Water - Analysis

A religion built out of the one thing that actually touches us

Larkin’s central move is blunt and quietly radical: if he had to construct a religion, he would base it on water because water is the nearest thing he can trust as sacred. The poem sounds half practical, half longing. It treats religion not as revealed truth but as human design—something you could be called in to build like an engineer. And yet the choice of water isn’t merely cynical. Water becomes a way to keep the hunger for cleansing, awe, and reverence, while stripping away whatever he suspects is theatrical, institutional, or false.

The tone is characteristically Larkin: dryly conversational at first, almost managerial, but with an undertow of genuine desire. That doubleness—cool voice, warm need—is the poem’s engine.

Church as fording: belief as a physical trial

In this invented faith, Going to church means you must wade across something: it would entail a fording. That small image flips the usual direction of religion. Instead of being carried by doctrine, you must get wet; the body has to submit. The detail about dry, different clothes makes the ritual feel real and slightly inconvenient, like a pilgrim’s task. It also implies change that is undeniable but not mystical: you are different because you have been soaked and had to dress again. Larkin’s imagined ceremony takes the idea of conversion and gives it a mundane proof—wet fabric, the chill of water, the simple fact that you can’t ford without being altered.

There’s a tension here: he dismisses religion as something one can “construct,” but he still wants a threshold experience, a crossing that marks off ordinary life from something set apart.

A litany of drenching: devotion without gentleness

When the poem turns to language—My litany would employ—it chooses not serene sprinkling but violence: sousing, a furious drench. The phrase devout drench is almost comic, but it’s also serious in its insistence that real devotion might feel like being overwhelmed. Water here is not only purifying; it is corrective, humiliating, bracing. Larkin replaces the soft-focus spirituality of hymns with an elemental force that doesn’t flatter the worshipper.

This is another contradiction the poem leans into: he wants a religion that is less made-up, yet his chosen sacrament is deliberately theatrical in its extremity. The “furious” immersion suggests that what he distrusts isn’t intensity—he distrusts unearned intensity. Water earns it by being real.

The glass in the east: a spare, believable miracle

The poem’s final gesture is its most openly reverent: I should raise in the east / A glass of water. The east quietly evokes sunrise and old religious orientations, but Larkin keeps the object disarmingly plain: not a chalice of wine, just a glass. Still, light transforms it. Any-angled light will congregate endlessly there, as if the congregation has become physics itself—rays gathering, refracting, returning. Without claiming a supernatural presence, the poem finds a steady kind of wonder in how light behaves when it meets water.

This is the poem’s tonal shift: the earlier lines sound like a skeptical brief for redesigning worship, but the ending lingers in a nearly mystical attention. The “endlessly” matters. It suggests a perpetuity he can accept: not eternal life promised by creed, but an inexhaustible phenomenon available to anyone who looks.

What the poem refuses—and what it can’t quite give up

The poem refuses a religion of assertions. Its sacred object is transparent, ordinary, and testable. And yet it cannot give up the old needs that religion answered: cleansing, passage, communal gathering, even orientation toward the east. Water lets Larkin keep the human shape of belief while emptying it of dogma. The result is both austere and oddly tender: a faith made of fording, drenching, and watching light collect in a glass—rituals that don’t promise salvation, but do promise contact with something larger than the self.

A sharper question hidden in the clarity

If any-angled light can “congregate” in a simple glass, what does that imply about the older kinds of congregation—people in a church, words in a litany? The poem almost dares us to wonder whether the impulse to worship is just light looking for a vessel. But it also hints at a colder possibility: that the vessel is all we can build, and the rest is merely what naturally happens when the world strikes it.