Larkin was unaware that postal rates had gone up, and most recipients, when asked to pay the difference for delivery of a pamphlet by a little-known writer, turned them away; only around 100 copies were printed.

Put out by The Marvell Press, a small operation run by George Hartley and his wife Jean Hartley in Hessle, East Yorkshire,[4] the book through the depth of its appeal, the formal skill of its verse, and its consistent striking of Larkin's distinctive tone gained wide readership.

It is about death, and, according to Andrew Motion, is the kind of poem for which Larkin "is so often regarded as an unrelievedly pessimistic poet"[6] Its concluding lines, "What is under my hands, / That I cannot feel?

I know it sounds ridiculous to say I wasn't young at twenty-five or twenty-six, but at least I was beginning to find out what life was about, and that's precisely what I found in Hardy.

When I came to Hardy it was with the sense of relief that I didn't have to try and jack myself up to a concept of poetry that lay outside my own life – this is perhaps what I felt Yeats was trying to make me do.