It's such a childlike question and yet more sophisticated than the clichéd, more adult 'What is the meaning of life?' After avoiding the question for three lines - 'Well, days are just there', 'Days just happen, one after the other' - Philip Larkin suggests that what days are for is 'to be happy in' (as if we all knew what 'happy' meant; is it only wanting what we can have?)
Indeed, what can we do but inhabit passing time, the time between breakfast and falling asleep? So how can I spend my days in order to make them worth valuing as they pass? Like most people I know, I've spent most of my days trying either to ignore time's passing or to make sense out of the years and decades gone by. That's the whole thing about time: it's not a dimension, not a thing, so you can't grasp bits of it, except in retrospect. It's what you do with your days that matters.
The 'turn' of the poem comes with that word 'Ah', and the response that the only way to escape living one's life in terms of 'days' brings the priest and doctor running 'over the fields' in 'their long coats'. Who are typically attended by the priest (administering last rites) and the doctor (attempting to do something either to avert the patient's death, or, at the very least, alleviate their suffering at the end)? So the only people who can truly escape the day-to-day struggle of life are the dead.
Larkin has just looked me straight in the eye and said: forget years, forget lifetimes and what's been happening in them, it's a succession of days you live in, so make sure they're good ones, be happy in them as they pass, one after the other, that's the point. Somehow, I feel I have largely failed to live in my succession of days. I can see that now when my time's nearly up, and after I've squandered decades. "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me ...' (Richard II) Thank you, Philip Larkin!
