Analysis

Title:

Summer is fading

Change in season mirrors change in people’s lives

Suggests people’s lives are fading back from excitement

Sets a slightly melancholy tone from the start of the poem

The leaves fall in ones and twos

Mirrors slow passage of time

Reflects how life changes bit by bit, and a lack of drastic alterations

The hollows of afternoons

Suggests emptiness and gaps

Implies afternoons are not full or meaningfull, but empty and unfulfilling

Plural of afternoons implies it is a continuous cycle and repetitive occurance

Young mothers assemble.. setting free their children

Suggests motherhood is restrictive and consuming, as their lives revolve around “assemble” and supervising children

Line presents a cycle of life- the children’s freedom comes at the cost of the mothers loss of time and pleasure

At intervals, stand husbands at skilled trades

Emphasises gender stereotypes of 1960s expectations

Working class

Systematic (“at intervals”

Implies emotional distance and separation makes them seem functional rather than emotional

“Our Wedding, lying near the television”

Suggests wedding has been discarded and meaning has diminished

Creates contrast between romance and mundane everyday life

Romance replaced by habit

Excitement has been worn down by time

The wind is ruining their courting places

Wind symbolises passage of time

As time passes love has detoriated and diminished

Reinforced idea nothing remains the same

Sense of inevitable decline

Their beauty has thickened

Implies a loss of lightnesses, freshness and gracefulness of youth

Suggests beauty has became less refined and less delicate

Bases woman’s value on physical beauty

Could reflect society’s tendancy to judge a woman based on beauty of appearance

Something is pushing them to the side of their own lives

No longer priority of their own lives

This quote leaves the reader to only guess what it is referring to

The somethinhrg could be children