What ironies are used by the poet Philip Larkin in "Church Going"?

Central to understanding this poem is appreciating the
deep irony that is evident in the reaction of the speaker to the theme he is trying to
address. At surface level, at least, he is cynical and mocking about religion, churches
and its importance to life. However, in this poem he explores his own mixed feelings and
admits the way that churches and what they represent are something that he cannot so
quickly shrug away as being unimportant to him.

Note how
this irony is created. The first and second stanza present the church as nothing
special: just another church with its "matting, seats and stone" and "sprawling
flowers." Being alone in the church, the speaker feels free to say "Here endeth" as a
kind of joke, and we are told that "The echoes snigger briefly," perhaps indicating the
attitude of the speaker towards religion and
churches.

However, in spite of his cynicism, the rest of
the poem explores the speaker's rather complicated thoughts about church and its role in
life. Even though he reflects that the church was not really worth stopping for, the
next stanza begins with the statement "Yet stop I did," as he discusses the kind of
magnetic attraction he feels that draws him to visit such churches. Even though he
doesn't belive in the tenets of Christianity, he is forced to concede that churches fill
some kind of whole or vacuum in our lives, as the last stanza makes
clear:

A serious house on serious earth
it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized,
and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since
someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more
serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once
heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie
round.

Note how the speaker recognises
that churches will never be "obsolete" because they satisfy the "hunger" within
ourselves to be "more serious." Also spot the ironic closing line. Churches are good
places to grow "wise in," if only for the fact that they are surrounded by graves. Thus
the central irony of this excellent poem deals with the mixed feelings and emotions the
speaker has regarding churches and religion in general.