolated sickness but a widespread, quiet accounting of unlived love. The final force of all time has disproved is not simply atheistic; it is anti-fantasy. Time is the great refuter of the life we think we were meant to have. The faith healer cannot change that, but he can momentarily make it speakable, letting the frozen landscape weep.