MCMXIV - Philip Larkin Context Flashcards
Explain the context of MCMXIV
• 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?
o 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.
o 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?
o 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.
Explain MCMXIV as a meditation poem
MCMXIV,” like many of Philip Larkin’s poems, is a meditation
o This poetic form, modelled on John Donne’s prose Meditations, begins with a description of an object, a place, or an event
o The description leads directly into a response or a consideration of the issues, problems, and complexities suggested by the object; this consideration then leads to a conclusion or resolution
o In “MCMXIV” the object is a 1914 photograph of British volunteers lined up in front of an army recruiting office after England entered World War I
o By extension the poem considers the prewar British society that those men represent
o The poem itself does not overtly indicate that the photograph is the object of meditation; rather, the title (Roman numerals for 1914) and the description provide that context
o While readers can not know whether Larkin was contemplating a particular photograph, there are examples of this type of picture in most illustrated histories of World War I
Explain the scene of the poem
• The first three stanzas of the four-stanza poem offer an interpretive description of the scene in the photograph
o The men stand patiently in line, as they might wait to gain admission to a sporting event or an “August Bank Holiday lark.” (In England a bank holiday is a legal holiday when the banks are ordered closed.)
o This holiday is in August, since August 4, 1914, was the date England declared war on the Central Powers
o “MCMXIV,” like all of Larkin’s poems, is characterized by clear, straightforward, unadorned language
o Larkin is the best-known and most successful of a group of British poets from the 1950’s known as “The Movement” (other Movement poets include Robert Conquest, Kingsley Amis, and Donald Davie)
o All these poets used direct, plain language, which was deliberately chosen in rejection of the rich, melodic, metaphoric language of Dylan Thomas and the dense, allusive, intellectual language of T. S. Eliot
o It was an appropriate language for the skeptical, unsentimental, sometimes hopeless worldview of their poems
o Larkin, like other Movement authors, worked within a narrow emotional range, ironically noting the pain and dreariness of everyday experience that must be accepted
Explain some of the reference in the poem
• When Larkin departs from his usual plain language, the effect is striking. In stanza 3, describing rural fields, he refers to “Domesday lines”: These are the boundaries between property first defined in 1086 by William the Conqueror and recorded in the Domesday Book
o The historical reference is a jarring pun, since the Domesday Book is also known as the Doomsday Book
o The men in Larkin’s photograph were taking their first step toward their doom
o That Larkin’s language is generally plain does not mean that he eschews metaphor entirely. The lines of men waiting to enlist in the British army are like lines waiting to see a cricket
