Life & Wisdom Quote by Philip Larkin

Aging is supposed to be clarifying; Larkin’s line treats that promise like a slogan half-remembered from someone else’s mouth. “They say” is the tell: an anonymous chorus offering reassurance, the kind of folk wisdom that circulates because it’s comforting, not because it’s true. Larkin begins by ventriloquizing consensus so he can quietly pull it apart.

The phrase “eyes clear” does double work. Literally, it nods to the body’s betrayals and repairs, the medical hope that time might correct what youth blurs. Figuratively, it’s a moral claim: age brings insight, the world snaps into focus, illusions drop away. Larkin’s genius is that he never confirms it; he just hangs the idea in the air, letting its sentimentality show. The line’s smooth, almost nursery-simple cadence makes the proposition feel easy - which is precisely what Larkin distrusts.

Context matters: Larkin’s postwar English sensibility is allergic to grand narratives of progress, personal or national. His poems repeatedly test the consolations people inherit - romance, religion, “maturity” - and find them wanting or compromised. Read against that temperament, “They say eyes clear with age” becomes a skeptical preface, the start of an argument with optimism. It’s the sound of someone listening to the world’s assurances and already bracing for the moment they fail, when what clears isn’t vision but the realization that clarity can be another name for resignation.