 ", presage the helplessness, the dread of the atrophying of emotion, the despair, and the magnetic terror of death in the poems that follow.These are Larkin's most persistent themes.Throughout the collection, the feeling of diminishment and loss is pervasive, whether in the visit of a cyclist to a church in the volume's best known poem, "Church Going," or in the alienation of the speaker looking at a photograph of a young lady, or in the man in "Toads" beaten by work into an imprisonment he then wills, or even in the "I" who "starts to be happy" when light strikes on the "foreheads" of houses.