By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Home is so Sad’ was completed on New Year’s Eve 1958, while Philip Larkin was staying at his mother’s house in Loughborough during the Christmas holidays. Larkin was often inspired to write some of his most moving poems about home while visiting his mother, and this is one of his clearest poems written on this theme. It appeared in The Whitsun Weddings in 1964.