By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
How we should analyse Philip Larkin’s poetry depends on what phase of his career we’re dealing with. In ‘Send No Money’, Larkin examines the gulf between our expectations of the world and the somewhat less satisfying realities the world provides us with.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Stephen Spender (1909-95) said of Tony Harrison’s series of elegies for his parents that they were the sort of poetry he felt he’d been waiting his whole life for. ‘Timer’, which was published in Harrison’s 1981 collection The School of Eloquence, is one of the most famous of these. You can read ‘Timer’ here; in this post we’re going to offer some notes towards an analysis of Harrison’s poem.
A reading of one of his best poems
Everything about ‘Poem’ by Simon Armitage is understated. It opens with a casual ‘And’ (‘And if it snowed’), as if merely a continuation of something already in progress. It has an ‘anti-title’ which refuses to comment on the content of the poem that follows. (Armitage is fond of using such titles.) Its lines are all end-stopped with a full stop, suggesting a flatness of expression. Yet there is more to it than might first meet the eye. In this post, we’re going to offer some words towards an analysis of Armitage’s ‘Poem’, which you can read here.
‘Poem’ is a sort of obituary for an anonymous man – we know it’s an obituary because he is referred to in the past tense and is being ‘rated’ by people at the end of the poem, as if they are seeking to assess his whole life. The poem notes the different sides to the man’s personality. The fourth, eighth, and twelfth lines provide an insight into the darker and less pleasant side of the man, while the rest of the poem – or those first twelve lines, anyway – describe the good things he did. When it snowed, he would go out with a spade and clear the driveway. He was an attentive father, tucking his daughter up in bed every night. His daughter was clearly a good child, as she only ever lied ‘one time’, we are told; but he beat her with a slipper for this single transgression.
A summary of a Rossetti poem by Dr Oliver Tearle
‘Good Friday’ was published in Christina Rossetti’s 1866 collection The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. The poem is about Rossetti’s struggle to feel close to Christ and the teachings of Christianity, and to weep for the sacrifice he made. Below we offer a short summary and analysis of ‘Good Friday’, focusing on its language and meaning.
Interesting facts from Larkin’s life 1. Philip Larkin wrote a number of stories featuring girls at boarding school. While he was completing his English degree at St John’s College, Oxford in 1943, Larkin started writing stories and poems – and even a whole novella, Trouble at Willow Gables – under the pseudonym Brunette Coleman. The … Read more