'And now this stride into our solitude...'

 On this day in 1981, the Humber Bridge – at the time the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world – opened. Andrew Marvell not being available, Hull's other great poet, Philip Larkin, was commissioned to write a celebratory poem, which would be set to music and performed by the Hull Choral Society. The result was a rare, and very accomplished, public poem – one that suggests that, had the occasion arisen, Larkin could have made a perfectly good Poet Laureate... 

Bridge for the Living

Isolate city spread alongside water,

Posted with white towers, she keeps her face

Half turned to Europe, lonely northern daughter,

Holding through centuries her separate place.

 

Behind her domes and cranes enormous skies

Of gold and shadows build; a filigree

Of wharves and wires, ricks and refineries,

Her working skyline wanders to the sea.

 

In her remote three cornered hinterland

Long white flowered lanes follow the riverside.

The hills bend slowly seaward, plain gulls stand,

Sharp fox and brilliant pheasant walk, and wide

 

Wind-muscled wheatfields wash round villages,

Their churches half submerged in leaf. They lie

Drowned in high summer, cartways and cottages,

The soft huge haze of ash-blue sea close by.

 

Snow-thickened winter days are yet more still:

Farms fold in fields, their single lamps come on,

Tall church towers parley, airily audible,

Howden and Beverley, Hedon and Patrington,

 

While scattered on steep seas, ice-crusted ships

Like errant birds carry her loneliness,

A lighted memory no miles eclipse,

A harbour for the heart against distress.

 

And now this stride into our solitude,

A swallow-fall and rise of one plain line,

A giant step for ever to include

All our dear landscape in a new design.

 

The winds play on it like a harp; the song,

Sharp from the east, sun-throated from the west,

Will never to one separate shire belong,

But north and south make union manifest.

 

Lost centuries of local lives that rose

And flowered to fall short where they began

Seem now to reassemble and unclose,

All resurrected in this single span,

 

Reaching for the world, as our lives do,

As all lives do, reaching that we may give

The best of what we are and hold as true:

Always it is by bridges that we live.