'A slight relax of air'

 On this day in 1962, Philip Larkin wrote, or signed off on, this unusually constructed sonnet. 

A slight relax of air where cold was
And water trickles; dark ruinous light,
Scratched like an old film, above wet slates withdraws.
Shrinkage of snow shows cleaner than the net
Stiffened like ectoplasm in front windows.

Shielded, what sorts of life are stirring yet:
Legs, lagged like drains, slippers soft as fungus,
The gas and grate, the old cold sour grey bed.
Some ajar face, corpse-stubbled, bends around
To see the sky over aerials –
Sky, absent paleness across which the gulls
Wing to the Corporation rubbish ground.
A slight relax of air. All is not dead.

Weather is always a presence in Larkin, and not only in the poems – A Girl in Winter is built around a powerfully realised alternation of deep winter and high summer – and here weather comes to the foreground in a vivid, sharp-eyed description of a particular moment when 'a slight relax of air' enables a thaw to set in. It's a bleak English provincial scene, but the poem ends on a note of something like hope: 'All is not dead.'