Skin
Skin - meaning Summary
Aging Made Visible
Larkin treats skin as an obedient daily garment that inevitably betrays age. The poem describes how the face must learn "lines"—expressions of anger, amusement, sleep—and gradually roughen, sag, and acquire a soiled reputation. The speaker observes this physical decay with understated regret and offers a small apology for having found no occasion to celebrate the skin when it was new. It is an unsentimental meditation on ageing and the loss of youthful surface.
Read Complete AnalysesObedient daily dress, You cannot always keep That unfakable young surface. You must learn your lines - Anger, amusement, sleep; Those few forbidding signs Of the continuous coarse Sand-laden wind, time; You must thicken, work loose Into an old bag Carrying a soiled name. Parch then; be roughened; sag; And pardon me, that I Could find, when you were new, No brash festivity To wear you at, such as Clothes are entitled to Till the fashion changes.
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