Ambulances

Since many of Larkin’s poems leaned towards death and the miserable, it is no surprise to
discover that death is a prevalent topic in “Ambulances”. Larkin was fascinated by the human
condition and death is part of it, and its randomness and inevitability are interesting to Larkin
for the analysis. “Ambulances” was written for the collection “The Whitsun Weddings”.

In his opening stanza, Larkin describes ambulances as something sacred, comparing them to
confessionals. Those are the vehicles, but for Larkin, they are something mysterious. Larkin's
similes are notable for their startling accuracy; they are not far-fetched yet always seem just and
inevitable even if they are more expressive than they first appear. Ambulances are put apart
from everything else, they ‘thread / loud noons of cities, giving back / none of the glances they
absorb’, and they are not in touch with people in the surrounding. Disaster in the poem happens
during those “loud noons of cities”, attended by “children on steps or road” and women
rushing “past smell of different dinners”. In the book “The Whitsun Weddings and The Less
Deceived by Philip Larkin” Swarbrick (1986) notices that the atmosphere and urban life in the
poem are characterized by “impersonality, tedium, drabness and occasionally fear”. 1
Onlookers find themselves randomly caught up in somebody else's loss and tragedy, spectators
of 'A wild white face' which interrupts their mundane routine. The focus in the second stanza is
on the stretcher, not on the actual corpse. It seems that Larkin ignores the issue of death, never
approaching it head-on. This immediate presence of death brings to the surface this “emptiness/
that lies just under all we do”. For a moment, people became aware of their mortality and the
infinite emptiness of death that will strike them one day. They whisper “Poor soul” and feel
pity for themselves, not for this dead person, as they are suddenly conscious of the inevitability
of their death. The fourth stanza is about extinction. As the ambulance drives off in “deadened
air, the constituent elements of someone’s life as “'the unique random blend/ Of families and
fashions' begin to come apart. Everything that composed an individual’s life unravels as death
comes to the person carried away in the ambulance. In the last stanza, the “white face” lies
“unreachable” and remote. Watching the ambulance, people are closer to the void of their death.
It 'dulls to distance all we are' in confronting us with the inescapable reality of death. As
Swarbrick describes it: “The living identity we feel ourselves to have and which is given
substance by our daily habits and behavior suddenly perishes in the face of death's continuous
presence. Ambulances confront us with 'what is left to come': our own death.” (p- 67) Larkin
uses familiar incident to clarify our common response. This ambulance simply attends the final
accident in the series of accidents that make up the 'unique random blend' we call life. In the
final two stanzas, Larkin merges abstract and concrete language (the abstraction of 'unique
random blend' is given a tangible concreteness by the metaphor of ‘cohered ... .loosen'), and he
did it masterly.

The poem has a simple a/b/c/b/c/a rhyme scheme which gives the poem solidity and the tone
represents stately gravity and urgent seriousness. Alliteration is also present in the poem, as in
they/thread, glossy/grey, different/dinners, wild/white, families/fashion, dull/distance. In the
1

https://pdf.zlibcdn.com/dtoken/1a7012c95d19e07cf78740ec0154fa89/The_Less_Deceived_and_the_Whitsun_
Weddings_by_Phil_2670517_(z-lib.org).pdf
third stanza, there is a repetition of the word “And” -- "And sense the solving emptiness/That
lies just under all we do, And for a second get it whole/So permanent and blank and true; used
to deliver the idea of death as a bitter truth. 2 Also, I have to mention enjambment in the fourth
and fifth stanza; the idea of the fourth stanza runs over to the fifth.

2
https://www.academia.edu/29235704/Stylistics_Analysis_of_the_Poem_Ambulance_by_Philip_Larkin