philip larkin analysis
Analysis- SELFS THE MAN
From the offset, we get the sense of a sarcastic, cynical and flippant character. “Oh, no one can deny / That Arnold is less selfish than I”. The colloquial “oh” gives a sense of how he brushes it off, and he seems to be boastful of his selfishness. Into the next few lines, he presents a stereotypical image of marriage as entrapment, “married a woman to stop her getting away” and the ironic aside, ‘Now she’s there all day” as though his “less selfish” friend didn’t know what he was letting himself into. Notice how he refers to her as a mere “woman” – not a lover, and there seems to be, at least from the persona’s perspective, no love in the relationship.
His negative view of women continues into the second stanza. “Perk”, another example of colloquial lexis, is a work bonus. That the woman takes “the money he gets” seems to present her as selfish, and almost like a prostitute, being paid for sex, and the uses direct speech “It’s Put a screw in this wall” mocks the women’s stereotypical words and undermines them, the imperative making her seem interfering and controlling. Direct speech is used again for the mother’s words: “Saying Won’t you come for the summer.” Again, mocking and scornful, this utterance holds pseudo-snobbishness.
After considering all the dislikeable things that Arnold has to do (a list in the third stanza of things connected with the conjunction “and…and…” creating a moaning, immature attitude), the persona concludes where he started, “Oh, no one can deny / That Arnold is less selfish than I”. As with ‘Mr Bleaney’, a colloquial register is adopted, such as “kiddies’ clobber” referring to toys, “perk”, and “nippers”. It shows the lack of respect the persona has towards anything regarding the family.
But moving into the sixth stanza, there is something of a volta, signalled by the contracting conjunction “but”: “But wait, not so fast: / Is there such a contrast?” The poet claims that Arnold, too, was just “out for his own ends” and “if it was such a mistake / He still did it for his own sake / Playing his own game.”
He concludes that “he and I are the same” and both are selfish, but he is better “At knowing what I can stand / Without them sending a van”. The “van” is a mental institute’s mode of transportation, suggesting that Arnold is going mad in his situation.
This negative view of marriage could be argued to represents Larkin’s own negative view of marriage. However, all the impressions are just filtered through the persona’s eyes, much like ‘Mr Bleaney’. It could be that Arnold has a happy marriage, most of the time, for every complaint is stereotypical and unimaginative. Even if does Arnold constantly moan in the pub about his marriage, the persona has a simplistic, unsympathetic view, while the childlike rhyming couplets (which often stretch the rhyme scheme, “dryer” and “fire”, for example), augment the dislikeable, immature character. Larkin, a master of sounds, deliberately makes the poem jarring to read, and it seems that he presents the persona as a satirical character, one we can laugh at, until his the last line.
In the final line, there is the first hint of insecurity and vulnerability in the persona, “Or I suppose I can,” much like the “I don’t know” that deflates ‘Mr Bleaney’. The persona perhaps becomes aware of his own inadequacy, admits that his previous attitude was just a cocky façade to make him feel better about the emptiness in his own unmarried life. He is, perhaps, unsure that he can stand this – that while marriage can drive you to insanity, so, too, can loneliness. It’s a chilling ending
Analysis- HERE
‘Here’ is perhaps one of the most challenging poems in Larkin’s collection, so naturally they put it first to scare us all off. The main idea the poem presents is the idea of defining just where “here” is. The word has immediacy, and brings the reader into a specific moment, but as we see in the train journey, the “here” of the poem changes…
The lexis and the syntax give a sense of motion from the opening of the poem. Larkin begins with the trochaic word “swerving”, giving a sense of driving forward, though it is an unstable motion. The train journey begins from this point, and is swerving away from the centre, similar, in a sense to falcon’s “widening gyre” in W.B. Yeat’s ‘The Second Coming’ from the AS Anthology. If the train journey is a symbol for life, it has the same sense that life is almost out of control as it “swerves” along its track.
The syntax also gives a sense of the motion. Its lack of end-stops or caesuras (one reason it is so difficult to get into) allows it to flow from one line to the next, with enjambment connecting the stanzas – a single, unstopping moment.
From the harsh environs around the train line, “too thin and thistled to be called meadows” (the t/th alliteration augments the harshness), the train travels further from civilisation, from the “workmen at dawns”, until all that remains of other humans are “scarecrows”. Nature, beautifully described, takes over, with “plied gold clouds” and even “gull-marked mud” that might normally be a negative thing are “shiny”.
The sensuous description all “Gathers” into the next stanza, but then is abruptly ended, by “the surprise of a large town” and the end-stopping colon. We have reached the first destination in the poet’s search for “here”: “Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster”. This image of the city landscape is like Worthsworth’s Romantic ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’ where “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie”. Yet, Larkin makes the point that the distant first impression is Romantic, not a reality: when he looks closer, he sees “residents from raw estates” on “dead straight miles” and their “cheap” commercial “desires”. They are a “cut-price crowd” and only come “here” for “salesmen and relations”.
Leaving Hull behind, Larkin continues the journey into the countryside on foot (as the train reaches its "terminate") where “loneliness clarifies” the “remote lives”. In this final stanza, there is a build up with the short sentences, of excitement, as though the “loneliness” and “silence” in the “here” of this place are what Larkin has been searching for.
Yet, just as the excitement builds and he almost reaches his “here”, “Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach” – halting his journey. If life’s journey comes to its end, what comes after is death, and the land ending suddenly is a symbol for the barrier between life and death. That “here” constantly changes reflects upon the transient nature of life, how the only truly constant “here” is in death. Despite being “untalkative”, Larkin perceives death as “unfenced existence / Facing the sun”, and there is a sense of disappointment and desperation in his final words, “out of reach”.
Analysis- NOTHING TO BE SAID
This poem, like many of Larkin’s poems, is about death. In the first stanza, we are presented with an mixture of images, from “nations vague as weeds” – those tiny, isolate communities – to “nomads”, wanderers without fixed homes, to an image of Hull, with “cobble-close families / In mill-towns on dark mornings”. Despite all the differences in their ways of life, life, for all of them “is slow dying”. Life is a slow death.
Similarly, their “separate ways” all “advance / On death equally slowly”. It doesn’t matter about what “building” is done in life, for like “nomads” they come to death eventually. All their “benediction” similarly, their kindness, blessings and religion won’t slow death’s constant progression. “Love and money” are juxtaposed in “measuring”, bringing both to a commercial, materialistic level. Everything they do are just “Ways of slow dying”.
In “hunting pig” and “holding a garden-party”, Larkin refers to the upper class of his society, and there are more examples in the final stanza, “hours giving evidence” referring to the law profession, while “or birth” refers to a medical occupation. Like everything else, it doesn’t matter where you are in society, you “advance / On death equally slowly”.
Yet, though the things in life cause us to “advance / On death”, irony lies in their inescapability: they are a distraction from the haunting death, and without them, we might as well die upon “birth”.
The conclusion of the poem shows the differing attitudes. For some, the idea of life being a slow death “means nothing”, that they don’t think about it and that it has little consequence, or are perhaps too scared to think. For “others it leaves / Nothing to be said”. There’s no way to escape it, and its traumatic nature robs any words they might have.
Analysis- LOVE SONGS IN THE AGE
This, perhaps my favourite Larkin poem, is based loosely on his mother. It begins, unlike a lot of Larkin’s poems, with a third person pronoun, “She.” Without a name, however, the poem becomes more universal, speaking about women in general, or even humans in general…
The first stanza describes the finding of the songs. That “they took so little space” gives an impression of a tidy person, only keeping them as they’re out of the way – an insignificance – and this characterising occurs later too, in “One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,” as though tidying is out of her control. (Larkin’s mother was a very tidy person).
The listing in the first stanza gives a sense of the songs' sentiment, how picking each one out brings a whole memory with it.
“She found them, looking for something else” shows the discovery is accidental, or serendipity (a happy chance) and as the poem moves into the second stanza and she begins “Relearning”, the poem takes on a melodious tone, “word after sprawling hyphenated word” to mirror this. It is really quite effective, and shows Larkin’s mastery of words… (in my opinion).
“The unfailing sense of being young / Spread out like a spring-woken trees” connects youth to the idea of Spring, as we see in a number of other poems like ‘First Sight’. The poem is made more potent by the woman’s age, that only in “widowhood” does she find them, and the nostalgia sweeps over her. When we are young, we have “That certainty of time laid up in store”, the belief that we have so much time to do everything in life, we could want… it’s only as we age, that we realise time is limited…
Moving into the third stanza, the concept of “much-mentioned”, almost clichéd, love is presented in its “brilliance”: love lifts us up “its bright incipience sailing above”; it is “still promising to solve, to satisfy”; and brings order to chaos “set unchangeably in order”. However, in a moment of tearful recognition, “to cry,” the character reflects on how love has not fulfilled those bright promises, leaving the last sad note: “It had not done so then, and could not now.”
The poem shows how attitudes change over time, and how love, promising so much, fails to deliver.
Moving into the third stanza, the concept of “much-mentioned”, almost clichéd, love is presented in its “brilliance”: love lifts us up “its bright incipience sailing above”; it is “still promising to solve, to satisfy”; and brings order to chaos “set unchangeably in order”. However, in a moment of tearful recognition, “to cry,” the character reflects on how love has not fulfilled those bright promises, leaving the last sad note: “It had not done so then, and could not now.”
The poem shows how attitudes change over time, and how love, promising so much, fails to deliver.
Analysis- TAKE ONE HOME FOR THE KIDDIES
Though this is only a short poem, it displays all Larkin’s usual characteristics. It’s largely a narrative poem, based on a walk past a pet shop, and has the usual dialogue features. The simple abab rhyme scheme of the two stanzas suggests the simplistic was of looking at life that is expressed within the poem, similar in some ways to ‘Self’s the Man’.
In the first stanza, Larkin paints a picture of these animals’ lives. “Shallow” gives a sense of their meaningless existence, “shadeless glass” conveys an image of them behind glass in the sun’s harsh glare, “empty bowls” suggests that they are being starved, and then in the next line, the constant repetition of “no” enforces the deprivation, with “no dam” means “no mother”. The poem doesn’t describe a specific animal, however, making it more universal.
The final line of the stanza is the first piece of dialogue, the children’s words with the colloquial “Mam”. The child’s utterance shows an innocence that only comes in childhood, demanding one “to keep”. He or she doesn’t appreciate that the animal will eventually die, believing in “always”. The comical utterance is a sharp contrast to the dark image of suffering painted in the previous lines.
The animals are diminished to “living toys”, and in that “it soon wears off somehow”, it shows how fickle children are. The ending is very matter of fact, through the use of the imperative: “Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel” – and then the simple matter-of-fact, unfeeling speech: “Mam, we’re playing funerals now”.
The death of the pet, an almost universal occurrence in children’s lives, teaches them about death and the transience of life, an integral part of growing up. In its epigrammatic style (short, punchy), it is satirical – we don’t understand the rehearsal for life that we give children when we indulge them in pets.
Analysis- DAYS
This poem opens with a simple interrogative, "what are days for?" the type of abstract question that only a heuristic child can ask. The next few lines are the type of answer a parent might give, a simple solution to what appears a simple question. “Days are where we live,” and the next lines almost personify the concept of ‘days’ to make them easier to relate to, “They come, they wake us.”
In the simple phrase, “Time and time over” is conveyed their eternalness, and by contrast, the transient nature of humans. Only by grouping humans as “us” can we compare in continuity to “days”, and the poem hints towards the darker, deeper message. Further, “They are to be happy in” is simple on the surface, but raises a question of “but”… and “what if we aren’t happy”. The simplistic answer begins to crumble once we begin to examine it, and the persona realises this as he begins to question himself: “Where can we live but days?”
Moving into the second stanza, the poem presents the surreal image of the “priest and the doctor / In their long coats / Running over the fields” as an attempt to “solve” what has become a puzzle, though in the use of “solving” in the first line, the poem suggests there isn’t a solution. The idea of the priest “and” doctor present two different attitudes towards the alternative to days, which we now realise, is death. The priest hurries to perform the last rites, to speed the person to a better dayless existence, while the doctor moves to try to help a person remain in “days”. Both consider themselves as saving, yet from the “long coat”, a vaguely threatening image (see ‘Toads Revisited’), suggests the persona receives no comfort from either.
Overall, the poem presents no solution to the question of days. Simplistic, apparent answers crumble when examined closely, while other solutions are surreal and threatening. “Days” we can say, however, are the containers for our lives – much like the idea of rooms in other poems like ‘Mr Bleaney’ – and without them, we have death.
Analysis- TALKING IN BED
This poem links to ‘An Arundel Tomb’. Though it can be interpreted in biographic terms, the idea of two people ‘talking in bed’ is universal.
As with a number of Larkin’s poems it begins with something that should be an assertion, about talking in beds being easy, though it is immediately weakened by the modal “should”, implying that it isn’t at all. The next line begins with “Lying”. Larkin often punned on this word, as we’ve seen in ‘An Arundel Tomb’, suggesting untruth as well as the mere supine. There’s a nice ambiguity in the next few lines too; “goes back so far” reminds us of both lying on the back, and the history of the “emblem”.
When we’re most intimate, Larkin says, “talking in bed” should be an “emblem of being honest,” and here again, we have a similar idea to ‘An Arundel Tomb’, though in that poem, we had “blazon” rather than “emblem”.
Within the next stanza, the “yet” signifies the reality of the “emblem”. “More and more time passes silently” could be the literal silent passage of time, or that it grows harder and harder to “talk in bed.” There is irony in the title, for despite the “talking” the poem features no dialogue that we see in other Larkin poems, and is more a poem of silence.
The description of the weather outside perhaps reminds us of awkward small talk – how people will use the weather when they are struggling to find words to say. There is something ominous in the description, with the wind’s “incomplete unrest” and the “dark towns heap up on the horizon.” In how the clouds “build and disperse”, there is perhaps a reflection of those inside the room: perhaps their courage is building to suggest a break up or such a serious conversation, but then it disperses like the clouds. “On the horizon” perhaps suggests the future is “dark” for the “two people” – who aren’t even a couple, which would suggest togetherness.
The poem continues, building up a sense of isolation through “None of this cares for us” and “this unique distance from isolation”. Despite being physically together, the two people are separated in their silence.
The silence, Larkin explains in the final stanza, is through two causes:
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
There is almost a rhyming triplet in this final stanza, yet it doesn’t quite word with the repletion, augmenting the hesitancy and uncertainty of the poem. “Not untrue” and “not unkind”, despite the negations (which this poem is filled with), don’t mean the same as “true” and “kind”. It’s much like how “not bad” isn’t the same as “good”; rather, it is closer to “bad” than “good”. Not only is it difficult to be kind and true as time passes, it’s also difficult to be neutral towards each other.
Analysis- AMBULANCES
‘Ambulances’ are another type of container for our lives, like the room in ‘Mr Bleaney’ and ‘Days’. The first image, “closed like confessionals,” conveys this, and the small “closed” spaces compared both seem threatening. The next phrase shows Larkin’s linguistic inventiveness: “they thread / Loud noons” uses the great verb “thread” for weaving through the traffic and pre-modifying “noons” with the usual “loud” evokes the general noise and bustle of life around them.
The ambulances give “back / None of the glances they absorb” refers to how everyone always turns to look at an ambulance, as it drives past, but with its darkened glass, it returns none of the looks it receives. There’s something threatening about the one-sided nature of it, and isolating.
The final two lines of the stanza are also chilling, and yet are true: an ambulance can “rest at any street” (the word “rest” reminds us of “requiescat in pace” of a tombstone, as well as their ominous, silent approach) and “All streets in time are visited”. Death eventually strikes everywhere in the world.
As we move into the second stanza, there in a sharp contrast. From the previous ominous mood, we are greeted with “children”, “women”, “smells of different dinners” (typical of Larkin’s day, when meals were home cooked) and a general image of life.
“Then”, in the midst of this life, the ambulance’s “wild white face” appears, and the “it” is “stowed”, both the genderless pronoun and the verb suggesting something inanimate. Even if the human isn’t dead when they are carried into the ambulance, it suggests that they won’t last long.
Larkin uses an idea found in a number of poems like ‘Love Songs in Age’ at the opening of the next stanza: “And the sense of solving emptiness.” It’s as though life is somehow a puzzle with a solution, as though death is the solution. Or, perhaps, it is live ‘dissolving’, that the life is being eroded.
Another familiar Larkin characteristic is the use of direct speech: “Poor soul, / They whisper at their own distress.” This line, again, is so true. It’s quite astounding how well Larkin can express the ideas that surround death. (Sorry, I can’t help but get subjective…)
“For borne away in deadened air” can be interpreted as punning on “borne”, as in “born”, and thus juxtaposing the ideas of life and death. It reminds us, perhaps, of the transience of human life: how from the moment we are born, we are moving closer and closer to death.
Yet in this, Larkin is quite mournful of what is being lost. “Across / The years, the unique random blend” is a celebratory description of a person, how we’re all unique, formed from our experiences of our “families and fashions”. Despite this, it “At last begins to loosen.” As we age, we start to decline, though not everything goes at once: first the eyes, perhaps, then the ears, our strength… Until in the end, we are “unreachable”.
The largest piece of evidence that the “out of reach” of ‘Here’ is actually death is the “unreachable” of this poem. It reminds us of ‘Here’ and connects the persona’s desperate longing to the death of ‘Ambulances’. The absolute solitude can only be found in death.
The final two lines perhaps shift our interpretation a little. “Brings closer what is left to come” means that seeing the ambulances reminds us of the approaching death, “And dulls to distance all we are.” Death shadows us, and this somehow “dulls” our lives. Larkin, celebrating life as seen in the “unique, random blend”, regrets the hold death has over us. How much better would life be without the perpetual fear always shadowing us?
Analysis- DOCKERY AND SON
This poem is one of the most melancholic of Larkin’s collection, and like many, it starts with a specific, real instance before moving to a more general contemplation. Larkin, here, is a “visitant” to the “Dean”, returning to Oxford University.
From the offset, there is a sombre mood evoked through “death-suited”. It suggests that Larkin feels, himself, death just around the corner, shrouding him; or perhaps it is that Dockery has died, and that’s why Larkin has made the journey to his old university, that the “death-suit” is literally a suit for the dead.
Returning to Oxford, there is a sense of alienation and isolation. In the direct speech from the Dean, we hear that Dockery’s “son’s here now”, following the common tradition of Oxbridge alumni’s child to follow in their parents’ footsteps. It cuts the persona off immediately, who has ‘outgrown’ this place. He loses himself in the memories of how “half-tight” he’d once give his “‘version’ of ‘these events last night’”. Of course, the Dean’s words contrast now, in “do / You keep in touch with”.
The enjambment, leading to stress on the word “locked” also evokes the sense of alienation – Larkin can no longer enter a place that was once “home”. Almost like ‘Home is So Sad’, though now there is a physical barrier. Larkin leaves, catching the train “ignored”.
The ideas that have come from the meeting with the Dean are not so easy to leave behind. Larkin reflects upon Dockery, how he was “that withdrawn / High-collared public-schoolboy” – not someone to have sex, to produce a son. And not so young as “nineteen”. Again, there is a reference to death, the transience of life, in Cartwright, his roommate, “who was killed.” The persona seems to be greatly conflicted by the ideas that greet him, and he trails off into sleep, “how much… how little…” with the matter unresolved.
On the platform, Larkin sees that “the ranged / Joining and parting lines reflect a strong / Unhindered moon” before him – a visual metaphor for the different strains of existence that we can travel down. Dockery has one line, Larkin another, but for that brief moment in Oxford, their lines “joined”.
A perfect summary of Larkin’s life to this point comes at the beginning of the fourth stanza: To have no son, no wife, No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Of all the poems, this one seems to contain the greatest self-recognition, the closest the persona can be to Larkin, the poet. “Only a numbness registered the shock / Of finding how much had gone of life.” As time passes, has his life, so far, been a waste? When he holds up Dockery and his son in contrast, what does he have to show for his life?
But again, as he draws these contrasts, comes to the conclusion that Dockery, at only “nineteen” had “taken stock / Of what he wanted”, there is further doubt. “No, that’s not the difference” between them. Larkin believes that Dockery merely followed the “innate assumption” that he should marry and have children.
For Larkin, the idea of being “added to” – having a “wife”, a “son” – meant dilution. Larkin believed the expression: “the greatest enemy of art is the pram in the hall.” He believed, to be married and have children would stifle his creativity, take him away from the art that he centred himself around, divide him. This was one of the reasons why, despite his long relationships, he never married.
He questions these “innate assumptions” that family is good. He doesn’t believe they come from “what / We think truest, or most want to do”. Because of the “innate assumptions”, our true desires “warp tight-shut, like doors” – like the door in Oxford.
But it’s these “innate assumptions” that “Suddenly harden into all we’re got”. For Larkin, looking back, he sees that he has “nothing” – stressed by the repetition of the word. Yet even for Dockery, with his son, the assumptions are threatening, as they “rear / Like sand-clouds, thick and close” – suffocating.
Like in ‘Self’s the Man’, there is a question of who, ultimately, is better off. Here, Larkin reflects, there is no answer to that, because “whether we use it or not, it goes”. Regardless of how we use our lives, we are all headed for the same point: “age, and then the only end of age” – death.
Analysis- WILD OATS
This poem is based upon the only woman Larkin came close to marriage with: his first girlfriend Ruth Bowman. She had a friend called Jane, who is the model for the “bosomy English rose”, while sixteen-year-old Ruth was “her friend in specs I could talk to”.
The idea of “specs” reminds us of ‘A Study of Reading Habits’, a self-deprecating poem, and in its way, this isn’t dissimilar. The title ‘Wild Oats’ comes from a common euphemism for sex: an encouragement for boys to go out and ‘saw some wild oats’ – sleep with lots of women before getting serious. During the 1950s, there was still a real dichotomy between males and females: men were encouraged to ‘get out there’, while women were advised to remain chaste.
Considering ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ and Larkin, though, this seems a somewhat ironic title: no matter the adolescent fantasies of the persona in ‘A Study’, Larkin doesn’t seem the type to have cast many. Immediately in this poem, the persona is intimidated by the “rose” and “it was the friend I took out”. In the second stanza, he believes he “met beautiful twice” and he is convinced that both times “she was trying” “not to laugh”. It shows again the low self-confidence, unlike the “wild oats”.
The relationship went on for “seven years” and even as far as engagement, “Gave a ten-guinea ring,” but in the end it didn’t last. The persona’s colloquial attitude to the giving is rather dismissive anyway, and the whole poem is tongue-in-cheek. In real life, Larkin was quite cruel to Ruth, and the conclusion is probably what she said of Larkin, “That I was too selfish, withdrawn, / And easily bored to love.” Again, the persona is dismissive and tongue-in-cheek in response to this: “Well, useful to get that learned.”
Though this is a reflection on the past of “about twenty years ago”, the persona still has “two snaps / Of bosomy rose with fur gloves on”. The persona comes to the trivial conclusion, in that he is still single, that they are “unlucky charms”. Yet, as with many of Larkin’s poems, the last word discredits this light-hearted conclusion: “perhaps.” Perhaps those “snaps” are “unlucky charms”, but perhaps there is a much darker, more serious reason for the ‘Mr Bleaney’-like existence.
Analysis- AFTERNOONS
Like ‘First Sight’, this poem connects the idea of seasons with the passage of time. “Summer is fading” immediately evokes a sense of loss in the emotive verb “fading”. Even the day is in its decline in the “afternoon” and the plural on the title gives a sense that the scene painted in the poem applies to many days, and to life in general.
The poem focuses on “young mothers”. Though these women are in fairly well off positions, with “husbands in skilled trades”, higher than the old middle-class women in ‘Faith Healing’, their lives are like the “hollows of afternoons”: there is a sense of the emptiness in domestic life, in which they now nothing but “an estateful of washing”. That they are “Setting free their children” gives a sense of their own entrapment, and desire to break away.
The seasons mark how time changes their lives. “The wind / Is ruining their courting places” now, as autumn and winter approach, and the juxtoposition of “And the albums lettered, / Our Wedding, lying / Near the television”, shows that their marriages and love have now, somehow, been pushed aside and reduced, casually placed beside the “jabbering set” (‘Mr Bleaney’) to never be viewed.
Despite still being “young”, their lives have been superseded, for those places are “still courting places / (But the lovers are all in school)”. Now they have entered into the snare of domesticity, children have replaced their place. Instead, their “children, so intent on / Finding unripe acorns” (a hint that though they are young now, they will eventually grow into the same cycle) “expect to be taken home”. The verb “expect” commands the women; their children and the thousand other domestic necessities trap them. “Their beauty has thickened” is a wonderful metaphor for captures the signs of age, the beauty of youth filling out…
The final two lines sum up the rest of the sad, sympathetic poem: “Something is pushing them / To the side of their own lives”. They have now become spectators in life (shown in their “assemble” to watch the children in the first stanza), and are powerless to prevent the unknown and threatening “something”, domesticity.
ANALYSIS- ARUNDEL TOMB
There are different ways of interpreting this poem, particularly the final line. Larkin’s poem is based upon a real tomb, Arundel being a place in Sussex. He was an atheist, and terrified of death. The poem falls into a movement that Larkin drove called “the Movement,” which was a response to the highly introverted Modernism poems – mostly iambic tetrameter and uses enjambment throughout.
The first stanza of the poem describes the tomb, although it is full of a deeper message. “Side by side, their faces blurred” gives the impression that their identities have been lost through time and erosion, as does the choice of “vaguely.” There is something ambiguous in the lexical choices, however: although “lie” can be taken that they’re literally lying down, it could also mean that the “truth” of them has also been lost through time, and in “their proper habits vaguely shown,” “habits” could refer to their mannerisms, not only their clothes, have been distorted.
Referring to “such plainness of the pre-baroque” (before the irregularity of architecture seen in the Gothic style) could be a criticism of modern art – perhaps the time before was better. Another example of this is the reference to the “Latin names” – a dead language nowadays – and that soon in “Their early supine stationary voyage,” the “succeeding eyes begin / To look not read” the Latin. There is a sense of loss about this fact, a criticism of the modern world. “The old tenantry” – the old way of life – soon “turn” “away.” until It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still Clasped empty in the other;
The complex syntax of these few lines means that his left gauntlet is held in his right hand and that the left hand is “holding her hand.” “Sharp tender shock” is an oxymoron – but then, Larkin was a man of contradictions.
The next stanza has the same ambiguity on the word, “lie,” and the two lines perhaps mean that the “faithfulness of effigy” (being unable to move away from each other; eternally holding each others’ hands) isn’t something that they’d intended. The oxymoron, “sweet commissioned” draws out how the effigy was only made because it was the sculptor’s job, “sweet” becomes almost sarcastic.
“Rigidly” is another pun on death and moving into the next stanza, there are various images of the passing time:
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass.
In “The endless altered people came,” referring to tourists, there is a pun on “altered,” which means changed people, but could also refer to the altar – loss of religion. This “endless” wave of people are criticised, that they “look, not read” similar in some ways to the “tourists’ feet / Who in the good weather come” of ‘Abbey Tomb.’ These people are “washing away at their identity” – their lack of understanding is hastening the air’s “soundless damage” of the tomb (erosion).
Larkin refers to the current world as an “unarmorial age,” (without the coat of arms), negative image, “hollow” and “a trough / Of smoke in slow suspended skeins.” The sibilance of that line augments the negative image, and the “smoke” is a reference to Industrial Britain. (“skeins” means “tangles,” great imagery for the collection of smoke in the sky). It really is an image of deterioration.
In the final stanza, “Time has transfigured them into / Untruth.” Something that “hardly meant” anything when it was first sculptured “has come to be / Their final blazon.” It proves, Larkin says, “our almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is love.”
Is that an optimistic end? In my opinion, not at all. Larkin doesn’t really mean the last line, saying it’s only “almost true” and that it’s an “almost-instinct” anyway. For love to “survive of us” is something that humans desire to be true, but in truth, the two figures never meant the “blazon” of love. The modern world merely projects that “almost-instinct” on them. Because of the deterioration, we cannot understand what it was like to be those people.
Nothing to Be Said
For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.
So are their separate ways
Of building, benediction,
Measuring love and money
Ways of slowly dying.
The day spent hunting pig
Or holding a garden-party,
Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly.
And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said.
Love Songs In Age
She kept her songs, they took so little space,
The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,
And coloured, by her daughter -
So they had waited, till in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood
Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
That hidden freshness, sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,
The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.
Take One Home for the Kiddies
On shallow straw, in shadeless glass,
Huddled by empty bowls, they sleep:
No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass -
Mam, get us one of them to keep.
Living toys are something novel,
But it soon wears off somehow.
Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel -
Mam, we're playing funerals now.
Days
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
Talking In Bed
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
Ambulances
Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.
Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,
And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;
For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there
At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable inside a room
The traffic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.
Dockery and Son
'Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn't he?' said the Dean. 'His son's here now.'
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. 'And do
You keep in touch with-' Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
'Our version' of 'these incidents last night'?
I try the door of where I used to live:
Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In '43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn
High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
How much . . . How little . . . Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end to see the ranged
Joining and parting lines reflect a strong
Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of . . . No, that's not the difference: rather, how
Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They're more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we've got
And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son's harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
Wild Oats
About twenty years ago
Two girls came in where I worked -
A bosomy English rose
And her friend in specs I could talk to.
Faces in those days sparked
The whole shooting-match off, and I doubt
If ever one had like hers:
But it was the friend I took out,
And in seven years after that
Wrote over four hundred letters,
Gave a ten-guinea ring
I got back in the end, and met
At numerous cathedral cities
Unknown to the clergy. I believe
I met beautiful twice. She was trying
Both times (so I thought) not to laugh.
Parting, after about five
Rehearsals, was an agreement
That I was too selfish, withdrawn
And easily bored to love.
Well, useful to get that learnt,
In my wallet are still two snaps,
Of bosomy rose with fur gloves on.
Unlucky charms, perhaps.
Afternoons
Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.
Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places
That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.
An Arundel Tomb
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly, they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
Self's the Man
Oh, no one can deny
That Arnold is less selfish than I.
He married a woman to stop her getting away
Now she's there all day,
And the money he gets for wasting his life on work
She takes as her perk
To pay for the kiddies' clobber and the drier
And the electric fire,
And when he finishes supper
Planning to have a read at the evening paper
It's Put a screw in this wall -
He has no time at all,
With the nippers to wheel round the houses
And the hall to paint in his old trousers
And that letter to her mother
Saying Won't you come for the summer.
To compare his life and mine
Makes me feel a swine:
Oh, no one can deny
That Arnold is less selfish than I.
But wait, not do fast:
Is there such a contrast?
He was out for his own ends
Not just pleasing his friends;
And if it was such a mistake,
He still did it for his own sake,
Playing his own game.
So he and I are the same,
Only I'm a better hand
At knowing what I can stand!
HERE
Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river s slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,
Gathers to the surprise of a large town:
Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires—
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers—
A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages, where removed lives
Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
From the offset, we get the sense of a sarcastic, cynical and flippant character. “Oh, no one can deny / That Arnold is less selfish than I”. The colloquial “oh” gives a sense of how he brushes it off, and he seems to be boastful of his selfishness. Into the next few lines, he presents a stereotypical image of marriage as entrapment, “married a woman to stop her getting away” and the ironic aside, ‘Now she’s there all day” as though his “less selfish” friend didn’t know what he was letting himself into. Notice how he refers to her as a mere “woman” – not a lover, and there seems to be, at least from the persona’s perspective, no love in the relationship.
His negative view of women continues into the second stanza. “Perk”, another example of colloquial lexis, is a work bonus. That the woman takes “the money he gets” seems to present her as selfish, and almost like a prostitute, being paid for sex, and the uses direct speech “It’s Put a screw in this wall” mocks the women’s stereotypical words and undermines them, the imperative making her seem interfering and controlling. Direct speech is used again for the mother’s words: “Saying Won’t you come for the summer.” Again, mocking and scornful, this utterance holds pseudo-snobbishness.
After considering all the dislikeable things that Arnold has to do (a list in the third stanza of things connected with the conjunction “and…and…” creating a moaning, immature attitude), the persona concludes where he started, “Oh, no one can deny / That Arnold is less selfish than I”. As with ‘Mr Bleaney’, a colloquial register is adopted, such as “kiddies’ clobber” referring to toys, “perk”, and “nippers”. It shows the lack of respect the persona has towards anything regarding the family.
But moving into the sixth stanza, there is something of a volta, signalled by the contracting conjunction “but”: “But wait, not so fast: / Is there such a contrast?” The poet claims that Arnold, too, was just “out for his own ends” and “if it was such a mistake / He still did it for his own sake / Playing his own game.”
He concludes that “he and I are the same” and both are selfish, but he is better “At knowing what I can stand / Without them sending a van”. The “van” is a mental institute’s mode of transportation, suggesting that Arnold is going mad in his situation.
This negative view of marriage could be argued to represents Larkin’s own negative view of marriage. However, all the impressions are just filtered through the persona’s eyes, much like ‘Mr Bleaney’. It could be that Arnold has a happy marriage, most of the time, for every complaint is stereotypical and unimaginative. Even if does Arnold constantly moan in the pub about his marriage, the persona has a simplistic, unsympathetic view, while the childlike rhyming couplets (which often stretch the rhyme scheme, “dryer” and “fire”, for example), augment the dislikeable, immature character. Larkin, a master of sounds, deliberately makes the poem jarring to read, and it seems that he presents the persona as a satirical character, one we can laugh at, until his the last line.
In the final line, there is the first hint of insecurity and vulnerability in the persona, “Or I suppose I can,” much like the “I don’t know” that deflates ‘Mr Bleaney’. The persona perhaps becomes aware of his own inadequacy, admits that his previous attitude was just a cocky façade to make him feel better about the emptiness in his own unmarried life. He is, perhaps, unsure that he can stand this – that while marriage can drive you to insanity, so, too, can loneliness. It’s a chilling ending
Analysis- HERE
‘Here’ is perhaps one of the most challenging poems in Larkin’s collection, so naturally they put it first to scare us all off. The main idea the poem presents is the idea of defining just where “here” is. The word has immediacy, and brings the reader into a specific moment, but as we see in the train journey, the “here” of the poem changes…
The lexis and the syntax give a sense of motion from the opening of the poem. Larkin begins with the trochaic word “swerving”, giving a sense of driving forward, though it is an unstable motion. The train journey begins from this point, and is swerving away from the centre, similar, in a sense to falcon’s “widening gyre” in W.B. Yeat’s ‘The Second Coming’ from the AS Anthology. If the train journey is a symbol for life, it has the same sense that life is almost out of control as it “swerves” along its track.
The syntax also gives a sense of the motion. Its lack of end-stops or caesuras (one reason it is so difficult to get into) allows it to flow from one line to the next, with enjambment connecting the stanzas – a single, unstopping moment.
From the harsh environs around the train line, “too thin and thistled to be called meadows” (the t/th alliteration augments the harshness), the train travels further from civilisation, from the “workmen at dawns”, until all that remains of other humans are “scarecrows”. Nature, beautifully described, takes over, with “plied gold clouds” and even “gull-marked mud” that might normally be a negative thing are “shiny”.
The sensuous description all “Gathers” into the next stanza, but then is abruptly ended, by “the surprise of a large town” and the end-stopping colon. We have reached the first destination in the poet’s search for “here”: “Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster”. This image of the city landscape is like Worthsworth’s Romantic ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’ where “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie”. Yet, Larkin makes the point that the distant first impression is Romantic, not a reality: when he looks closer, he sees “residents from raw estates” on “dead straight miles” and their “cheap” commercial “desires”. They are a “cut-price crowd” and only come “here” for “salesmen and relations”.
Leaving Hull behind, Larkin continues the journey into the countryside on foot (as the train reaches its "terminate") where “loneliness clarifies” the “remote lives”. In this final stanza, there is a build up with the short sentences, of excitement, as though the “loneliness” and “silence” in the “here” of this place are what Larkin has been searching for.
Yet, just as the excitement builds and he almost reaches his “here”, “Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach” – halting his journey. If life’s journey comes to its end, what comes after is death, and the land ending suddenly is a symbol for the barrier between life and death. That “here” constantly changes reflects upon the transient nature of life, how the only truly constant “here” is in death. Despite being “untalkative”, Larkin perceives death as “unfenced existence / Facing the sun”, and there is a sense of disappointment and desperation in his final words, “out of reach”.
Analysis- NOTHING TO BE SAID
This poem, like many of Larkin’s poems, is about death. In the first stanza, we are presented with an mixture of images, from “nations vague as weeds” – those tiny, isolate communities – to “nomads”, wanderers without fixed homes, to an image of Hull, with “cobble-close families / In mill-towns on dark mornings”. Despite all the differences in their ways of life, life, for all of them “is slow dying”. Life is a slow death.
Similarly, their “separate ways” all “advance / On death equally slowly”. It doesn’t matter about what “building” is done in life, for like “nomads” they come to death eventually. All their “benediction” similarly, their kindness, blessings and religion won’t slow death’s constant progression. “Love and money” are juxtaposed in “measuring”, bringing both to a commercial, materialistic level. Everything they do are just “Ways of slow dying”.
In “hunting pig” and “holding a garden-party”, Larkin refers to the upper class of his society, and there are more examples in the final stanza, “hours giving evidence” referring to the law profession, while “or birth” refers to a medical occupation. Like everything else, it doesn’t matter where you are in society, you “advance / On death equally slowly”.
Yet, though the things in life cause us to “advance / On death”, irony lies in their inescapability: they are a distraction from the haunting death, and without them, we might as well die upon “birth”.
The conclusion of the poem shows the differing attitudes. For some, the idea of life being a slow death “means nothing”, that they don’t think about it and that it has little consequence, or are perhaps too scared to think. For “others it leaves / Nothing to be said”. There’s no way to escape it, and its traumatic nature robs any words they might have.
Analysis- LOVE SONGS IN THE AGE
This, perhaps my favourite Larkin poem, is based loosely on his mother. It begins, unlike a lot of Larkin’s poems, with a third person pronoun, “She.” Without a name, however, the poem becomes more universal, speaking about women in general, or even humans in general…
The first stanza describes the finding of the songs. That “they took so little space” gives an impression of a tidy person, only keeping them as they’re out of the way – an insignificance – and this characterising occurs later too, in “One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,” as though tidying is out of her control. (Larkin’s mother was a very tidy person).
The listing in the first stanza gives a sense of the songs' sentiment, how picking each one out brings a whole memory with it.
“She found them, looking for something else” shows the discovery is accidental, or serendipity (a happy chance) and as the poem moves into the second stanza and she begins “Relearning”, the poem takes on a melodious tone, “word after sprawling hyphenated word” to mirror this. It is really quite effective, and shows Larkin’s mastery of words… (in my opinion).
“The unfailing sense of being young / Spread out like a spring-woken trees” connects youth to the idea of Spring, as we see in a number of other poems like ‘First Sight’. The poem is made more potent by the woman’s age, that only in “widowhood” does she find them, and the nostalgia sweeps over her. When we are young, we have “That certainty of time laid up in store”, the belief that we have so much time to do everything in life, we could want… it’s only as we age, that we realise time is limited…
Moving into the third stanza, the concept of “much-mentioned”, almost clichéd, love is presented in its “brilliance”: love lifts us up “its bright incipience sailing above”; it is “still promising to solve, to satisfy”; and brings order to chaos “set unchangeably in order”. However, in a moment of tearful recognition, “to cry,” the character reflects on how love has not fulfilled those bright promises, leaving the last sad note: “It had not done so then, and could not now.”
The poem shows how attitudes change over time, and how love, promising so much, fails to deliver.
Moving into the third stanza, the concept of “much-mentioned”, almost clichéd, love is presented in its “brilliance”: love lifts us up “its bright incipience sailing above”; it is “still promising to solve, to satisfy”; and brings order to chaos “set unchangeably in order”. However, in a moment of tearful recognition, “to cry,” the character reflects on how love has not fulfilled those bright promises, leaving the last sad note: “It had not done so then, and could not now.”
The poem shows how attitudes change over time, and how love, promising so much, fails to deliver.
Analysis- TAKE ONE HOME FOR THE KIDDIES
Though this is only a short poem, it displays all Larkin’s usual characteristics. It’s largely a narrative poem, based on a walk past a pet shop, and has the usual dialogue features. The simple abab rhyme scheme of the two stanzas suggests the simplistic was of looking at life that is expressed within the poem, similar in some ways to ‘Self’s the Man’.
In the first stanza, Larkin paints a picture of these animals’ lives. “Shallow” gives a sense of their meaningless existence, “shadeless glass” conveys an image of them behind glass in the sun’s harsh glare, “empty bowls” suggests that they are being starved, and then in the next line, the constant repetition of “no” enforces the deprivation, with “no dam” means “no mother”. The poem doesn’t describe a specific animal, however, making it more universal.
The final line of the stanza is the first piece of dialogue, the children’s words with the colloquial “Mam”. The child’s utterance shows an innocence that only comes in childhood, demanding one “to keep”. He or she doesn’t appreciate that the animal will eventually die, believing in “always”. The comical utterance is a sharp contrast to the dark image of suffering painted in the previous lines.
The animals are diminished to “living toys”, and in that “it soon wears off somehow”, it shows how fickle children are. The ending is very matter of fact, through the use of the imperative: “Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel” – and then the simple matter-of-fact, unfeeling speech: “Mam, we’re playing funerals now”.
The death of the pet, an almost universal occurrence in children’s lives, teaches them about death and the transience of life, an integral part of growing up. In its epigrammatic style (short, punchy), it is satirical – we don’t understand the rehearsal for life that we give children when we indulge them in pets.
Analysis- DAYS
This poem opens with a simple interrogative, "what are days for?" the type of abstract question that only a heuristic child can ask. The next few lines are the type of answer a parent might give, a simple solution to what appears a simple question. “Days are where we live,” and the next lines almost personify the concept of ‘days’ to make them easier to relate to, “They come, they wake us.”
In the simple phrase, “Time and time over” is conveyed their eternalness, and by contrast, the transient nature of humans. Only by grouping humans as “us” can we compare in continuity to “days”, and the poem hints towards the darker, deeper message. Further, “They are to be happy in” is simple on the surface, but raises a question of “but”… and “what if we aren’t happy”. The simplistic answer begins to crumble once we begin to examine it, and the persona realises this as he begins to question himself: “Where can we live but days?”
Moving into the second stanza, the poem presents the surreal image of the “priest and the doctor / In their long coats / Running over the fields” as an attempt to “solve” what has become a puzzle, though in the use of “solving” in the first line, the poem suggests there isn’t a solution. The idea of the priest “and” doctor present two different attitudes towards the alternative to days, which we now realise, is death. The priest hurries to perform the last rites, to speed the person to a better dayless existence, while the doctor moves to try to help a person remain in “days”. Both consider themselves as saving, yet from the “long coat”, a vaguely threatening image (see ‘Toads Revisited’), suggests the persona receives no comfort from either.
Overall, the poem presents no solution to the question of days. Simplistic, apparent answers crumble when examined closely, while other solutions are surreal and threatening. “Days” we can say, however, are the containers for our lives – much like the idea of rooms in other poems like ‘Mr Bleaney’ – and without them, we have death.
Analysis- TALKING IN BED
This poem links to ‘An Arundel Tomb’. Though it can be interpreted in biographic terms, the idea of two people ‘talking in bed’ is universal.
As with a number of Larkin’s poems it begins with something that should be an assertion, about talking in beds being easy, though it is immediately weakened by the modal “should”, implying that it isn’t at all. The next line begins with “Lying”. Larkin often punned on this word, as we’ve seen in ‘An Arundel Tomb’, suggesting untruth as well as the mere supine. There’s a nice ambiguity in the next few lines too; “goes back so far” reminds us of both lying on the back, and the history of the “emblem”.
When we’re most intimate, Larkin says, “talking in bed” should be an “emblem of being honest,” and here again, we have a similar idea to ‘An Arundel Tomb’, though in that poem, we had “blazon” rather than “emblem”.
Within the next stanza, the “yet” signifies the reality of the “emblem”. “More and more time passes silently” could be the literal silent passage of time, or that it grows harder and harder to “talk in bed.” There is irony in the title, for despite the “talking” the poem features no dialogue that we see in other Larkin poems, and is more a poem of silence.
The description of the weather outside perhaps reminds us of awkward small talk – how people will use the weather when they are struggling to find words to say. There is something ominous in the description, with the wind’s “incomplete unrest” and the “dark towns heap up on the horizon.” In how the clouds “build and disperse”, there is perhaps a reflection of those inside the room: perhaps their courage is building to suggest a break up or such a serious conversation, but then it disperses like the clouds. “On the horizon” perhaps suggests the future is “dark” for the “two people” – who aren’t even a couple, which would suggest togetherness.
The poem continues, building up a sense of isolation through “None of this cares for us” and “this unique distance from isolation”. Despite being physically together, the two people are separated in their silence.
The silence, Larkin explains in the final stanza, is through two causes:
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
There is almost a rhyming triplet in this final stanza, yet it doesn’t quite word with the repletion, augmenting the hesitancy and uncertainty of the poem. “Not untrue” and “not unkind”, despite the negations (which this poem is filled with), don’t mean the same as “true” and “kind”. It’s much like how “not bad” isn’t the same as “good”; rather, it is closer to “bad” than “good”. Not only is it difficult to be kind and true as time passes, it’s also difficult to be neutral towards each other.
Analysis- AMBULANCES
‘Ambulances’ are another type of container for our lives, like the room in ‘Mr Bleaney’ and ‘Days’. The first image, “closed like confessionals,” conveys this, and the small “closed” spaces compared both seem threatening. The next phrase shows Larkin’s linguistic inventiveness: “they thread / Loud noons” uses the great verb “thread” for weaving through the traffic and pre-modifying “noons” with the usual “loud” evokes the general noise and bustle of life around them.
The ambulances give “back / None of the glances they absorb” refers to how everyone always turns to look at an ambulance, as it drives past, but with its darkened glass, it returns none of the looks it receives. There’s something threatening about the one-sided nature of it, and isolating.
The final two lines of the stanza are also chilling, and yet are true: an ambulance can “rest at any street” (the word “rest” reminds us of “requiescat in pace” of a tombstone, as well as their ominous, silent approach) and “All streets in time are visited”. Death eventually strikes everywhere in the world.
As we move into the second stanza, there in a sharp contrast. From the previous ominous mood, we are greeted with “children”, “women”, “smells of different dinners” (typical of Larkin’s day, when meals were home cooked) and a general image of life.
“Then”, in the midst of this life, the ambulance’s “wild white face” appears, and the “it” is “stowed”, both the genderless pronoun and the verb suggesting something inanimate. Even if the human isn’t dead when they are carried into the ambulance, it suggests that they won’t last long.
Larkin uses an idea found in a number of poems like ‘Love Songs in Age’ at the opening of the next stanza: “And the sense of solving emptiness.” It’s as though life is somehow a puzzle with a solution, as though death is the solution. Or, perhaps, it is live ‘dissolving’, that the life is being eroded.
Another familiar Larkin characteristic is the use of direct speech: “Poor soul, / They whisper at their own distress.” This line, again, is so true. It’s quite astounding how well Larkin can express the ideas that surround death. (Sorry, I can’t help but get subjective…)
“For borne away in deadened air” can be interpreted as punning on “borne”, as in “born”, and thus juxtaposing the ideas of life and death. It reminds us, perhaps, of the transience of human life: how from the moment we are born, we are moving closer and closer to death.
Yet in this, Larkin is quite mournful of what is being lost. “Across / The years, the unique random blend” is a celebratory description of a person, how we’re all unique, formed from our experiences of our “families and fashions”. Despite this, it “At last begins to loosen.” As we age, we start to decline, though not everything goes at once: first the eyes, perhaps, then the ears, our strength… Until in the end, we are “unreachable”.
The largest piece of evidence that the “out of reach” of ‘Here’ is actually death is the “unreachable” of this poem. It reminds us of ‘Here’ and connects the persona’s desperate longing to the death of ‘Ambulances’. The absolute solitude can only be found in death.
The final two lines perhaps shift our interpretation a little. “Brings closer what is left to come” means that seeing the ambulances reminds us of the approaching death, “And dulls to distance all we are.” Death shadows us, and this somehow “dulls” our lives. Larkin, celebrating life as seen in the “unique, random blend”, regrets the hold death has over us. How much better would life be without the perpetual fear always shadowing us?
Analysis- DOCKERY AND SON
This poem is one of the most melancholic of Larkin’s collection, and like many, it starts with a specific, real instance before moving to a more general contemplation. Larkin, here, is a “visitant” to the “Dean”, returning to Oxford University.
From the offset, there is a sombre mood evoked through “death-suited”. It suggests that Larkin feels, himself, death just around the corner, shrouding him; or perhaps it is that Dockery has died, and that’s why Larkin has made the journey to his old university, that the “death-suit” is literally a suit for the dead.
Returning to Oxford, there is a sense of alienation and isolation. In the direct speech from the Dean, we hear that Dockery’s “son’s here now”, following the common tradition of Oxbridge alumni’s child to follow in their parents’ footsteps. It cuts the persona off immediately, who has ‘outgrown’ this place. He loses himself in the memories of how “half-tight” he’d once give his “‘version’ of ‘these events last night’”. Of course, the Dean’s words contrast now, in “do / You keep in touch with”.
The enjambment, leading to stress on the word “locked” also evokes the sense of alienation – Larkin can no longer enter a place that was once “home”. Almost like ‘Home is So Sad’, though now there is a physical barrier. Larkin leaves, catching the train “ignored”.
The ideas that have come from the meeting with the Dean are not so easy to leave behind. Larkin reflects upon Dockery, how he was “that withdrawn / High-collared public-schoolboy” – not someone to have sex, to produce a son. And not so young as “nineteen”. Again, there is a reference to death, the transience of life, in Cartwright, his roommate, “who was killed.” The persona seems to be greatly conflicted by the ideas that greet him, and he trails off into sleep, “how much… how little…” with the matter unresolved.
On the platform, Larkin sees that “the ranged / Joining and parting lines reflect a strong / Unhindered moon” before him – a visual metaphor for the different strains of existence that we can travel down. Dockery has one line, Larkin another, but for that brief moment in Oxford, their lines “joined”.
A perfect summary of Larkin’s life to this point comes at the beginning of the fourth stanza: To have no son, no wife, No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Of all the poems, this one seems to contain the greatest self-recognition, the closest the persona can be to Larkin, the poet. “Only a numbness registered the shock / Of finding how much had gone of life.” As time passes, has his life, so far, been a waste? When he holds up Dockery and his son in contrast, what does he have to show for his life?
But again, as he draws these contrasts, comes to the conclusion that Dockery, at only “nineteen” had “taken stock / Of what he wanted”, there is further doubt. “No, that’s not the difference” between them. Larkin believes that Dockery merely followed the “innate assumption” that he should marry and have children.
For Larkin, the idea of being “added to” – having a “wife”, a “son” – meant dilution. Larkin believed the expression: “the greatest enemy of art is the pram in the hall.” He believed, to be married and have children would stifle his creativity, take him away from the art that he centred himself around, divide him. This was one of the reasons why, despite his long relationships, he never married.
He questions these “innate assumptions” that family is good. He doesn’t believe they come from “what / We think truest, or most want to do”. Because of the “innate assumptions”, our true desires “warp tight-shut, like doors” – like the door in Oxford.
But it’s these “innate assumptions” that “Suddenly harden into all we’re got”. For Larkin, looking back, he sees that he has “nothing” – stressed by the repetition of the word. Yet even for Dockery, with his son, the assumptions are threatening, as they “rear / Like sand-clouds, thick and close” – suffocating.
Like in ‘Self’s the Man’, there is a question of who, ultimately, is better off. Here, Larkin reflects, there is no answer to that, because “whether we use it or not, it goes”. Regardless of how we use our lives, we are all headed for the same point: “age, and then the only end of age” – death.
Analysis- WILD OATS
This poem is based upon the only woman Larkin came close to marriage with: his first girlfriend Ruth Bowman. She had a friend called Jane, who is the model for the “bosomy English rose”, while sixteen-year-old Ruth was “her friend in specs I could talk to”.
The idea of “specs” reminds us of ‘A Study of Reading Habits’, a self-deprecating poem, and in its way, this isn’t dissimilar. The title ‘Wild Oats’ comes from a common euphemism for sex: an encouragement for boys to go out and ‘saw some wild oats’ – sleep with lots of women before getting serious. During the 1950s, there was still a real dichotomy between males and females: men were encouraged to ‘get out there’, while women were advised to remain chaste.
Considering ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ and Larkin, though, this seems a somewhat ironic title: no matter the adolescent fantasies of the persona in ‘A Study’, Larkin doesn’t seem the type to have cast many. Immediately in this poem, the persona is intimidated by the “rose” and “it was the friend I took out”. In the second stanza, he believes he “met beautiful twice” and he is convinced that both times “she was trying” “not to laugh”. It shows again the low self-confidence, unlike the “wild oats”.
The relationship went on for “seven years” and even as far as engagement, “Gave a ten-guinea ring,” but in the end it didn’t last. The persona’s colloquial attitude to the giving is rather dismissive anyway, and the whole poem is tongue-in-cheek. In real life, Larkin was quite cruel to Ruth, and the conclusion is probably what she said of Larkin, “That I was too selfish, withdrawn, / And easily bored to love.” Again, the persona is dismissive and tongue-in-cheek in response to this: “Well, useful to get that learned.”
Though this is a reflection on the past of “about twenty years ago”, the persona still has “two snaps / Of bosomy rose with fur gloves on”. The persona comes to the trivial conclusion, in that he is still single, that they are “unlucky charms”. Yet, as with many of Larkin’s poems, the last word discredits this light-hearted conclusion: “perhaps.” Perhaps those “snaps” are “unlucky charms”, but perhaps there is a much darker, more serious reason for the ‘Mr Bleaney’-like existence.
Analysis- AFTERNOONS
Like ‘First Sight’, this poem connects the idea of seasons with the passage of time. “Summer is fading” immediately evokes a sense of loss in the emotive verb “fading”. Even the day is in its decline in the “afternoon” and the plural on the title gives a sense that the scene painted in the poem applies to many days, and to life in general.
The poem focuses on “young mothers”. Though these women are in fairly well off positions, with “husbands in skilled trades”, higher than the old middle-class women in ‘Faith Healing’, their lives are like the “hollows of afternoons”: there is a sense of the emptiness in domestic life, in which they now nothing but “an estateful of washing”. That they are “Setting free their children” gives a sense of their own entrapment, and desire to break away.
The seasons mark how time changes their lives. “The wind / Is ruining their courting places” now, as autumn and winter approach, and the juxtoposition of “And the albums lettered, / Our Wedding, lying / Near the television”, shows that their marriages and love have now, somehow, been pushed aside and reduced, casually placed beside the “jabbering set” (‘Mr Bleaney’) to never be viewed.
Despite still being “young”, their lives have been superseded, for those places are “still courting places / (But the lovers are all in school)”. Now they have entered into the snare of domesticity, children have replaced their place. Instead, their “children, so intent on / Finding unripe acorns” (a hint that though they are young now, they will eventually grow into the same cycle) “expect to be taken home”. The verb “expect” commands the women; their children and the thousand other domestic necessities trap them. “Their beauty has thickened” is a wonderful metaphor for captures the signs of age, the beauty of youth filling out…
The final two lines sum up the rest of the sad, sympathetic poem: “Something is pushing them / To the side of their own lives”. They have now become spectators in life (shown in their “assemble” to watch the children in the first stanza), and are powerless to prevent the unknown and threatening “something”, domesticity.
ANALYSIS- ARUNDEL TOMB
There are different ways of interpreting this poem, particularly the final line. Larkin’s poem is based upon a real tomb, Arundel being a place in Sussex. He was an atheist, and terrified of death. The poem falls into a movement that Larkin drove called “the Movement,” which was a response to the highly introverted Modernism poems – mostly iambic tetrameter and uses enjambment throughout.
The first stanza of the poem describes the tomb, although it is full of a deeper message. “Side by side, their faces blurred” gives the impression that their identities have been lost through time and erosion, as does the choice of “vaguely.” There is something ambiguous in the lexical choices, however: although “lie” can be taken that they’re literally lying down, it could also mean that the “truth” of them has also been lost through time, and in “their proper habits vaguely shown,” “habits” could refer to their mannerisms, not only their clothes, have been distorted.
Referring to “such plainness of the pre-baroque” (before the irregularity of architecture seen in the Gothic style) could be a criticism of modern art – perhaps the time before was better. Another example of this is the reference to the “Latin names” – a dead language nowadays – and that soon in “Their early supine stationary voyage,” the “succeeding eyes begin / To look not read” the Latin. There is a sense of loss about this fact, a criticism of the modern world. “The old tenantry” – the old way of life – soon “turn” “away.” until It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still Clasped empty in the other;
The complex syntax of these few lines means that his left gauntlet is held in his right hand and that the left hand is “holding her hand.” “Sharp tender shock” is an oxymoron – but then, Larkin was a man of contradictions.
The next stanza has the same ambiguity on the word, “lie,” and the two lines perhaps mean that the “faithfulness of effigy” (being unable to move away from each other; eternally holding each others’ hands) isn’t something that they’d intended. The oxymoron, “sweet commissioned” draws out how the effigy was only made because it was the sculptor’s job, “sweet” becomes almost sarcastic.
“Rigidly” is another pun on death and moving into the next stanza, there are various images of the passing time:
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass.
In “The endless altered people came,” referring to tourists, there is a pun on “altered,” which means changed people, but could also refer to the altar – loss of religion. This “endless” wave of people are criticised, that they “look, not read” similar in some ways to the “tourists’ feet / Who in the good weather come” of ‘Abbey Tomb.’ These people are “washing away at their identity” – their lack of understanding is hastening the air’s “soundless damage” of the tomb (erosion).
Larkin refers to the current world as an “unarmorial age,” (without the coat of arms), negative image, “hollow” and “a trough / Of smoke in slow suspended skeins.” The sibilance of that line augments the negative image, and the “smoke” is a reference to Industrial Britain. (“skeins” means “tangles,” great imagery for the collection of smoke in the sky). It really is an image of deterioration.
In the final stanza, “Time has transfigured them into / Untruth.” Something that “hardly meant” anything when it was first sculptured “has come to be / Their final blazon.” It proves, Larkin says, “our almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is love.”
Is that an optimistic end? In my opinion, not at all. Larkin doesn’t really mean the last line, saying it’s only “almost true” and that it’s an “almost-instinct” anyway. For love to “survive of us” is something that humans desire to be true, but in truth, the two figures never meant the “blazon” of love. The modern world merely projects that “almost-instinct” on them. Because of the deterioration, we cannot understand what it was like to be those people.
Nothing to Be Said
For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.
So are their separate ways
Of building, benediction,
Measuring love and money
Ways of slowly dying.
The day spent hunting pig
Or holding a garden-party,
Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly.
And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said.
Love Songs In Age
She kept her songs, they took so little space,
The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,
And coloured, by her daughter -
So they had waited, till in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood
Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
That hidden freshness, sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,
The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.
Take One Home for the Kiddies
On shallow straw, in shadeless glass,
Huddled by empty bowls, they sleep:
No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass -
Mam, get us one of them to keep.
Living toys are something novel,
But it soon wears off somehow.
Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel -
Mam, we're playing funerals now.
Days
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
Talking In Bed
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
Ambulances
Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.
Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,
And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;
For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there
At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable inside a room
The traffic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.
Dockery and Son
'Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn't he?' said the Dean. 'His son's here now.'
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. 'And do
You keep in touch with-' Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
'Our version' of 'these incidents last night'?
I try the door of where I used to live:
Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In '43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn
High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
How much . . . How little . . . Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end to see the ranged
Joining and parting lines reflect a strong
Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of . . . No, that's not the difference: rather, how
Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They're more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we've got
And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son's harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
Wild Oats
About twenty years ago
Two girls came in where I worked -
A bosomy English rose
And her friend in specs I could talk to.
Faces in those days sparked
The whole shooting-match off, and I doubt
If ever one had like hers:
But it was the friend I took out,
And in seven years after that
Wrote over four hundred letters,
Gave a ten-guinea ring
I got back in the end, and met
At numerous cathedral cities
Unknown to the clergy. I believe
I met beautiful twice. She was trying
Both times (so I thought) not to laugh.
Parting, after about five
Rehearsals, was an agreement
That I was too selfish, withdrawn
And easily bored to love.
Well, useful to get that learnt,
In my wallet are still two snaps,
Of bosomy rose with fur gloves on.
Unlucky charms, perhaps.
Afternoons
Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.
Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places
That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.
An Arundel Tomb
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly, they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
Self's the Man
Oh, no one can deny
That Arnold is less selfish than I.
He married a woman to stop her getting away
Now she's there all day,
And the money he gets for wasting his life on work
She takes as her perk
To pay for the kiddies' clobber and the drier
And the electric fire,
And when he finishes supper
Planning to have a read at the evening paper
It's Put a screw in this wall -
He has no time at all,
With the nippers to wheel round the houses
And the hall to paint in his old trousers
And that letter to her mother
Saying Won't you come for the summer.
To compare his life and mine
Makes me feel a swine:
Oh, no one can deny
That Arnold is less selfish than I.
But wait, not do fast:
Is there such a contrast?
He was out for his own ends
Not just pleasing his friends;
And if it was such a mistake,
He still did it for his own sake,
Playing his own game.
So he and I are the same,
Only I'm a better hand
At knowing what I can stand!
HERE
Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river s slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,
Gathers to the surprise of a large town:
Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires—
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers—
A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages, where removed lives
Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
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Arnold Friend is a character that is also controlled by his id. When he first makes contact with Connie he smiles and says “Gonna get you, baby” (Oates 1). In that instance, his id is controlling his decision-making. Arnold immediately determined that he wanted Connie without taking any time to process his thoughts. Later in the story, Arnold shows up at Connie’s house with his friend Ellie. At first he asks Connie to get in the car, but as time progresses he becomes more aggressive, demanding that she gets in the car. His behavior can be compared to that of a child. When a child doesn’t get what he wants, he becomes more and more aggressive until he does. That is because the child is not developed enough to have an ego or superego to counteract their id, which is the same for Arnold. He goes so far as to rape Connie, which expresses how Arnold’s id took advantage of a vulnerable girl (Snodgrass). However, Connie does have a superego in this situation. Instead of acting impulsively and getting in the car with Arnold, Connie begins to think about the consequences and decides against it. That is because Arnold is more than just a character, he is a physical representation of Connie’s id. He knows details about Connie that nobody should know except her, such as the location of her family. In this situation Connie’s mind only contains an ego and superego, but the id is standing in front of her. Arnold is her inner…
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Connie asks Arnold and his friend to leave. Arnold refused to leave without her. Connie noticed he was wearing a wig. Arnold begins to describe Connie’s family at the Barbeque. He gives Connie details about what her sister was wearing. He also stated that Connie’s mother was shucking corn. Finally, Arnold refers to himself as Connie’s lover and shows his sexual intentions, upsetting…
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She is displayed as a bitter, hateful character who seeks revenge, shown with ‘not a day since then I haven’t wished him dead’ and ‘give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon’. This is almost contrasted with her loneliness and sexual frustration explored in the first stanza, with ‘some nights better, the lost body over me, my fluent tongue in it’s mouth in it’s ear then down till I suddenly bite awake.’…
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In the novel The Catcher and the Rye by J.D Salinger, Holden expresses his hate for the idea of growing up and becoming an adult, as he sees the majority of adults as phonies. Along with that, he regards the process as taking away your innocence and freedom. With his view of adulthood, he hates the idea of children having to go through what he did and losing their innocence. He often praises children, placing them as superior to adults.…
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stuffed boots; these features led her to believe he was not a teenager, but in…
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In another metaphor about her mother, Charlotte says that she is “a white picket fence [that] stands in a field of weeds [and] is bounded on its other sides by thorny bushes and barbed wire”. In this passage, Charlotte further unveils her harsh opinion of her mother. She believes that, while she may appear to be the perfect mother and wife, she is really a bitter broad with a holier-than-thou persona.…
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Through the sincere and loyal tone, it becomes apparent that the speaker herself is proud of her work, but fearful of others’ responses to it. Although she refers to the book as a “rambling brat” and “hobbling,” due to the impressions of others, the tone is of protective sincerity, thus the mother-child metaphor. The narrator says, “‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam,” in reference to the outside world being ultra-critical of the book and child – purporting a deep sense of motherly protection. This…
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Symbolism is a literary device that is used much in this poem. One example of symbolism is the woman being sick and her husband does no treat her with respect symbolizes women’s rights. The woman describes her husband “If a physician of high standing, and ones husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one, but temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency- what is one to do”? (Gilman 1). John is not treating her like a woman is supposed to be treated. He does not want to tell her friends and relatives that she is sick. She tells him that she is sick, but he does not do anything but make it worse because he does not believe that she is sick. Another symbol in the poem is that her husband treats her like a little child. The speaker describes her room as “It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium and windows are barred for little children (3). The woman is being treated like a little child by her husband. He treats her like a little child because she lets him control and tell her what to do. John calls her “Little Girl” instead of by her name. The barred windows symbolize her being trapped. So, the room she stays in is for children. The wallpaper symbolizes her being trapped, and the windows symbolize her trying to get away.…
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Although this poem is written in free verse, it still attains a strong cadence through rhetorical schemes. End rhymes are sporadically seen throughout the poem. An example is in the last two lines, “Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night.” “Flight” and “night” rhyme, which creates rhythm throughout the poem. Another tool Arnold uses is parallelism. For instance line 2 has parallel syntax. Both phrases in, “The tide is full, the moon lies fair,” have the same structure of an…
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