Background to the poem

The title of Larkin’s poem (1914 in Roman numerals) immediately locates the poem within a specific time and a specific event. Why might he have chosen to use Roman numerals rather than the more familiar Arabic numerals?

Larkin was born four years after the end of World War 1 and so his impressions of the men queuing to enlist at the start of the war that he records in one long 32 line sentence are governed by photographs he has seen. A photographer has captured the grinning faces of the men who look like they are waiting to get in to a football or cricket ground oblivious to the horrors that await them. Note the picture of England Larkin creates in the second stanza which deftly captures a society on the brink of monumental change.

The countryside is depicted as neglected but “not caring” in the third stanza as fields start to revert to divisions recorded in the Domesday Book, the great land survey of 1086. Does this reference also introduce a sense of “Doomsday” and a looming, imminent catastrophe?

The poem deals in humane, ironic, nostalgic fashion with England at a moment of innocence destroying change. The great houses have lost their servants; the sleek limousines have no one to drive them and gather dust whilst men from different classes leave gardens “tidy” in an act that inevitably makes us think of the contrast with the chaos that will confront them in the trenches.

About Phillip Larkin

Larkin’s four main volumes of poetry cover only about a hundred pages and were produced over forty years ago and yet he is regarded as one of the finest poets of post war Great Britain. Why is he held in such high regard? The answer probably lies in the fact that he was technically brilliant and valued clarity and precision in his poetry. He could work with strict metres and polished rhymes and yet still incorporate the sounds and voices of modern life. He was an astute observer of people and places, situations and events.

He was a shy, undemonstrative man who spent most of his working life as the Librarian at the University of Hull. He did not travel widely or tour or perform. His poems are not full of linguistic fireworks and some may see in them a kind of unsettling melancholy pessimism. However, they are beautifully crafted and accessible and unfailingly honest in the way they look at modern life. Take a look at those slim volumes of poetry and see what you think.

Read more about Phillip Larkin in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography