Home is so sad

• ‘Shaped to the comfort of the last to go, As if to win them back.’

  • Each line contains ten syllables. This reliable metre creates a stable, predictable beat leading the reader through the poem.
  • Metaphor of memories invested and significance they hold in certain times and places. Syntax from the first line is extended by a subordinate clause, runs on for the next two lines leaving an uneasy feeling in the reader.
  • Shaped to someone else preference, therefore leaving a discomforting atmosphere. Without loved ones, the heart of this ‘home’-no meaning left,its identity is fundamentally destroyed
• ‘it withers so, having no heart to put aside the theft’

  • personification - our pride in investing so much and yet in the end it simply conveys our ephemeral human nature, our inferiority at the hands of time
  • verb ‘withers’ - degradation, decay, loss - times illusory and derogatory nature - disillusionment at the ill-fated effects of time.
  • The shortening sentences become fragments, shards of nostalgia and loss that embed in the heart.
  • Ordinary domestic objects- reduced to relics of the past no longer in use.
•  “joyous shot at how things ought to be/long fallen wide”

  • The depth of disappointment captured in the adjective “long” and verb “fallen” is amplified by Larkin’s use of enjambment.
  • Juxtaposition of “joyous shot ”(the past) and “long fallen wide” (reality)= the chasm between the hopes of the past & the harsh realities of the present/a future devoid of hope.
  • Home" becomes an embodiment of thwarted idealism, like a failed work of art. Homes remain behind as a kind of gloomy shrine, memorialising all that the family hoped for in life but never managed to attain.
• ‘You can see how it was: Look at the pictures and the cutlery.’

  • Ordinary objects within the household are depicted as relics of the past symbolising the grief and pain of the lonely, ageing persona who can only look to the past for meaning in their life.
  • The objects, now redundant, serve as memento mori- (a symbol of death and a reminder that we will all one day die)
  • Symbolises the clutter in the psyche of the persona - suffocating, dispiriting reminders of what used to be but is no longer present. Lists to slow down time and leave the reader with a snapshot of a scene.
• ‘The music in the piano stool. That vase’

  • Vase” is the additional beat, adds to its out of place.
  • noun ‘music’: a way of expressing the deepest passions of humanity -music is an abstract noun: illusory nature of time and our fragility. Noun ‘vase’: flowers connoting joy, brilliance, however they die and wither.
  • metaphors of the depictions of the past: bereavement of the alienated, only look to the past for comfort and security.
  • iambic pentameter in the poem, disrupted by end line, resonating with the crumbling mental state of a person who is left with only commodities of insignificance.