larkin

lines on a young lady’s photograph album

mood - nostalgic, desiring, contemplative, discerning

themes - childhood, the past, relationships, class

structure - 6 quintets of (mostly) iambic pentameter

techniques

• ‘i choke on such nutritious images

  • metaphor, not literally choking, but shows abundance, ‘images’ emphasises the artificiality, the consonance demonstrates the desire for consumption

• ‘not quite your class, i’d say, dear, on the whole’

  • narratorial interjection, moral judgement, upper class expectations, ‘dear’ used condescendingly

• ‘faithful and disappointing!’

  • dissatisfaction with reality, terminal caesura used for an uncertain metre, exclamatory

poetry of departures

mood - dissatisfied, frustrated, restless, dejected

themes - ambition, fulfilment, the mundane

structure - 4 octaves of varied metre

technqiues

• ‘I detest my room / its specially-chosen junk’

  • oxymoron, compounded adjectives, simple assertion, common language

• ‘this audacious, purifying, / elemental move’

  • tricolon of adjectives, seemingly unrelated, creates disjunction. complex language mirrors the speaker’s struggle to understand / ‘approve’, pronoun ‘this’ is removed from its noun ‘move’ by further qualification — struggle to understand

• ‘leaves me flushed and stirred’

  • sexual connotations, vulnerability, desire, ‘leaves’ also implies vulnerability, and places the speaker on the outside of the action, as well as of the adventure

triple time

mood - dejected, hopeless, regretful, lamenting

themes - regret, passivity, the past, time

structure - three tercets of controlled metre and rhyme

techniques

• ‘this is the future furthest childhood saw’

  • assertion that unqualified ‘this is the future’ adds to the sense of vagueness and disconnection with the present, the fricative alliteration in the line confuses the syllables and blurs the image, the phrase ‘furthest childhood’ complicates the image and makes it uncertain as to what the speaker means

• ‘that we insensately forbore to fleece’

  • the collective pronoun ‘we’ makes a claim about humanity as a whole, the connotations of ‘forebore’ as a refrain imply the subjects’ passivity in a decision they themselves made, the adverb ‘insensately’ details the frustration at the self

• ‘this empty street, this sky to blandness scoured’

  • the immediate introduction of emptiness informs the tone of the poem, the pronoun ‘this’ assumes that the reader will be familiar with what he is talking about, and the anaphora of it creates a specific image without larkin actually giving much detail

places, loved ones

mood - fed up tbh

themes - disappointment, imperfection, indecision

structure - 3 octets of iambic trimeter,
techniques -

• ‘you want no choice in where / to build or whom to love’

  • connects to title, and conveys wider theme of the significance of choices, identifies individual responsibility

• ‘the place where i could say’

  • the place singular and specific, could is conditional rather than future or present

• ‘your person, your place’

  • Direct address to personalise, separates the speaker from the subject, distinguishes him

coming

mood - nostalgic, unsettled, introspective

themes - childhood, suburbia, appearances vs reality

structure - one stanza of 19 lines, no regular rhyme scheme or line length

techniques -

• ‘a thrush sings, / laurel-surrounded / in the deep bare garden’

  • an innocent image (the singing thrust) is complicated and mystified by the following lines. The compound adjective ‘laurel-surrounded’ make it seem trapped, and ‘laurels’ carry varied connotations, although the most apt here is probably the christian crown of laurels, signifying sacrifice and loss. The ‘deep bare garden’ is very reminiscent of middle class suburban childhoods, but slightly eerie given the plosive sounds and juxtaposition of adjectives

• ‘it will be spring soon, / it will be spring soon —’

  • between these repeated lines there is a shift in tone from the speaker which signifies a change of focus from the scene itself, where it will be spring soon, to the speaker, who knows it will be spring soon and goes on to dwell on his place within the scene. ‘spring’ has connotations of birth and renewal, which is unsettling and ironic, because this poem seems so trapped in the past

• ‘and i, whose childhood / is a forgotten boredom’

  • the enjambement disjoins the sentence to build tension, the disconnection between ‘i, ‘whose’ separates the speaker from ‘i’, as though he’s reflecting, the present tense is strange when talking about childhood and things ‘forgotten’.

reasons for attendance

mood - isolated, dismissive, superior

themes - life vs art, relationships, modernity, society

structure - four stanzas of tight iambic pentameter

techniques -

• ‘ - or so i fancy, sensing the smoke and sweat’

  • sibillant alliteration makes the scene more vivid, the hyphen dash separates the speaker, and ‘i fancy’ separates him further

• ‘what calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell / (art, if you like)

  • ‘lifted’ implies superiority tbh, ‘rough-tongued’ is disconcerting, but might denote vagueness or unpredictability? maybe even cruelty, bc being an artist is so hard 🙄. The little parenthesis is just pretentious

• ‘therefore i stay outside, / believing this, and they maul to and fro, / believing that’

  • the structure is really satisfying, the juxtaposition between ‘i’ and ‘they’, about as opposed as pronouns can be, on different lines with paralleled structures describing the two sides. ‘stay’ and ‘maul’ and opposing verbs too, maybe showing his civilisation and their savagery, more elitism.

dry-point

mood - frustrated, restless, repressed

themes - sexual frustration, worthlessness, death

structure - loose iambic pentameter, variatio and lack of rhyme scheme

techniques -

• ‘it will grow again until we begin dying’

  • something something freud sex and death, inevitability, men just can’t help themselves whatever this is gross

• ‘bestial, intent, real’

  • tricolon of weird and disjunct adjectives, ‘bestial’ is a little bit repressed, ‘intent’ is awfully vivid, and ‘real’ is just sort of sad

• ‘that padlocked cube of light / we neither define nor prove’

  • making sweeping statements about all people, which is bold given the subject matter. ‘padlocked’ implies repression and restriction, ‘cube of light’ is ethereal, and if you can’t define or prove something, what even is it? abstract?