Philip Larking has a poem called Church Going written in an iambic pentameter consisting of seven stanzas, each including nine lines, of which the language is typical of Larkin - ordinary, conversational, and almost slangy. It talks about the relationship among people, religion and church. In this essay, I want to discuss the speaker's attitude toward religion and evaluate the poem, stanza by stanza. The poem explains the way how these relationships have become hackneyed to great extent, say, people do go to church without even pondering upon the reason to do so. In the first stanza, the speaker explains how cliché the entering to the church is and in the second stanza, he moves forward and emphasizes the condition of the roof and he believes that it is not worth stopping, and in the third stanza he questions the habit of church going, that is to say, the whole poem is trying to find the meaning of religion and in this way each stanza plays its proper role. In the first stanza we see a phrase "another church" which exposes that this church is like other churches: the same seats, the same structure, he wants to say that all of the churches have the same inspiration for him, explaining the atmosphere of the church by mentioning to the books and the unignorable silence that covers the church, say, he again enters to another church and he does not does not possess any feeling toward it. In the second stanza, he moves forward and refers to the roof where there are some biblical verses are printed in large type for reading aloud, he says: "pronounce "Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant", he points that people and whoever enters the church repeat the utterings that they do not know why they do because church going has become a habitual and it has lost its basic scope which should be considered as a place where people should have felt an spiritual feeling, and he donates an Irish six pence before leaving which could be interpreted in two ways, either he felt that the place was useless to him in his quest and gave it something that had no value of currency at that time; or he felt that it did have something to offer as in those days, though Irish six pence had no monetary value, it was commonly given as a gift. After emphasizing on the repetitious nature of church goings in the above two stanzas, the speaker enters to the church in an amphoteric circumstances, he continues to say that these church goings have become futile since the churches themselves are made useless by the time of 1900s when people were somehow fed up with religion and its deputies like churches, priests, and nuns. He believes that churches will be reduced to small churches or authorities will change them into some tourist places, hence, these churches will be visited by tourists or their stones will be used as medical herbs for curing cancer, that is to say, churches have already lost their duties, unlike supposedly being a place for worshipping God, they have become a superstitious place for a group of people who do not care about God and religion. They just think that churches are a kind of tourism places that people are supposed to visit every Sunday and repeat some verses and look at the walls and come back and do the same next week. He complains about this situation of churches being meaningless. In the fourth stanza, Larkin talks about the consequences of this indifference, especially in the last line, we see the word "grass", signifying the earth on which we are born; and "weedy pavement" - the path we must tread which is not smooth and full of brambles and thorns along the way; and "buttress" referring to the church and religion which grant us hope and strength to keep on going and "the sky" - heavens- our ultimate goal through all the struggle. He conjectures that by the whole system of religion including churches, people has been covered under the heavy dust of meaninglessness, that is to say, human beings have lost their spirituality and churches have lost their actual purpose for which they were built. We have three stanzas up to the end of the poem, Larkin wants to put the last bullets into the dead corpse of religion in the time of 1900s, that is to say, this lack of belief in people going to church leads to disbelief, Larkin believes that people are physically in the church but the point is that they should spiritually be there in the church in order to perceive a spiritual hilarity. At the beginning of the poem we may think that Larkin is not a spiritual man and he does not have faith in church or religion but at the end of the poem, he comes to terms with the fact that, although churches have lost their vital purpose among people, still, there is a luminosity that we can "grow wise in" by coming to church. This poem has some features in common with Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot", some critics believe that this play mocks the Bible but some say that it is a zealous invitation to return to God since there is no way to end this emptiness of Godless life. Larkin's church going neither takes side of religion nor invites people to go to church, rather, it reflects the contemporary circumstances of the churches and lets people decide about the philosophy of church going, say, church going is one thing and having spiritual feeling is another. He emphasizes on the modern man of 1900s, an automatized man who is stripped of religion. In this situation, he offers church going by asserting that religion "Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in", that is to say, these churches should be in order to v from the yoke of the material life, that is to say, the way to salvation is in churches that have been forgotten in the 1900s. Man of this age has fed up with religious matters, he only goes to church because he is used to do that and he does not get any results. Philip Larkin as a poet, better saying, as a speaker has a neutral viewpoint to this matter. In my opinion, he neither encourages people nor warns them, he wants to portray the present situation of the church which has merely become an institution, far from its former fluidity and strength, therefore, people are now afflicted with being immersed in a profound sense of nothingness.