English - Larkin & Duffy

Before You Were Mine

'my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics'

-symbol for her mother's youth which is unable to undergo change

-metaphor imbues a tone of history and nostalgia, instigated by memories and infliction of change, progression of time

-'red high-heeled shoes' - fun her mother had in the past in a carefree life, Duffy feels this was taken away from her when she became a mother

-'relics' - antiquity, value the speaker places on their mother's possessions, treasures and protects them from change

-tactile imagery through 'hands', longing to connect with the past

-dramatic contrast between what is tangible and not, physical 'shoes' are tangible but they are now metaphorical 'relics', past remains at an intangible and unreachable state

Before You Were Mine

'In the ballroom with the thousand eyes, the fizzy movies tomorrow/ the right walk home could bring'

-time is depicted as seemingly cruel to her mother

-metaphor - encapsulates a desire and expectation that Duffy's mother had for the future

-dream was lost over time and overshadowed by the responsibility of becoming a mother, extra burden was expected of them, negative change

-'thousand eyes' - hyperbole, her mother used to turn heads with her beauty and gain a multitude of attention, over time this died down and began to blend in with societal expectations

-Duffy feels she is at fault for her mother being seen as less unique and significant

Love Songs In Age

'the glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love'

-metaphor, harmful nature of love, ability to deceive us, appearing as something to be desired but turning out to be filled with disappointment

-’glare’ - double meaning, intensity and something that is bright, once being exposed for too long it becomes damaging and painful

-negativity of an aggressive stare or scowl, transformed from what once was a smile - change in the relationship must have developed from a once positive romance

-similar to Duffy, love is desired at first but over time has detrimental effects and is damaging

-’much-mentioned’ - Larkin’s cynical outlook of love, irony, despite the title of the poem he fails to mention love, up to interpretation

Love Songs In Age

‘one bleached/ one marked/ one mended’

-anaphora, inevitability of time passing

-asyndetic listing, continuity and endless vastness of love, each song opens up another revelation about love and human relationships

-’songs’, tone of harmony and musicality, metaphorically encapsulates the physical build up and journey of the songs

-structure of these past relationships, blinded by love at first, become messy and broken down over time

-’bleached’, ‘marked’ - destructive verbs, semantic field of brokenness, highlights how disrespected and useless the records have become over time along with the love

Critic for BYWM

Rees Jones - ‘Duffy’s poetry isn’t just straightforward feminist poetry and that it depicts the difficulties that the patriarchy presents to both men and women’

-challenged - premise of the poem circulates round motherhood and how it changes women independently

-doesn’t focus on the struggles of men as well

-highlights the abrupt change from youth to parenthood that women face

Critic for LSIA

King - ‘Larkin’s poetry is the poetry of disappointment’

-agree - persona is hit with overpowering dread and frustration

-discovery of a widening chasm between the expectation and reality of love that one may experience as time passes

-challenged - before these feelings the persona experiences a sense of joy and triumph when reminiscing

-for them to experience these feelings of regret there has to be hope and beauty originally

Mean Time

‘the clocks slid back an hour’

-metaphor of time passing from summer to winter, lament the end of a relationship

-conveys a loss of light and joy from life

-‘slid’ - monosyllabic verb, time ultimately slips away, cannot grasp onto it, its passing is inevitable and somewhat aggressive, cruelty of time - emphasises our inability to alter it and stay in the present

-symbol of clocks going back - light being taken away physically through daylight savings, in relationships people are overcome with love which overshadows faults at first, they are eventually revealed and plunge us into darkness

-sound of a ticking clock, reminding us of our continuation into the future, time is getting away from us

-consistency of time as clocks are rhythmic and somewhat poetic sounding

Mean Time

‘stole light from my life’

-personifies time as criminal like, reflects her brutal vision of time

-‘stole’ - malice and time’s cruelty, intent on it’s actions, only mission is to change our lives for the worse

-passing of time may have positive effects, provides us with memories when we were full of joy and contentment, allows us to see the world in a brighter colour

-‘light’ - metaphor for hope and happiness that is ripped away from us, plunged into darkness and unable to see ourselves in a better light, something we require to be able to see, we require a metaphorical light inside of us in order to live a fulfilling life

-‘light’ and ‘life’ - liquid alliteration, tone of hope and desire, gentle to distract us from the cruel effects of time on people

Afternoons

‘albums, lettered/ Our wedding, lying’

-his outsider perspective, ability to picture the hopeless deterioration of marriage from a rounded view

-universal decline of marriages of young people, dependent on the progression of time

-1950s- society pressured women to marry young and fulfil their roles, bleak physical representation of marriage, he critiques the church and marriage as a whole in the dismal fate it is subject to

-‘lying’ - ambiguous, stationary resting, evokes an image of an object thrown and discarded

-deceitful and devious ‘lying’ - Larkin is indicative of both, stagnant marriage which does not move with the passing season instead remains grounded, untruthful expression of what the marriage has become after time eroded it away

-‘lettered’ - diminishes the meaning of ‘our wedding’, in isolation they have no meaning or purpose- the love is diminished to a series of moments that don’t exist in a coherent fashion

-italics - mocking the institution, was known to disagree with marriage, viewed it as futile, once people are married they are shackled to a life of domestic drudgery, repetitive

Afternoons

‘summer is fading’

-similarity to Duffy, autumn setting is depicted

-change in seasons, metaphor for the progression of life and how dramatically it can change, lack of faith in time passing, cynical change

-‘fading’ - negative change, light and vibrancy surrounding the persona are gone and they are plunged into darkness - similar to Duffy

-Larkin, time as a slower force that is still ongoing, Duffy presents it as quick acting through short harsh words

-factual tone, time is inescapable, unemotive language

Afternoons critic

Peter Filkins - a central theme in Larkin’s poems is ‘love and the difficulty of attaining satisfaction within it’

-portrays the fleeting yet consistent nature of time, disrupting any ‘attaining satisfaction’

-lack of satisfaction, outsider perspective which reveals the deterioration of love and its insubstantial nature as he observes ‘our albums lettered…’

-universal decline of marriages amongst the youth, love is carelessly left out in the open, destined to tarnish by the inevitable progression of time

Disgrace

‘each nursing a thickening cyst of dust and gloom’

-motif of disease and death, decaying imagery, inevitable destruction and breakdown of relationships

-‘cyst’ - metaphor, cancerous nature of the relationship, inevitable death of love, leads to overwhelming pain

-‘thickening’ - premodifier, problematic for a long time, only now become a problem that can’t be ignored any longer, at one point the relationship was fulfilling and did provide pleasure, now reached the point of no return

-elongated vowel sounds of ‘gloom’ mirror the enjambment inherent in this poem and adds to the tone of never ending, inescapable suffering that the persona or both people in the relationship may feel is ongoing now

Disgrace

‘woke to your clothes like a corpse on the floor’

-simile, continues the motif of death and decay of the relationship, love’s stagnation is as inevitable as death

-‘woke’ - perceptive insight to the way people tend to continue a relationship long past the point when it has already broken down, repeated references to waking up, truth has a habit of confronting us with what we already knew but did not face

-‘like a corpse’ - simile, the same sight can have different effects over time, once brought erotic charge and pleasure now only suggests the death of a relationship and the pain it brings

-‘corpse’ - noun, been destroyed for some time through the references to death and decay throughout, connotes a lack of individuality and identity

-nod to the notion that love is futile in a world where we all have the same fate, all reduced to an unrecognisable ‘corpse’ that has no purpose in the world

-nihilistic view, both in Duffy and Larkin’s poetry, tackled more brutally in Duffy’s

Talking in Bed

‘outside the wind’s incomplete unrest’

-uses his poem to present time as a catalyst in the breakdown of relationships which lacked pure love in the first place and were purely based on unrealistic expectations

-pathetic fallacy, disintegrated nature of the relationship, seeming relentless storm of damage and erosion

-‘wind’ - noun, sweeping out the old and bringing in the new, emotions once felt of happiness and cheerfulness are now replaced with sadness and pain

-‘incomplete’ - modifying adjective, no couple is ever metaphorically ‘completing’ each other due to the pre-destined end to the relationship, cynicism in Larkin’s tone, influenced by the pessimistic tone of Hardy’s work

-pathetic fallacy contrasted with Duffy’s use of domestic imagery, extended metaphor of a decaying home is used to emulate the deterioration of her relationship, Larkin uses a wider range of imagery - cannot escape pain and is surrounded by it wherever he goes

Talking in Bed

‘dark towns heap up on the horizon’

-images of nature disrupting clarity and beauty, gradual loss of the sense of relationship

-‘dark towns’ - rather than describing light in the distance and representing hope it is foreboding and anxiety inducing

-pessimistic vocab, growing sense of pain and a lack of love which encapsulates him

-‘horizon’ - sense of freshness and light in life, juxtaposed with ‘dark towns’, present love as inevitably futile

-loss of intimacy as a result of lack of communication perhaps in someway saddened by the fact however seemingly more regret if not keeping the love

Talking in Bed critic

Leo Cox - ‘Larkin uses nature as a medium for discussing his preoccupation with how transient and pointless everything in the world is’

-repeated pathetic fallacy, depicts the relationship as no use to him in the first place and it has caused more trouble

-overriding use of cynical vocab

-welcomed the relationship in the first place even though he had unrealistic expectations for it, sense of optimism and hopefulness

Adultery

‘wear dark glasses in the rain’

-metaphor, persona’s refusal to see the red flags in the relationship

-‘dark glasses’ - sunglasses, worn when it is sunny, the persona is having to act like their relationship is content when in actual fact it’s tumultuous - the rain

-block out light to prevent damage, persona is ignoring the truth which is damaging to them, sunglasses will prevent them from seeing the issues, still feel all the weight of the rain - metaphor for the deceit going on behind their back

-pathetic fallacy, encapsulate chaos and the flawed nature of the relationship

-‘rain’ - disruptive, weight of the deceit that soaks the persona, makes her feel cold when a relationship should keep her warm and safe

Disgrace

‘your heart over ripe at the core’

-metaphor, persona’s ex lovers unforgivable acts and how they have started to become disgusted by them

-semantic links, something rotten and out of date, the relationship has lost all sense of love and connection due to the adultery

-partner has been with so many sexual partners, become overly consumed by it

-centre of their heart and their ultimate being, tainted from within, persona has lost all hope of ever loving him again

-not one part of him that remains untouched, rottenness has spread from within and infected every part of him like a disease, can’t bear to remain with him, disgusted by him

-‘heart’ - previous love that was once there between the couple, lost through betrayal, part of the persona is still in love and doesn’t want to let go yet, links to the idea of her wearing ‘dark glasses’

-biblical allusions, Adam and Eve

Wild Oats

‘a bosomy English rose and her friend in specs I could talk to’

-description of this woman comes before any reference to his long term girlfriend, her importance and significance of appearance in relation to lust’s attraction

-‘rose’ - symbol of shallow and physical sex, Larkin fails to acknowledge the thorns beneath, he isn’t looking for true love, woman is objectified, no sense of romance or true love

-‘rose’ - beauty and sexuality, contrast between the beautiful but not functional, plant is covered in thorns and thus hard to obtain

-links to Tudors, white rose of York and red rose of Lancaster joined together following the war of the roses, union of houses, highlights the formation of a relationship

Wild Oats

‘gave a ten guinea ring/ I got back in the end’

-‘ring’ - materialistic imagery, action of giving and taking back, themes of transaction, Larkin sought out romantic relationships not out of love, but lust

-marital imagery, metaphor for Larkin’s hesitation to commit to marriage and universal experience of love falling apart as people lose feelings or go after extramarital affairs

-'I got back in the end’ - euphemism for the ending of the relationship, matter of fact tone, he doesn’t seem to mind that the engagement is broken off, inevitable, expecting it