Larkin, 'the Peg's Paper sonneteer'

 'God, this place is dull,' the young Philip Larkin declared in a letter to his friend Jim Sutton, after the Larkins had temporarily left blitzed Coventry in October 1940 and moved in with family in... Lichfield, where generations of Larkins had lived and died (many are in St Michael's churchyard). Dull it doubtless was, like any provincial town at the time, but young Philip whiled away the time drinking in the George Hotel and The Swan, then a hotel, now divided into apartments, plus a branch of Ask Italian (nice garden) and a wine bar. Larkin wrote three poems during his time in Lichfield – all essentially juvenilia, but one, I think, showing a glimmer of what was to be. This is 'Ghosts', which was probably inspired by the story of a ghostly White Lady who appeared from time to time at or near The Swan, which overlooks a corner of Beacon Park...

They said this corner of the park was haunted,
At tea today, laughing through windows at
The frozen landscape. One of them recounted
The local tale: easy where he sat
With lifted cup, rocked in the servile flow
Of disbelief around, to understand
And bruise. But something touched a few
Like a slim wind with an accusing hand –
Cold as this tree I touch. They knew, as I,
Those living ghosts who cannot leave their dreams,
And in years after and before their death
Return as they can, and with ghost’s pleasure search
Those several happy acres, or those rooms
Where, like unwilling moth, they collided with
The enormous flame that blinded and hurt too much.

Including the poem in a letter to Jim Sutton, Larkin glossed 'Ghosts' thus: 
‘Have just written the above in about ½ hour – actually a great speed. Lousily technically done, but I wanted to send it to you to show you my real talent – not the truly strong man but the fin de siècle romantic, not the clinically austere but the Peg’s Paper* sonneteer, not Auden but Rupert Brooke.’
A harsh judgment surely: those closing lines are really rather good, and give a definite sense of the mature Larkin in the making. And it's hard to believe that this  15-line sonnet with its well disguised scheme of rhymes and half-rhymes was written in half an hour. 

 
* Peg's Paper was an escapist magazine aimed at working-class girls and filled with tales of love across the class divide.  It ran from 1919 to 1940.