How Philip Larkin found poetry in water

SIR – Christopher Howse (Sacred Mysteries, January 7) writes eloquently on the symbolic importance of water in Christian expression.

Philip Larkin considered himself an agnostic “but an Anglican agnostic, of course”. His poem “Water”, envisaging the sort of religion he might construct, draws beautifully from the same font of imagery, concluding with a glass of water raised in toast to the east, “Where any-angled light/would congregate endlessly.” He chose to publish it opposite perhaps his most famous poem, “The Whitsun Weddings”, in which young women among wedding parties stare at “a religious wounding”. The poem ends with an arrow-shower “Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.”

C J Fletcher Stanton St John, Oxfordshire

Shapes and shingle: a 1969 picture of Larkin near Hull, where he lived for 30 years