Love Songs In Age Flashcards
Context
-about his mother although she is unnamed
-written after a visit to her at Christmas the previous year
- at the time she was 71 and had been widowed for 25 years
- represents larkins cynical view of relationships
-he was associated with the ‘movement’, this poem aligns with the recurring themes of nostalgia and inevitability of time passing and disappointment
Structure
-written in lose iambic pentameter
- uses long sentences that which culminates in the emotional core of the poem
-running from the first line”she played them first”
-effect smoothly transitions from larkins detached observervation of his mother as she find her “songs” to an empathetic remianganing of her emotions as she relives hearing them for the “first” time reawakening her youth
“ it had not done so then and could not now”
- showings that the love has left to disappointment and the promise of love held in these songs has unfifilled then and still now
- could be Larkin projecting his feelings of disappointment in his own relationships onto the relationshipp he experienced between his parents
- stark acknowledgement of disillusionment
-gap between ideal and lived experience
“She”
-opens woth an anonymous personal pronoun
- giving a sense of detachment from his subject
-the detachment gives way to empathy as he re imagines the woman’s thoughts and feelings and ends in revelation
- a link between the subject matter and Larkin himself, and , it is implied the reader
“So little space”
- shows how the woman’s world hass diminished in her old age left alone
“And coloured by her daughter” “ and stood/relearning”
- finding this forgotten music She begins to read it in her mind larkin shows the transition from reading and hearing the music by the enjambment
“ spears like a spring wokened tree” “unfaling sense of being young” “but even more/the gamer”
- she doesn’t just remember the songs but relives how the music and words felt when she played and sung them when she was young
- the feelings of youth are …
- a tree woken from the winter of her old age to blossom again
- she is once again aware of the possibilities that lay ahead of her
And again uses the emjabment to further develop this idea “but even more/the glare”
“The glare of that much mentioned brilliance, love, broke out to show” ‘bright incipience sailing above”
- not only the feelings of the promise of you that are reawaken but also the power of love
- love is a reoccurring theme in the songs “much mentioned”
- the strength of these emotions is conveyed in “glare”,”brilliance” “bright, and its unexpectedness in “broke”
- with it comes the same awareness of loves potential to satisfy these desires
-however it may be out of reach, an unattainable aspiration “sailing above”
“Solve” “satisfy” “ set in order”
-Larkin seems to view her marriage woth his father as desirable in that it fulfilled the expectations held by women at the time whilst matching her need for a quite odrdely life
-however Larkin typically opens out the thought to suggest that what we all wish of love is to make sense of out lives and find some resolution through it
“ pile them back to cry” “could not now”
- with regret and sadness she puts the songs away,crying, as she has to admit to herself that the promise love held for her when she was young is false and its “now to late”
- reveals the painful process of reassembling these memories, a confrontation with the gab between past promises and present reality
- Larkin may not be speaking of his mother anymore bur rather himself and suggesting in the ambiguity of the word “now” that love is np longer capable of fulfilling his desires, and ours, than it was capable of fuffiling his mothers
- love is impotent
“One bleached from ‘lying in a sunny place”
““One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her
-suggests the effect of time an nature
- suns bleaching not only alters the covers presence but also metaphorically hints at how memories fae and change
- introduces notion of repair—both physical and emotional. The phrase “tidy fit” might imply a sudden impulse to correct or preserve something, suggesting moments when she actively tried to hold on to the past.
