- The final poem in her collection, Duffy’s ‘Prayer’ provides a lasting sense of hope
and an uplifting end to a volatile journey.
Larkin
Here
- The suggestive power of Larkin’s poem partly lies in the fact that we, as readers,
become passengers in the poem’s steadily travelling carriage. Larkin creates a sense
of movement through this train journey; as we are carried through the city of Hull
and beyond to the countryside, we become aware of a change not only in the
physical landscape, but in the speaker’s attitude.
- Larkin sharply contrasts the urban, industrial environment of the city with the rural
paradise of the countryside in order to examine how physical environments can
shape one’s mood. Larkin, playing with the notion of the pastoral, criticises the sordid
landscape of the city with its overwhelmingly materialistic nature. As if to follow the
movement of the train, Larkin’s speaker swerves away from a sneering and distaste
for the trappings of urban life and towards a climactic moment of transcendence
upon entering the unrestricted countryside.
- Larkin, whom Golding noted ‘was quite content in pursuing his own agenda’,
expresses a desire and longing for solitude which can only be found away from the
busy urban lifestyle. Such a desire perhaps reflects Larkin’s own belief that only in
solitude can creativity flourish and a sense of self be achieved. True solitude is
something which is almost ineffable in its transcendental experience.
- Outsider perspective, but is not personal
Mr Bleaney
- Larkin uses the physical setting of a lodger’s room to establish a bleak view of the
empty lives lived within it.
- Golding, arguing that Larkin suggested it preferable ‘for everyone to resign
themselves to their individual destinies and accept the impeccable emptiness of their
lives’, picks up on the dreary and bleak atmosphere which permeates poems such
as ‘Mr Bleaney’. Larkin, whilst providing insight into the stunted life of an individual
whose mediocre living conditions reflect his own state of being, highlights a personal
fear of being trapped in a solitary, dull existence.
- The speaker’s portrait of the former tenant of his room, Mr Bleaney, suggests a kind
of distaste for a life devoid of passion and human interaction. The speaker’s anxiety
about enduring the same ‘the failure to lead a meaningful life, and finally the trudge
towards extinction’ (Banerjee) manifests in an uncomfortability with identifying with
Mr Bleaney in any way. Thus, his inability to form a sense of self beyond what Mr
Bleaney has already marked in the room highlights how he is no further forward in his
life than the former lodger was.
, - Larkin, creating a poem which is consumed by a sense of unhappiness and
disillusionment, stays true to his comment that ‘deprivation is for me what daffodils
were for Wordsworth’.
Nothing To Be Said
- Larkin, whom Heaney argues was ‘haunted by both life and death’, explores the
impermanence of life through a poem which serves as a constant reminder of our
mortality. Whilst it could be argued that there is something incredibly bleak and
pessimistic about Larkin reducing values such as love or money to shallow figures in
the grand scale of things, perhaps there is some hope in his image of humanity being
unified in death.
- Larkin, employing the common notion of death as the great leveller, explores a
variety of different societies and cultures only to show how these differences
become insignificant after the small time period that is life.
- Larkin, in an effort to highlight the inevitability of time passing and death
approaching, reduces humanity’s actions to nothing more than wasted time.
- Whilst Larkin’s blunt tone is a reflection of his realistic attitude, it also highlights an
inability to encapsulate these great philosophical processes of life and death in
language.
- Cox, arguing that Larkin’s message is one which depicts ‘life [as] just a brief and
overrated interlude in the ongoing state of non-existence’, highlights the
philosophical undertone which becomes increasingly obvious as the poem, in
Larkin’s typical structure, moves from individual scenarios to abstract musings on life
and death.
Love Songs in Age
- If Larkin, as Edwards suggests, ‘is a poet with a very strong sense of past, present
and future’, then this poem certainly reflects that through its study of how physical
objects can both reopen windows into the past and bring memories back into the
present.
- The poem is centred around a widow, who upon rediscovering her old sheet music, is
brought back to the feelings of hope and passion that encapsulated her youth.
- However, the poem is also stained with a note of disillusionment and loss as the
speaker is forced to acknowledge the transience of memory and the permanence of
the present. The sorrow expressed towards the end of the poem reminds the reader
of Larkin’s intentions to create what King calls ‘a study of how hopes, dreams and
ideals are relentlessly diminished by the realities of life’.
- Larkin makes the passing of time an unignorable fact of life, leaving ‘the reader with
a profound sense of the blues’ (Greens) as the speaker comes to recognise the
changes which have occurred and the love which she has lost.
Faith Healing
- Larkin, through his presentation of the throngs of women enticed by the words of a
faith healer, portrays religion as a corrupt and superficial institution which we
cannot trust or have faith in.
- Naremore argues that ‘Larkin presents himself as a sceptical, less deceived observer
of contemporary life’. This idea of Larkin being ‘less deceived’ that the rest of society
