No Road Flashcards
What is the main technique employed by Larkin in No Road?
Extended metaphor
What is significant about Larkin’s use of line break to split up the opening sentence - ‘let the road between us/fall to disuse’
The line break acts as a representation of the new separation between the speaker and the unnamed character
No Road was written in 1951, soon after Larkin had called off his engagement to…?
Ruth Bowman
The end of which relationship is thought to have shaped the poem?
The end of Larkin’s brief engagement to Ruth Bowman
‘time’s ____________ agents loose’
eroding
Why does Larkin refer to ‘time’s eroding agents’?
Time is presented as a slow, but inevitable, force of change. Whereas the couple in the poem struggle to separate and move on, time is presented as an undeniable force that will cause the break
In the final stanza, how and why is there a shift in the pronoun usage?
The plural ‘us’ from the first stanza is replaced by the singular forms ‘I’ and ‘you’. This conveys the increasing sense of separation towards the end of the poem
‘To watch that world come up like a cold ________’
sun
Why does the narrator compare a life without his partner to watching a ‘world come up like a cold sun’?
To present how such an existence would be unnatural and lifeless
At the end of the poem, the syntax becomes muddled bad confusing to represent the speaker’s guilt and anxiety. He ultimately has to accept that his ‘ailment’ is that…?
He prefers a simple life of solitude to the complexity and compromise of being with another
