•“I have no enemies.

But my friends
don't like me.” 

― Philip Larkin
 Philip Larkin – This Be The Verse (1971)

Reading Poetry

Poetry takes on different meanings, intonations, feelings and

emotions depending on how it is read, by whom, when and where.

Context is everything.

• First read the poem to yourself…

• …then your teacher will read it to the group…
• …and finally the poet will deliver his reading

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rjRYSfCJvM
Group Discussion
Before beginning to analyse the poem discuss its meaning in groups.

These questions are just a

What do you think the title means? guide.

Why do you think the title is phrased in this way? What Really we are asking you
to react to the poem.
impression does it give?
What do you make of it?
Is the poem accurate?
Make sure that each
person in your group has
Is the poem relevant today? something to say.

What phrases / words or concepts stand out to you?

Annotating the poem – The poem is in Iambic
Tetrameter
 This is how you annotate a poem to show
stressed and unstressed syllables.
Now annotate the rhyme scheme of the
poem using capital letters to indicate
rhyming words.
Is there significance to the words Larkin
chooses to associate and highlight through
rhyme?
Annotate your copy of
the poem in this way.
Discuss with your group whether the
poem completely fits this pattern.
Consider why Larkin chooses certain
words to be on the stressed or unstressed
syllables.
Consider the juxtaposition of words that
are stressed and unstressed. Is there any
significance to be found?
Viewing List
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqa6L22m0rY

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdeEFErYVtk

• The last ten minutes of each lesson should be dedicated to making

progress with these documentaries.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVv2dEUsYKI
Church Going - 1955
Reading

Before you listen to the poet reading his work, everyone should read
the poem to themselves. Unless you first encounter the poem on a one
to one basis you will forever be deprived of your true, initial, personal
reaction to it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5aKknj-q3o
Church Going – 1955 – Discussion Points
In groups discuss and present your thoughts and findings…

What is the tone of the poem? What is it’s emotional quality?

Do you feel that the poet is the speaker of the poem?
How does Larkin feel about the future of organised religion and faith?
Would you say the poem is anti-religion?
Do you think the poem is humerous in any way?
Key Poetry Term: Spondee / Spondaic
A spondee is a metrical foot (this just means a part of a line of poetry)
which contains two longer stressed syllables.

Words and phrases like football, heartbreak, childhood, dumbbell, dead

man, race track, black hole, love song and breakdown are all examples
of spondaic patterns of syllables.

Now locate the spondee in stanza one of Church Going.

 On and stone are partial rhymes
What is the effect of the
Shut and cut are full onomatopoeia in line 2?
rhymes

• Once I am sure there's nothing going on This phrase is the spondaic foot.
What effect does two elongated
I step inside letting the door thud shut. stressed syllables have on the
Another church: matting seats and stone  tone, pace and rhythm of the
poem?
and little books; sprawlings of flowers cut
For Sunday brownish now; some brass and stuff Enjambment is used throughout
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; the poem. It is particularly
powerful here in Line 4 where we
And a tense musty unignorable silence  are left with the word ‘cut’. What
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless I take off effect does this choice of word
have?
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence 
Does the stanza fit any sort of rhyme scheme? Larkin seems very dismissive of
Consider the the sacred items he encounters,
Could we fit a ABABCADCD rhyme scheme to sibilance in the listing gives the impression
it? this stanza he just glances at the items in the
carefully church. Is he being
disrespectful?
 The punctuation in lines 2 and 3 affect the pace of the As the poem moves
poem considerably and disrupt the rhythm. Which words, forward so does the
phrases and accordingly ideas, emotions and concepts are speaker, further into
highlighted as a result? the church.

Move forward run my hand around the font.

From where I stand the roof looks almost new-- What is the significance of
these words? What is it that
Cleaned or restored? someone would know: I don't. Larkin supposes is ending?
Mounting the lectern I peruse a few
hectoring large-scale verses and pronouce
What is the effect of this
Here endeth much more loudly than I'd meant personification?
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book donate an Irish sixpence 
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for. Revisit the idea of a ABABCADCD rhyme
scheme. Considering both full and partial
rhymes, to what extent is this applicable in
stanza two?
 How does the beginning of
this stanza juxtapose the
end of the previous stanza?
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do 
And always end much at a loss like this 
What is the effect of the
Wondering what to look for; wondering too phrase ‘much at a loss’?
When churches fall completely out of use What is the poet’s reaction
What we shall turn them into if we shall keep to his experiences

A few cathedrals chronically on show 

What is the effect of the use
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases  of this imagery of religious
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep. items?
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
How does Larkin link faith
and superstition?
From primitive times the term "Herbal Simple" has been
applied to any homely curative remedy consisting of one What is the impact of this
ingredient only. http://www.gardenherbs.org/herb-simples.htm adjective choice?
Or after dark will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some How does the rhetoric in
Advised night see walking a dead one? this stanza influence the
reading of the poem?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games in riddles seemingly at random;
But superstition like belief must die  How does locating this line
in the centre of the stanza
And what remains when disbelief has gone? make it resonate more to
Grass weedy pavement brambles butress sky. the reader?

Some stanzas use What does remain when

enjambment between them. faith and worship are
Not this one. How does removed from the church?
end stopping the final line of
this stanza alter the impact
of the final thought.
 How does the image of the
changing shape of the church
A shape less recognisable each week  over time act as a metaphor?
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last the very last to seek neolologism
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber randy for antique 
Or Christmas-addict counting on a whiff If a bibber is someone who
Of grown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh? regularly drinks alcohol what
could the meaning of ‘ruin
Or will he be my representative  bibber’ be?
Compound Adjectives
 Alliteration / sibilance
Silt is what remains after
something has settled. It is
what is left behind or left
over.
Bored uninformed knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation--marriage and birth 
And death and thoughts of these--for which was built References to catholic
sacraments /
This special shell? For though I've no idea ceremonies
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth 
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
 Repetition

Not robed in but robed as.

A serious house on serious earth it is  What is the significance of this
word choice?
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet 
Are recognised and robed as destinies.
Here Larkin seems to
And that much never can be obsolete  recognise that churches will
Since someone will forever be surprising always be significant.
A hunger in himself to be more serious 
What is the significance of this
And gravitating with it to this ground  word?
Which he once heard was proper to grow wise in 
If only that so many dead lie round.
Metonymy?
The poem is written in iambic pentameter.
Is a metrical pattern that consists of five stressed and five
unstressed syllables
Guardian Articles
Why must we be cautious when approaching a set of articles from the same
publication?
What are the characteristics of The Guardian newspaper?
What would it’s demographic be? Who is in it’s traditional readership?

Article 1 : All That Jazz

Why is it significant that Larkin was an enthusiast of Jazz Music?
How might we feel the influence of this music in his poetry?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK8j4kh4gtE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6MNx_WvY4E
Guardian Articles
Why must we be cautious when approaching a set of articles from the
same publication?
What are the characteristics of The Guardian newspaper?
What would it’s demographic be? Who is in it’s traditional readership?

Article 2 : Image Conscious Larkin

Is it significant that Larkin was image conscious?
How might this inform our view of his poetry?
Is it significant that he refused the role of poet Laureate?
Guardian Articles
Why must we be cautious when approaching a set of articles from the
same publication?
What are the characteristics of The Guardian newspaper?
What would it’s demographic be? Who is in it’s traditional readership?

Article 3 : Honoured at Westminster

How do you think Larkin would have felt about this honour?
Is it significant that he turned down Poet Laureate and
is still honoured in this way?
Guardian Articles
Why must we be cautious when approaching a set of articles from the
same publication?
What are the characteristics of The Guardian newspaper?
What would it’s demographic be? Who is in it’s traditional readership?

Article 4 : Dread of Literary Parties…

What do we learn about Larkin’s personality from the article?
How might these personality traits be evident in the theme
And content of his works?
Guardian Articles
Why must we be cautious when approaching a set of articles from the same
publication?
What are the characteristics of The Guardian newspaper?
What would it’s demographic be? Who is in it’s traditional readership?

Article 5: Poet’s Poll Crown’s Larkin King of Verse

What is the significance of Larkin being chosen as the nations favourite poet…?
In 2003?
Why do you think The Whitsun Weddings is the most popular poem?
The Whitsun Weddings - 1964
Try to establish the rhyme scheme of the poem
without support from your teacher.

Try also to consider the metre of the poem. Decide

how many syllables are in each line and whether
there is a pattern that holds throughout the poem.

The poem generally follows an ABABCDECDE rhyme scheme and there

are ten syllables in each line with the exception of the second line of
each stanza which has four.
•“I feel the only thing you can do
about life is to preserve it, by art if
you're an artist, by children if you're
not.”
Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica  

― Philip Larkin
 The title refers to the practice of
arranging weddings over the
Whitsun weekend as it would take
advantage of the bank holiday!
This year Whitsun is May 27th
That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river's level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.
Think about the central image of
the poem, the train.
How does this image work as a
metaphor?
What is the nature and function of
a train and how does this relate to
the subject matter and theme of
the poem?
The poem operates on a sensory,
even visceral level. Consider the
sensations that are described and
the senses that are evoked in the
poem.
The poem blurs the line between
land, sky and water. What is the
purpose of this image of the
horizon?

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars
The rhyme scheme is so subtle
and the tone so conversational
that we hardly notice the fact that
the poem is rigorously structured.
Discuss in small groups how Larkin
achieves this intimate,
conversational tone.
The poem is written in the form of a
Keatsian Ode.
The poet John Keats employed the
ABABCDECDE rhyme scheme in odes
written in iambic pentameter
It is curious that here Larkin chooses
this form as an ode is normally
associated with exaltation, celebration,
idolisation.
Is there any sense in which we can say
Larkin celebrates the subject of his
poem?
 Tone: cynical /
Caesura / Caesurae cynicism Imagery: Larkin builds a vivid
picture of the scene on the
platform.

At first, I didn't notice what a noise Highly sensory: Invokes hearing,

sight, touch, smell?
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what's happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
Enjambment used
I took for porters larking with the mails, throughout to highlight
And went on reading. Once we started, though, words. Effect of last
word?
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils, Creates a sense of
movement, the image out
All posed irresolutely, watching us go, the window frame keeps
changing. It is transient.
 How does the use of syndetic
lists alter the impact and
As if out on the end of an event resonance of the imagery of
the stanza?
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
monosyllabic
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
Syntactic Parallelism
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that
Colour imagery
In his own words:
"Whit Saturday is traditionally a good day for getting married in the
Anglican tradition. So a lot of people got on the train to London for
their honeymoons as not many people had cars. There were 6 stations
between Hull and London and there was a sense of gathering
emotional momentum. Every time you stopped fresh emotion climbed
aboard. Between Peterborough and London the whole thing felt like a
bullet, all this fresh open life and I've never forgotten it."
In his own words:
"Whit Saturday is traditionally a good day for getting married in the
Anglican tradition. So a lot of people got on the train to London for
their honeymoons as not many people had cars. There were 6 stations
between Hull and London and there was a sense of gathering
emotional momentum. Every time you stopped fresh emotion climbed
aboard. Between Peterborough and London the whole thing felt like a
bullet, all this fresh open life and I've never forgotten it."
Marked off the girls unreally from the rest. Unusually positive

Yes, from cafés

And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed Caesura/caesurae –
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days which images and
ideas are left to
Were coming to an end. All down the line
linger?
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown, Juxtaposition of
images – effect? –
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define wjhat are the
properties of confetti?
Just what it saw departing: children frowned What is larkin saying
about the advice?
At something dull; fathers had never known Why the verb
  thrown?
Harsh alliteration –
why this clipped
consonant choice?
Graphological /
typographical features

Success so huge and wholly farcical; Smile and oxymoron (oxymoronic) and
The women shared enjambment
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
Repetition / alliteration of guttural g sound
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
matrys / martydom
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Significant Caesura
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Choice of images /
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem metaphor
Just long enough to settle hats and say
Not weddings?
I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
- An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, And
someone running up to bowl - and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:
There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
‘To The Sea’ – From the collection ‘High Windows’
– Poem Completed 1969 – Published 1974
Rhyme Scheme?

Graphological Features
 Infinite verb to open:
alters level of formality,
makes it more accessible
/ general. Increases
universality of
To step over the low wall that divides experience.

Road from concrete walk above the shore Idea of horizon as in

Whitsun Weddings. A
Brings sharply back something known long before-- level of personification.
The miniature gaiety of seasides.
Listing, builds up an
Everything crowds under the low horizon: image so is imagery.
Repeated b sound,
Steep beach, blue water, towels, red bathing caps, relates to sound of
shivering
The small hushed waves' repeated fresh collapse
Rhyme schme ABBACDEEC – there is
Up the warm yellow sand, and further off structure here but it is not rigorous, one
could argue that it builds and ebbs like a
A white steamer stuck in the afternoon-- wave and that this links to the typography
of the poem.
 Repetition, and
exclamative. Each
utterance of ‘still going
on’ has different tone
due to punctuation
Still going on, all of it, still going on!
To lie, eat, sleep in hearing of the surf Semantic field / Lexical
field of words associated
(Ears to transistors, that sound tame enough with life / living /
Under the sky), or gently up and down everyday activities

Lead the uncertain children, frilled in white Creates an image /

perhaps nostalgic?
And grasping at enormous air, or wheel Colour imagery of white
connoting purity and
The rigid old along for them to feel vulnerability
A final summer, plainly still occurs Juxtaposition of young
Pun? On the last and old, comment on
As half an annual pleasure, half a rite, lifestyle?
word of the
stanza
 Cricket also mentioned
in Whistun Weddings,
reflects Britishness of
Larkin’s work and
themes
As when, happy at being on my own,
I searched the sand for Famous Cricketers, Sibilant alliteration,
reflects sound of waves.
Or, farther back, my parents, listeners
To the same seaside quack, first became known. Consider how ‘quack’
may relate to fraudulent
Strange to it now, I watch the cloudless scene: cures – link to Church
Going?
The same clear water over smoothed pebbles,
Caesura. Forces
The distant bathers' weak protesting trebles reflection on previous
words, the homogeneity
Down at its edge, and then the cheap cigars, of the beach experience
The chocolate-papers, tea-leaves, and, between Sensory language used throughout, the
tonal quality of the bathers described /
the smell of cigars
 Alliteration of a fricative
sound. There is hidden danger
here on the beach. To our
Lexical choice physical selves and
perhaps on a more
significant level?
Short sentence, draws
attention here.
Parallelism with stanza
one here.

The rocks, the rusting soup-tins, till the first

Few families start the trek back to the cars. A level of irony / sarcasm
The white steamer has gone. Like breathed-on glass here. A comment on the
traditional British
The sunlight has turned milky. If the worst summertime
Of flawless weather is our falling short, A comment on British
It may be that through habit these do best, values, prudishness /
shyness / a level of
Coming to the water clumsily undressed repression in Larkin’s
voice here?
Yearly; teaching their children by a sort
Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought. Thematic links with This
Ends on a rhyming be the Verse?
couplet
“Poetry is nobody’s business except
the poet’s, and everybody else can
fuck off.”

― Philip Larkin
‘The Building’ – Linked Themes
Active reading and annotation. Consider any evidence of
Larkin’s common themes:
As you read the poem annotate it for: • Environment and pollution
• Britishness and identity
Rhyme scheme
• Traditions
Metrical Structure
• Death and mortality
Language Features
• Work
Images and Imagery
• Religion, faith and god/God
• Families and children
“Life has a practice of living you, if
you don't live it.”

Philip Larkin
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-40496677 Poem written in 1972
Published in

‘The Building’ – Linked Themes collection ‘High

Windows’ (1974)

Use the boxes below to find quotations that relate to the linked themes
of bodily, spiritual and mental health.
Bodily Health Spiritual Health Mental Health

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wMeGzpy9Ds
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-40496677 Poem written in 1972
Published in

‘The Building’ – Linked Themes collection ‘High

Windows’ (1974)

Use the boxes below to find quotations that relate to the linked themes
of bodily, spiritual and mental health.
Bodily Health Spiritual Health Mental Health

“Those who tamely sit on “The unseen “The thought of dying”

rows on steel chairs”
“restless and resigned”
congregations” “A touching dream to
which we all are lulled”
“the end of choice, the last
of hope I and all here to
confess that something has
gone wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wMeGzpy9Ds
 http://
Comparison / www.thelarkintrail.co.uk/beyond-the-city-centre.php?item=trialItem_nam
comparative e_12
Repetition of h sound
Higher than the handsomest hotel
The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see, Compound adjective
All round it close-ribbed streets rise and fall
Like a great sigh out of the last century.
The porters are scruffy; what keep drawing up
caesurae
At the entrance are not taxis; and in the hall
As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell.
simile
 Use of nasal sounds m
and n

There are paperbacks, and tea at so much a cup,

Like an airport lounge, but those who tamely sit
On rows of steel chairs turning the ripped mags
Compound adjective
Haven't come far. More like a local bus.
These outdoor clothes and half-filled shopping-bags
And faces restless and resigned, although
Every few minutes comes a kind of nurse caesurae
Simile / liquid sounds
Simile / liquid sounds
 Assonance takes place when two or more
words close to one another repeat the
same vowel sound but start with different
consonant sounds.
To fetch someone away: the rest refit
Cups back to saucers, cough, or glance below
Seats for dropped gloves or cards. Humans, caught
On ground curiously neutral, homes and names
Suddenly in abeyance; some are young,
Some old, but most at that vague age that claims
The end of choice, the last of hope; and all
 Comparison to church /
are hospitals the new Assonance
churches / can they offer
Caesura / ae
redemption or salvation /
can they save us?

Here to confess that something has gone wrong.

It must be error of a serious sort, Sibilant / hushed tones

For see how many floors it needs, how tall

It's grown by now, and how much money goes
Like in ‘Church Going’ we
In trying to correct it. See the time, fund the building /
resources in order to
Half-past eleven on a working day, sustain the activity it
provides.
And these picked out of it; see, as they climb
Themes of inevitability of
aging, infirmity and
death.
Key Term - Anaphora
• In writing or speech, the deliberate repetition of the (first) part of the
sentence in order to achieve an artistic effect is known as anaphora.

• “Every day, every night, in every way, I am getting better and better”
• “My life is my purpose. My life is my goal. My life is my inspiration.”
• “Buying nappies for the baby, feeding the baby, playing with the baby:
This is what your life is when you have a baby.”
• “I want my money right now, right here, all right?”

http://literarydevices.net/anaphora/
 Assonance Compound adjective

Caesura / ae
To their appointed levels, how their eyes
Go to each other, guessing; on the way
Someone's wheeled past, in washed-to-rags ward clothes:
They see him, too. They're quiet. To realise Universality of Theme /
common human
This new thing held in common makes them quiet, experience / illness is a
great equaliser of people
For past these doors are rooms, and rooms past those,
And more rooms yet, each one further off
Repetition / anaphora
 Extended / metaphor

misogynist

Caesura / ae
And harder to return from; and who knows
Explanatory colon
Which he will see, and when? For the moment, wait,
Look down at the yard. Outside seems old enough:
Theme of construction /
Red brick, lagged pipes, and someone walking by it urbanisation /
competition with nature
Out to the car park, free. Then, past the gate,
Traffic; a locked church; short terraced streets
Where kids chalk games, and girls with hair-dos fetch
Theme of stages of life /
maturity / adolescence /
Theme of religion /
innocence and naivety of
buildings / buildings
youth
reflecting their societies.
Repetition / anaphora

Their separates from the cleaners - O world,

Your loves, your chances, are beyond the stretch
Of any hand from here! And so, unreal Caesura / ae /
A touching dream to which we all are lulled Exclamation

But wake from separately. In it, conceits

Repetitive liquid l
And self-protecting ignorance congeal
To carry life, collapsing only when
Compound adjective
Syntactic parallelism Parenthetical phrase

Theme of uncertainty
Called to these corridors (for now once more
The nurse beckons -). Each gets up and goes Caesura / ae /

At last. Some will be out by lunch, or four;

Others, not knowing it, have come to join Parallelism

The unseen congregations whose white rows

Lie set apart above - women, men;
Old, young; crude facets of the only coin
Theme of religion /
buildings / buildings
reflecting their societies.
 Metaphor: Sickness /
infirmity is the currency
of this place. Caesura / ae /

This place accepts. All know they are going to die.

Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,
And somewhere like this. That is what it means,
This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend
The thought of dying, for unless its powers
Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes
The coming dark, though crowds each evening try
Theme of religion /
Compound adjective buildings / buildings
reflecting their societies.
 serving or intended to propitiate

With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers. conciliatory

offered by way of expiation

atonement

making amends or reparation for guilt or wrongdoing

Discussion Points – Theme and Structure
• Rhyme Scheme? Religion / Uncertainty / Faith /
ABBACDCD Belief / God

• Themes? Mortality / Death

References to Nature / Water

and the sea / our relationship
• Use of enjambment? to nature

Use of enjambment differs Identity / self-questioning /

from other poems questioning of society
Key Term: Metonymy
Metonymy is a figure of speech that replaces the name of a thing with
the name of something else with which it is closely associated. 

Examples could include:

The Oval Office / The White House
Give me a hand
All hands on deck
The pen is mightier than the sword
Key Term: Synecdoche
Synecdoche is a literary device in which a part of something represents
the whole, or it may use a whole to represent a part. Synecdoche may
also use larger groups to refer to smaller groups, or vice versa. It may
also call a thing by the name of the material it is made of, or it may
refer to a thing in a container or packaging by the name of that
container or packing.
•I don’t think I write well – just
better than anyone else.

Philip Larkin
 Alliteration / fricative

Many Famous Feet Have Trod

Synecdoche belonging to this world as contrasted with a better or more
spiritual one.
Many famous feet have trod
Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed Repetition / Anaphora
The strength they have against the strength they need;
And famous lips interrogated God
Parentheses / Parentetical
Concerning franchise in eternity;
And in many differing times and places
Form of metaphor
Truth was attained (a moment's harmony);
Yet endless mornings break on endless faces. Written for the never published
collection ‘In The Grip of Light’
(1947) – First published in
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/07/26/twice-
‘Collected Poems’ (1988)
collected
 Natural Imagery /
Sibilance

not to be revoked or recalled; unable to be repealed or

annulled; unalterable:
Gold surf of the sun, each day
Stanza Links to Stanza 1 :
Exhausted through the world, gathers and whips Imagery of heavenly
Irrevocably from eclipse; bodies

The trodden way becomes the untrodden way,

We are born each morning, shelled upon
Figurative Language /
A sheet of light that paves Extended Metaphor /
Personification / Pathetic
The palaces of sight, and brings again Fallacy (pathos)
The river shining through the field of graves.
Lexical choices to do with
water on first and last line.
Such renewal argues down
Allusion to the sacrament
Our unsuccessful legacies of thought, of holy communion?

Annals of men who fought

Repetition of ‘or’ showing
Untiringly to change their hearts to stone, indecisinveness or
alternatives
Or to a wafer's poverty,
Or to a flower, but never tried to learn Symbolism

The difficult triple sanity

Or being wafer, stone and flower in turn. List
Reflection
“And in many differing times and places
Truth was attained (a moment's harmony);”

Reconsider this line from stanza one. It is important in understanding what the
poem is about.

The poem is about a search for truth and wisdom.

What can we infer about the poet’s views on insight and wisdom from these
words?
 Obverse of coin is always
the ‘heads’ side. Divisions / splits /
contrasts
Extended Metaphor

Turn out your pockets on the tablecloth; Act of turning out pockets:
reflecting on experience
Consider what we know. A silver piece: and life.
Silver coin: life
That's life; and, dealing in dichotomies, Copper coin: death
Markings on coin:
This old discoloured copper coin is death. experiences of life
Turn it about; it is impenetrable. The spinning of the coin:
whole life experience.
Reverse and obverse, neither bear
A sign or word remotely legible: caesurae
But spin the silver to a sphere.
Colons develop ides,
explain and expand
 Lexical choice.
Connotations of religion.
Links to common Larkin
theme of faith and
religion.

Look in, and testify. Our mortal state Personification

In turn is twisted in a double warp:

The light is waking and the dark is sleep
And twice a day before their gate
We kneel between them. There is more Pun – play on words –
Knowledge of sleep than death, and yet word has two meanings

Who knows the nature of our casting there,

Trawled inaccessible pool, or set
Metaphor again
A line to haul its logic into speech? The poem is about trying
to articulate the
Easier to balance on the hand inarticulatable
The waking that our senses can command, neologism
For jewels are pebbles on a beach
Before this weaving, scattering, winged-and-footed Draws a distinction
Privilege, this first, untold between sensory
experience, understanding
And unrecurring luck that is never completed and truth and intellectual,
cerebral, emotional insight
Even in distance out of our hands' hold, and wisdom
Paramount = of most
Division recalls words from
importance
previous stanzas such as
dichotomies and double

That makes, this waking traffic, this one last,

One paramount division. I declare Lineage – heritage /
bloodline / family
Two lineages electrify the air,
simile
That will like pennons from a mast
Suggests that sorrow and
Fly over sleep and life and death joy are more substantial
and long lasting than even
Till sun is powerless to decoy the sun itself.
A single seed above the earth;
Lineage of sorrow: Lineage of joy;
No longer think them aspects of the same; Continues the idea of ancestry /
Beyond each figured shield I trace lineages / history

A different ancestry, a different face,

Internal rhyme
And sorrow must be held to blame
Personification / metaphor
Because I follow it to my own heart
To find it feeding there on all that's bad: Fricative alliteration

It is sanctionable and right

Always to be ashamed of being sad.
Moral content / ethical content /
philosophical thought
 Almanac a metaphor for life
Ashamed that sorrow's beckoned in
By each foiled weakness in the almanac
Engendered by the instinct-to-turn back Parenthetical commas

-Which, if there are sins, should be called a sin-

Instinct that so worships my own face Peculiarly religious phrasing…
again
It would halt time herewith
And put my wishes in its place:
And for this reason has great fear of death.
 Image of the sea / water / link to
the moon / figurative language
 
Because tides wound it; Alliteration

The scuttling sand; the noose

Of what I have and shall lose, Metaphor

Or have not and cannot get;

Partings in time or space
Wound it; it weeps sorely;
Holds sorrow before its face,
And all to pretend it is not part of me,
 Anaphora / repetition
The blind part. I know what it will not know:
All stopping-up of cracks
Metaphoric language / figurative
Against dissolution builds a house of wax,
While years in wingspans go
Across and over our heads. Watch them: Continues the theme of water /
cleansing / renewal / life /
They are flying east. They are flying to the ebb sunrise / rebirth . New
beginnings
Of dark. They are making sorrow seem
sibilance
A spider busy on a forgotten web.
 Compound adjective

synecdoche
They are calling every fibre of the world
Into rejoicing, a mile-long silken cloth
Of wings moving lightwards out of death:
Lineage of joy into mortality hurled,
Endowing every actual bone Explanatory colons
Must tread sublunary paths, attest this one:
Perpetual study to defeat
References to previous stanzas
Synecdoche is a stylistic device. It is
the act of referring to an entity by one of
its parts. For example, if you refer to
your car as your "wheels", you are
using synecdoche. "All hands on deck!"
is another example. Syndecdoche is
closely related to but different from
metonymy, where a concept is referred
to by something closely associated.
 personification

Each slovenly grief; the patience to expose

Untrue desire; assurance that, in sum,
Nothing's to reach, but something's to become,
That must be pitched upon the luminous,
Denying rest. Joy has no cause:
Though cut to pieces with a knife,
Cannot keep silence. What else should magnetize Terminal rhetoric
Our drudging, hypocritical, ecstatic life?
Discussion Question

How does Larkin explore the nature, location

and duration of moments of insight and
understanding in life in the poem ‘Many
Famous Feet Have Trod’?
•Deprivation is for me what daffodils
were for Wordsworth.
•
Philip Larkin
MCMXIV (1964)
Read the poem and locate commonalities with poems we have
encountered to date on the course.

Try to identify both thematic and language/structural/language

commonalities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4YyZTMfDOk
Thematic commonalities
Thematic commonalities
“stretch outside the Oval” links to “Famous Cricketers” in To The Sea
Sports ground were used for army recruitment – this contrasts the use of sporting
grounds for different reasons.
Stanza 2 – “farthings and sovereigns” – links to image of coins in MFFHT – theme of
inheritance in This Be The Verse
Stanza 4 – “Never such innocence” – parallelism – theme of children – everywhere
else! Generations – the future.
Less reference to religion – due to subject matter?
“archaic” links to “antique” in Church Going – theme of tradition – the past - nostalgia
“tin advertisements” – “rusting soup tins” in to the sea – image of what time can do to
materials – metaphor
Link of bank holiday to Whistun Weddings – British traditions.
Definite link to man made / nature
Thematic commonalities
Observational poem? – Not a participant but a watcher and
commentator – links to The Building – To the Sea – Whitsun Weddings –
Church Going - High Windows.
The effects of war – philosophic reflection on pre/post wartime – MFFHT
Deprivation – Church Going – Toads / Toads Revisited
Time – Toads Revisited – MFFHT
Britishness / Englishness – TWW / To The Sea
Conflict
Nature
Language Commonalities
Language / Structure Commonalities
Use of explanatory colons – common to Larkin as he expands on ideas.
Regular stanza length – often used elsewhere
Line length / graphology – To The Sea – this time representing possibly
the lines of people waiting to sign up.
Language relating to childhood and children’s play.
Use of imagery to do with countryside – urban and rural environments
Lexical fields associated with Britishness
References to the sun – skies - moon (lunary) – MFFHT
Language / Structure Commonalities

Structurally similar to Toads – links to idea of routine / repetition

No consistent rhyme scheme – the building
Used of compound adjectives “differently-dressed” “dark-clothed”
Use of compound noun “place-names”
Use of explanatory colon stanza 3
Cyclical structure – MFFHT
Structure link to Church Going – EPISODIC
Repetition for structural effect – seen elsewhere – Church Going
• “Morning, noon & bloody night,
Seven sodding days a week,
I slave at filthy WORK, that might
Be done by any book-drunk freak.
This goes on until I kick the bucket.
FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT”
― Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
Dockery and Son (1967)
Read the poem and locate commonalities with poems we have
encountered to date on the course.

Try to identify both thematic and language/structural commonalities.

Read the article about Dockery and Son which connects the poem to
Larkin’s other major works that we have considered and Toads and
Toads Revisited which we will consider next and which remain
concerned with the theme of work.
Thematic commonalities
• Religion / god / faith / belief + society and the individual “good lord”
• “bell chimes” – churches weddings / religious buildings
• “and age, an d then the only end of age” – theme of ageing and detah / mortality /
afterlife / health / infirmity / illness
• Also in “death suited” themes of death and mortality, but also fasion / clothing / style
• “unhindered moon” – lunar connections
• “I catch my train” “the platform” – trains
• “canal and clouds” – natural images – deprivation – destruction of nature
• “….Shefiield” – urbanisation – destruction of landscape – environmental deprivation
• Families – “no son, no wife” – paternal relationships – parenting
Commonalities
Theme of death and mortality – MFFHT and throughout his works – relevant to last
line of poem. Links to ‘Ambulances’ (1961) – attitude to death and mortality changes
as time progresses – increased awareness.
Clear links to ‘Whitsun Weddings’ and ‘Here’ in terms of (train) journeys – repeated
metaphor of trains and train travel – trains are observational – interesting metaphor
for life – not being the driver – travelling on tracks – stops at stations.
Theme of generations and family – use of anaphora (‘no’) – link to ‘High Windows’ –
reflective / celebrative tone – questions self – regretful?
Theme of traditions – institutions of marriage / family – links to To The Sea and Church
Going
Themes of meaninglessness of life and death in MMFHT
Use of enjambment and caesura to bring thoughts to the foreground.
Use of compound adjectives to add detail.
Theme of Larkin as a voyeur (as a watcher / secretive / observational) – Links to ‘High
Windows’ – ‘Aubade’ - use of explanatory colon.
Language Commonalities
Use of caesura / caesurae / enjambment
Compound adjectives
simile in last stanza – uses natural image
Neologism – unbreakfasted
Anaphora – how much…how little
Repetition of negative tonal words
Use of parenthetical commas
Clipped consonant sounds repeated (canal and clouds and college)
Explanatory colon
Language Commonalities
Toads and Toads Revisited