Below are a few comments on each of the Larkin Poems I've photocopied for you. I'll update this post over the next couple of weeks. You should read the entries on this post as an introduction or a starting point to the poems. They are not a substitute for coming to lessons. You should read the poems in conjunction with the post Reading Poetry - linked here. I hope the introductions will help you read and engage with the poems on a personal and much deeper level.
Mr Bleaney
Summary - the narrative voice is a prospective tenant being shown a rented room by the landlady. Mr Bleaney was the last tenant. Perhaps he has died. The narrator observes little details of the room and concludes that Mr Bleaney lived a little, unremarkable and undistinguished life. Twice his narrative is interrupted by the landlady's comments about Mr Bleaney. The narrator accepts the room but also seems to accept that he and Mr Bleaney share a similar kind of life.
Form - traditional form, seven four line stanzas [quatrains] made up largely of iambic pentameters [five pairs of stressed and unstressed syllables] and a rigid abab rhyme scheme.
Difficult words
- the Bodies - local slang for a car manufacturing factory where Mr Bleaney worked.
- the four aways - a reference to the football pools in which he hopes to win and escape his mundane repetitive and boring life.
Theme - Life without meaning, suffering, presentation of a diminished life
Writing Style - dramatic monologue - could be autobiographical, use of direct speech, descriptive writing, nouns, premodifiers, last quatrain abstract nouns, symbols
Other Voices -
Other Voices -
"Mr Bleaney is effectively a neutral, objective documentary on an ordinary, unabitious, unimaginative, unadventurous, low keyed existence of a modern middle-class individual, a victim of alienation."
Sisir Kumar Chatterjee from Philip Larkin: Poetry That Builds Bridges, Atlantic Publishers and Distributers 2006.
Love Songs in Age
Before we go any further with this poem watch and listen to this love song. I have a story to tell you about the song - remind me to tell it.
Summary - a widow rediscovers neglected love songs she used to play [probably a piano] and sing when she was young. Relearning the songs rekindles the feelings of being young again - a youthful energy, passion, the promise of the future. However the songs make her realise that she never experienced the strong emotions and feelings evoked by the songs; despite being married and having a daughter. She also painfully realises that she will never experience them.
Difficult words - incipience meaning: just starting to be or happen; beginning; only partly in existence; imperfectly formed
Form - three eight line stanzas - called octaves, various line lengths, but dominated by iambic pentameters, in dispersed by four to seven live syllables. Rhyme scheme in each stanza is abacbcdd. Emjambment is an important feature. Formality of the poem creates an elegiac tone to the poem.
Themes - Appearance and reality, sense of loss and unfulfilled expectations,
Whitsun used to fall
Whitsun used to fall
Writing Style - third person narrative. The poem begins descriptive focussing on details of concrete nouns in the first stanza - the "covers". Then the second and third stanzas are dominated by abstract nouns. These stanzas introduce imagery specifically simile "spring woken tree" and metaphorical language - love"sailing above".
Faith Healing
Meaning - Faith healing is healing through spiritual means. Believers assert that the healing of a person can be brought about by religious faith through prayer and/or rituals that, according to adherents, stimulate a divine presence and power toward correcting disease and disability.
Summary - describes a group of women coming forward at a Christian Faith Healing service. Each woman meets the faith healer for a few seconds and he prays for them. Then he moves on to the next woman. Some women are moved powerfully by the experience and cry uncontrollably. This brief expression of care and concern touches them and releases in them long buried pent up emotions of unfulfilled love.
In the third stanza Larkin reflects on this experience. He seems to be saying that the healing experience for most - enables people to see their lives in relation to the amount of love they have received. It enables them to imagine how much more they could have been and done had they been loved fully. Meeting the faith healer has released their emotions. Larkin asserts that nothing can cure this pain. The voice of the faith healer - echoes the voice of God. This voice is a lie.
Form - Three ten line stanzas. Each line consists of an iambic pentameter. Eight sentences. A complex rhyme scheme consisting of abcabdabcabd. Poem uses enjambment extensively.
Theme - dominated by hope and expectation but ends with disappointment, unfulfilled longing. There is only the physical world.
Writing Style - detailed descriptive writing of the famous American evangelist/faith healer Billy Graham who visited the UK in the 1954. We read the voice of Billy Graham in the first stanza. This is echoed by Larkin in the third. Metaphorical language is used in the poem. Comparisons are also used - but not similes. There is some alliteration.
The Whitsun Weddings
Meaning - Whitsun is the name used in the UK for the Christian festival which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ's disciples. This usually takes place in early June a popular time for people to get married because it often falls on a Bank Holiday.
I don't think Larkin considered any religious symbolism or significance in his poem.
Summary - The narrator probably Larkin recounts the events of a train journey he took from Lincolnshire to London during Whitsun. He watches various wedding parties sending married couples off to London to begin their married life.
Meaning - Whitsun is the name used in the UK for the Christian festival which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ's disciples. This usually takes place in early June a popular time for people to get married because it often falls on a Bank Holiday.
I don't think Larkin considered any religious symbolism or significance in his poem.
Summary - The narrator probably Larkin recounts the events of a train journey he took from Lincolnshire to London during Whitsun. He watches various wedding parties sending married couples off to London to begin their married life.
Form - ten lines in all eight stanzas. Dominated by iambic pentameter. The second line of each stanza is made up of four syllables. There are some variations. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is ababcdecde. A complex and regular rhyme scheme. Emjamberment between stanzas 4-5, 5-6 and 6-7.
There are eight ten line stanzas.
Regularity of line and stanza structure as well as rhyme and emjamberment helps create a sense of movement.
Themes - social observation, promise and expectation followed by disillusion.
Writing Style - anecdotal, first person narrative, descriptive and detailed social observation, use of lists helps create snapshots of England, rural, suburban and urban. Selective use of simile. An extended metaphor that begins with 'curve', picked up with 'aimed' and the simile 'like a arrow shower.' A bow and arrow image. Other features include sensory language - including sound, smell and touch.
Comment - I think this is my favourite Larkin poem. It is a great poem. Larkin sits alone and remote in the train. At first he is preoccupied by the heat and what he can see out of the train window. There is a sense of uncomfortable confinement in the train carriage and the heat. He seems to accept the journey despite being late and hot and enclosed. The passing views out of the window offer an escape or at least a distraction from the journey.
But then in an understated and informal way he mentions the weddings at the start of the third stanza. They appear on the margins of his consciousness at first but quickly become the centre of his attention. At each station he passes he watches wedding parties. Family and friends wave goodbye to the newly wed couple as they embark on their married life. First stop - the big city - London. He watches the same scene re-enacted again and again at each station.
The descriptions of the people are remote, detached, unsympathetic - perhaps even cruel and judgemental. He comments on the weddings taking place and the significance of the rite of passage. His comments are judgemental. He is a snob looking down at them all - a different class - engaging in a ritual that he will never experience himself - within a religious context in which he thinks there is no meaning. He recognises that the public and social identity of these couples has changed. But for Larkin the marriages carry no genuine meaning or purpose. They seem a curiosity to him.
The train is a thread that has brought these people together. Embedded in the poem is an extended metaphor that builds through the poem and the poem concludes with it.
“Larkin stands back and looks.”
“In a sense the poet’s involvement is greater than theirs [the wedding couples]; he sees and understands just what it is that each participant feels, and then puts them together to form one complete experience, felt in its directness by no one, yet present in the atmosphere and available to that imaginative contemplation that makes ‘art’.”
John Wain ‘Engagement or Withdrawal: Some Notes on the Work of Philip Larkin’, Critical Quarterly, Summer 1964, quoted in Roger Day, Philip Larkin, OUP `1976
MCMXIV
Ambulances
Summary - The poem portrays the ambulances which call upon the sick and the dying as also acting as reminders to the bystanders of their own mortality, even as they express their sympathy for the person they see being taken to hospital. The speaker sees the process of dying in terms of the unravelling of bonds which have cohered in life. The certainty of death casts a pall over all we do.
Difficult words - confessional refers to the Roman Catholic practice of confessing one's sins to a priest in the dark, enclosed space of the confessional, through which one would receive absolution and the opportunity to make a new start in one's relationship with God.
Form - Five sestets, stanzas of six lines each. Each line consists of eight syllables. Each stanza consits of an abcbca rhyme scheme.
Theme - The ambulances represent or symbolise the inevitability of death.
Quotes - 'The somewhat nihilistic vision... expressed in Ambulances'
The poem 'employs virtually no simile's or metaphors...death seems to defy figurative expressions.' David Timms, Philip Larkin
Summary - The poem portrays the ambulances which call upon the sick and the dying as also acting as reminders to the bystanders of their own mortality, even as they express their sympathy for the person they see being taken to hospital. The speaker sees the process of dying in terms of the unravelling of bonds which have cohered in life. The certainty of death casts a pall over all we do.
Difficult words - confessional refers to the Roman Catholic practice of confessing one's sins to a priest in the dark, enclosed space of the confessional, through which one would receive absolution and the opportunity to make a new start in one's relationship with God.
Form - Five sestets, stanzas of six lines each. Each line consists of eight syllables. Each stanza consits of an abcbca rhyme scheme.
Theme - The ambulances represent or symbolise the inevitability of death.
Quotes - 'The somewhat nihilistic vision... expressed in Ambulances'
The poem 'employs virtually no simile's or metaphors...death seems to defy figurative expressions.' David Timms, Philip Larkin
Dockery and Son
Wild Oats
An Arundel Tomb
