Love songs in age

• ‘One bleached, one marked, one mended…’

  • Anaphora - repetitive rhythm, perhaps exaggerating the inevitability of nature to run its course, ‘one’ ironically repeated three times - can be seen to be counting in relation to music, counting beats or bars - the acknowledgement of time as a key theme
  • Juxtaposition - ‘bleached’ and ‘coloured’ the fading of age against the hope of youth
  • Syntax - ‘mended’ is last → something lasting and united, damage expecting to be repaired
• ‘Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein

  That hidden freshness, sung’

  • Personification - ‘hidden freshness sung’ implications that the rest of the world is in decay or are empty of this freshness and vitality.
  • Caesura - ‘hidden freshness, sung,’ continues Larkin’s use of music as extended metaphor and lens by which the woman can view love
  • Youth was considered to be ‘unfailing’ - infinite, and spring imagery suggests an invigorating and fresh life just beginning
• 'The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,'

  • Tone of ‘glare’ - interesting double meaning in shining, dazzling light against the negativity on the horizon of the aggressive stare, link to scowling which alludes to the bitter sweetness of love / alternatively perhaps can be seen to personify the ‘brilliance’ as glaring down in disapproval or resentment
  • Irony- ‘much-mentioned’ in actual fact despite the title of love songs in age, the poet does not actually mention love in light of Larkin’s cynical outlook towards romance.
  • Sharp, bright, intense but painful and damaging too.
• ‘Its bright incipience sailing above, Still promising to solve, and satisfy,’

  • Metaphor ‘bright incipience’ - bright beginnings as love would be, the thing that would change everything for you, the endlessness of possibilities, untarnished, hopeful and optimistic, alludes to an image of sunshine and illuminating
  • Love promises to ‘solve’ and ‘satisfy’ and at the time appears to be the answer to everything. It is a solution that is a lie as we have unrealistic expectations for it.
  • Metaphor ‘sailing above’ - sense of gliding along, smooth and rapid but perhaps also out of reach.