First Sight

Lyric poem (song-like) quality - meter (rhyme) expressing a personal point of view in which Larkin contemplates the plight of new born lambs that are born into a snow-bound landscape.

The semantic field formed by words that carry connotations of bleakness and suffering creating a melancholic tone.

‘Meeting a vast unwelcome’ - Metaphor conveys memorably the inhospitable nature of the natural world.

‘Hidden round them, waiting too,” - Personification of the spring

‘Earth’s immeasurable surprise’ - Metaphor for spring numinous imagery suggests the regenerative power of nature. Juxtaposes with the bleak and hopeless metaphor of the first septet.

‘Could not grasp it if they knew’ - suggestive of the lambs’ innocence

‘Soon’ - Time in terms of renewal rather than diminishment

‘Utterly unlike’ - Alliteration emphasises the juxtaposition between winter and spring. Despair and hope.

Truncated meter gives further emphasis to the contrast between spring and winter.

Larkin adopts some of the features of romantic poetry within ‘first sight’ as nature is presented with both moral and human terms offering us a lesson in hope. Romantics believed that nature was a moral tutor.