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Study material general English bg- 3rd year NEXT, PLEASE

Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin's poem, Next, Please, is a direct look at the folly of expectancy. A light beginning develops into dark gallows-humor. Always too eager for the future, we Pick up bad habits of expectancy. Something is always approaching; every day Till then, we say, and a parable begins, the poet grasping the arm of the reader on a rocky headland, looking out to sea. Life's events are seen as a line of approaching ships, the sparkling armada of promises long awaited, ready to unload their cargoes into the lives of poet and reader. (Larkin uses the words 'we' and 'our' throughout.) The description of the incoming vessels is side-splittingly funny. This is a parable, consciously overblown and made ridiculous, description replacing purpose, but it is done, for a purpose of the poet's own: though nothing balks Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked, Each rope distinct, Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits Arching our way But, however distinct, these vessels and their cargoes are illusory. Yet we deserve all that they do not bring, the poet says. They owe us because we have waited: we should be rewarded for our patience.In the event, of course, there is no such thing as reward. At its root is the unspoken assertion that what is desired takes on the form of a metaphor, shimmering but unreal, while that whichhappens is intellectually ungraspable, real, and inescapable. And it is here that the works emotionally and metaphysically diverge. In Larkin's poem, comedy is dropped like a mask to reveal what he sees as the future truth. A kind of portal becomes apparent:

Only one ship is seeking us, a blacksailed unfamiliar, towing at her back a huge and birdless silence. In her wake no waters breed or break. Death itself comes, at the end, in the form of a metaphor. There is a delicate craftsmanship in this poem. All aspects of meaning and ornament are carefully counterpoised. Under the humor is an emotion that is saved from being terror only by its orderliness; and, beneath that, the fear of the end of order cannot be spoken, because it is mute. If we were to remove the craftsmanship, the elegant rime, the humor, to look at the philosophy beneath, what should we find? Human existence inevitably depends on expectation. People spend their lives in waiting in hope. Surely patience must count for something. It does not. Death comes (it is the only expectation which actually happens) and for us the world is over. The only time we ever experience is now. The future and the past contaminate the present with anticipation and reminiscence which are the reasons for our absentmindedness. If we lived in the present then we'd remember where we left our keys. Some people are perpetual optimists, living in a state of hopeful expectation "something will turn up" as Mr. Micawber said in David Copperfield. It has been said that the normal state of mind is one of a mild and unrealistic optimism. The future didn't look so rosy to Philip Larkin.

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Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.(Larkin)

In this poem Philip Larkin is criticizing the tendency of people to always look to the future while neglecting the present. Larkin points out that we have a multiplicity of hopes, that spring eternal, many of which change to expectation and even anticipation. The hopes are all promises made by no-one, merely assumed by ourselves, so approach like ships towards a harbor. But then they do not dock, they keep going past

for they were not promised to us but thinking made it so, and the facts burst on us and leave us just the stalks without the expected flowers. The only thing certain in life is death. Whatever your hopes may be, the only thing you can really expect is death. Religions may o0ffer you other well-delineated ("every rope") hopes for after death, but these are promises just as airy as the ones we made for ourselves, and only death can be guaranteed actually to come, and with nothing in its wake. In the first two lines he sets a critical tone, saying that we are 'too eager' and pick up bad habits'. He takes on this persona and describes our wishes as 'always approaching'; this implies that they never actually arrive. The poem is dominated by the image introduced in the second stanza, that of our hopes as 'a sparkling armada of promises' that approaches the 'bluff' we all stand on. We ironically reflect on 'how much time they waste' when it is us wasting our lives by not living in the present. These ships 'never anchor', leaving us 'holding wretched stalks of disappointment'. Larkin chooses this metaphor because a stalk represents the potential of a flower, just as we are left with only potential and no time to fulfil it. The poet says that 'right to the last' we think that each ship will 'heave to and unload/ all good into our lives'. This means that right up to our death, we do not learn from our mistakes. In the last stanza Larkin describes the only ship we have not been searching for, 'a black sailed unfamiliar' that represents death. He describes this ship as 'towing at her back/ a huge and birdless silence' making it seem eerie and sinister. These qualities are particularly emphasized by the brevity of the last sentence, 'In her wake/ No waters breed or break.'

POETIC STYLE: Larkin's poetry has been characterized as combining "an ordinary, colloquial style", "clarity", a "quiet, reflective tone", "ironic understatement" and a "direct" engagement with "commonplace experiences, while Jean Hartley summed his style up as a "piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent".Larkin's earliest work showed the influence of Eliot, Auden and Yeats, and the development of his mature poetic identity in the early 1950s coincided with the growing influence on him of Thomas Hardy.

Larkin's style is bound up with his recurring themes and subjects, which include death and fatalism, as in his final major poem "Aubade". Poet Andrew Motion observes of Larkin's poems that "their rage or contempt is always checked by the ... energy of their language and the satisfactions of their articulate formal control", and contrasts two aspects of his poetic personalityon the one hand an enthusiasm for "symbolist moments" and "freely imaginative narratives", and on the other a "remorseless factuality" and "crudity of language". Motion defines this as a "life-enhancing struggle between opposites", and concludes that his poetry is typically "ambivalent": "His three mature collections have developed attitudes and styles of ... imaginative daring: in their prolonged debates with despair, they testify to wide sympathies, contain passages of frequently transcendent beauty, and demonstrate a poetic inclusiveness which is of immense consequence for his literary heirs.

LESSON-THE POEM TEACHES: The poem seems like an irrefutable comment on life. How many times haven't we felt that we are waiting (oh so long) for the good things to happen and when they do they are never as fulfilling in the realization as they are in the promise. And yes, the greatest certainty is death, the one thing that we are not waiting for but which is inevitably seeking us, after which there is nothing - not even disappointment.While the poem seems to speak of inevitability, it doesn't have to be that way: "Always too eager for the future, we Pick up bad habits of expectancy." The poet speaks for the 'bad habits' of expectancy. To break the inevitability of the poem, we have to break the bad habit of living for the next wonderful thing in our lives. We must live in the present, enjoying our lives as we live them. It is no use pinning our lives on some future event, which only disappoints us when it comes and sets us hoping for the next future event. So we can take the poem as a warning not to live our life pining for the future. If we live our life taking each moment as it comes, the richness of a well-lived life will leave us psychologically prepared for the inevitable time of death, when the black-sailed ship comes seeking us. Life is meaningless and death terrifying if we live our life that way. This is the lesson of the poem.

TITLE OF THE POEM: What do we make of the title of this piece? Next Please? Sounds like a shop or doctors waiting room and the references to death in the last stanza hint at the answer. This is Death calling! The Grim Reaper is calling this title out loud to us all. The premise of this poem is that we focus our attention on the future instead of living in the here and now. Notice the inclusive use of we and our throughout the poem. Larkin suggests we spend our entire lives waiting for the rewards the future will apparently endow to those who patiently wait for them. The irony is, of course, that from our vantage point think we are looking at our well-deserved rewards in life when in fact we are only seeing The Grim Reapers vessel getting closer. The rhyme scheme is aabb and the first three lines of each are mostly in iambic pentameter, while the last line of each is much shorter and is either four or six syllables in length. Lexis such as eager and expectancy have rather positive connotations, yet there is a tension when we see the phrase bad habits. The second stanza is rather cinematic in nature. This technique is rather typical of much of Larkins work. He often provides us with vivid mental images. We are taken to a cliff by the seaside. From here we see an approaching metaphorical armada of promises. It brings to mind the phrase that one day our ship will come in. He uses a three-part list to pre modify this image; it is tiny, clear and Sparkling. This armada is laden with alluring promises and seems a very attractive proposition to the onlooker. However, we have a hint of caution when we note the time-reference lexis in the second half of this stanza: slow, time and haste. He seems to be suggesting that much of life is spent waiting for rewards rather than having them. The third stanza shows us Larkins pivot word Yet. He will often set up a scene then interject a yet or but or however to turn the conversation round. The naval semantic field is extended with lexis like balk, brasswork and rope. Note the poets effective use of post modification too, here: brasswork is prinked and ropes are distinct, but the first line has given us a very clear negative land-based metaphor in the lines: holding wretched stalks Of disappointment We have been tantalized but are destined to be let down. Such is Larkins pessimistic view of life. The agony of lost opportunity is further extended in the fourth stanza. It starts with alliteration of the repeating f sounds and if we had originally thought the promises on board had been material wealth, now, the highly sexual figurehead metaphor suggests our love life is equally doomed to failure. The naval lexis is obvious in the penultimate stanza. Apparently, the ships will dock and deliver their alluring cargo; however in the last line we are met with another of Larkins pivot words as we are told categorically that: we are wrong. We will not get this delivery, whether material or sexual. It has all been in vain.

Our supposed rewards are depicted as a line of approaching ships that will unload their precious cargoes into our lives. In this nihilistic poem, Larkin describes vividly the void and nothingness that comes after death. The clear references to death are startling in the final section. If the first five verses have been about life, then this final stanza is about death. It is the only thing that we can be certain of in life. He seizes the naval image of a ship and sets out a morbid message. The sails are black. The connotations are clear. The ship itself is eerily called an unfamiliar and astern; we witness a huge and birdless silence. This is a very emotive line. The simple and moving alliterative last line rams home the point with w and b to pound out the beat. We have a nihilistic, cheerless end to life. No celebration; it is just silent and motionless. The extensive use of a naval semantic field produces a vivid, graphic and moving view of life and death.

THE MOON AND THE YEW TREE

Sylvia Plath

This poem fundamentally details how Sylvia Plath sees her life, through the metaphors and images she was so fond of. By using the word "planetary" in the first line, we gain a sense of how she saw her role in the world - still part of the solar system, but living in her own world, disconnected and distanced from everyone else. The point of the poem is to illustrate the different relationships Sylvia Plath had with the three most important and influential people in her life; her dead father, her mother who offered her little, if any support, and the elusive Hughes. By deliberately identifying throughout the negative("She is not sweet like Mary") Plath subtly portrays herself as a victim, not accusing her mother of neglecting her, just suggesting and implying that one of the reasons for her "complete despair" is this women. Her parents never saw her depression, and Hughes was - seemingly - oblivious to her neediness, and she could not turn to religion for hope and comfort, finding blind faith to be restrictive. It is a desolate poem, haunting in its imagery and the empathy it inspires. Sylvia Plath is looking for a way back to herself, to life - she is suicidal. "Separated from my house by a row of headstones." She seeks rescue and hope in religion "How I would like to believe in tenderness ----" but the saints are only cold delicate statues "stiff with holiness" and she finds no help. She seeks rescue through nature but nature treats her as if she were God and holds the answers to life's grief - she has no answers. She seeks rescue in the moon but the moon only reflects back her own wild and frightening despair and she is tormented by it. Separated from herself by thoughts of suicide she desperately looks to nature, the Holy Mother and church, and the sky - but all she ever sees are frightening reflections of herself, darkness and death. According to some critics/writers the Yew tree represents death, rebirth and resurrection. Also, the sap from the yew is poisonous, so it could have a number of interpretations. It is heartbreaking that Plath was looking at something so romantic and seeing something so desolate. The poem marks a time in her life when she felt nothing but sorrow which is why this poem is so deep. The moon-her mother is darkness and holds no way out. The Yew tree is a symbol a sign pointing to her mother, the moon. She feels uncomfortable here, the spirit of the dead all around her quilting her like a blanket. She moves steadfastly out of the graveyard, the moon, and the church teeming with spirits. She moves to her home, which is her safety and shield from the darkness. In The Moon and the Yew TreePlath is writing about her relationship with her parents and about her psychic state. The moon surfaces again and again as her mother. "Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place. Separated from my house by a row of headstones."

She is not at her house (i.e. she is not comfortable & happy with her life), which would be the salvation. The only way of getting back to her house goes through the graveyard, and the graveyard is not the place she wants to go to. The churchyard's Yew points her Moon, but "The moon is no door", so it offers no escape, she just "simply cannot see where there is to get to". After presenting us with her nightmarish inner landscape, the Fatherless, hopeless underworld with "no door," note the subtly ironic diction with which Plath introduces the nearby church into this landscape: the bells "bells startle the skyaffirming the Resurrection bong out their names." A marvelous image that works on two distinct levels: First, we can imagine that Hughes each Sunday morning comically jolted from their breakfasts by these alarming bells; on the Second level, however, the sky, Nature itself, is jolted, giving us the sense of an artificial intrusion upon the natural order --- Christianity as an affront, almost, to the amoral reality of pagan Nature. This ironic tone increases as we are at last introduced to the Yew Tree. The yew "points up", directing the poet's attention from the church back to the moon. Here, black humor kicks in with full force as the poet's voice, batting its eyes, becomes almost childlike: "The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary." Plath then gives us one of the most brilliant images in all of her poetry, a shockingly macabre, blasphemous moment: "Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls." This can be a reference to the traditional Roman Catholic Madonna, Rome's sanitized Mother Goddess, slowly parting her robes to unveil herself as the famously grotesque Ephesian Artemis, covered from head to toe with breasts, at which this swarm of bats and owls have been clustered, "sucking at the peps of darkness." ("The Stones"). As these nocturnal predators fly off in a swarm of shrieks, Plath has, with one line, toppled two thousand years of Christianity and reinstated demonic pagan Nature. After this horrific scenario, she then turns her attention coyly back to the church and muses, "How I would like to believe in tenderness. The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, Bending, on mein particular, its mild eyes."

A shocking, brutal, and sadistic moment, yet with a subversive humor ("stiff with holiness") that prefigures and points toward the later, gleefully sadistic voice of the "Ariel" poems. At this point in her development, Plath imagines the Yew tree's message to be "blackness and silence." This yew, pointing mutely at the moon is trying to send the poet's consciousness a very strong message indeed, and one which she will later hear loud and clear as her true voice triumphantly emerges: that the "door" Plath seeks so desperately is, in fact, through that demonic female moon, "bald and wild."

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To some critics, Sylvia Plath openly states that it is a poem about her "mind", in the very first line. It is a subjective landscape of her psyche. First, it is "cold and planetary" No warmth. No bloom. No fertility. Almost a moonscape. Bathed in an unearthly "blue" light. The only vegetation besides the Yew, are those "grasses," which are strangely alive, clutching at her, weeping, "unload their griefs", begging her, like God, for mercy"murmuring of their humility" In other words, the grasses think she is God - because they've never seen Him, He is absent. This is a godless universe in which she wanders. Around her swarm ghosts, the "fumy, spiritous mists." Where are we? We are in Hades, Hell, the land of the dead (the yew tree, in fact, as Hughes has pointed out elsewhere, stood in the west, the traditional entrance to the Underworld). This is further supported by the sudden revelation of the "headstones," graves - we are literally in the land of the dead. Sylvia is in Hell, where God is absent, or dead. Notice that the graves, the dead, separate the poet from "my house". In other words, she is in this graveyard, this underworld, and sees, off in the distance, her house, perhaps with its lights twinkling, where her husband, child, and her life, reside. It is just here that she chooses to say, "I simply cannot see where there is to get to. The moon is no door." In other words, we have the speaker wandering in the land of the dead, where the very grasses are in a torrent of grief, surrounded by spirits and a wall of graves, her home (a symbol of her positive life, of salvation) is unreachable, and she is looking desperately for a door that will allow her to get to that "house," that life. But there is no door, no exit.

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Suddenly, a new presence appears: the Moon. She thinks at first it might offer hope, a "door," a way out. But no door is available. The poet will tell us a few lines later that "The moon is my mother."The moon, the Mother, is "White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime." The sea is Female, a fluid realm, the site of our origin, the waters of the womb, etc. but, in another sense, the sea literally functions as Sylvia Plath's only physical barrier against her mother, who is across the Atlantic. Here, suddenly, horrifyingly, Mom appears, dragging the sea after her, like a placenta and a "dark crime." We discover that this Mother is also in grief, to such an extent that the sound is literally choked in her throat --"quiet, with the O-gape of complete despair." So, there's been a dark crime of some sort. (Might be a reference to Aurelias second marriage & her ignorance of her children, which she might have finally realized that she had done wrong). "I live here." Apart from the literal truth of this statement, since we are also in a churchyard next to a house in Devon, Sylvia Plath is telling us point-blank, This is where I live day to day, my inner world! And these things are always present here to haunt me. ========================================

POETIC STYLE: Sylvia Plath, a complex poet, a complex mind, was born on October 27, 1932 and committed suicide on February 11, 1963. During this short thirty years, many works were provided that served as a window into one fragile mind. Years of mental stability acted as a catalyst for the production of many famous works. Although it is still difficult to analyze Plath's mind, its products are still being cherished and praised. Plath published many works in her lifetime, yet her most famous works were published after her death. Plath's work as well as her many memories continue long after her passing. In Plath's work, death, conflict, & personal experience all play major roles.They serve as

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themes in the deep and realistic poetry that is Plath's work. The poetry of Sylvia Plath contains various themes that stem from the author's mind and internal battles. A large portion of Sylvia Plath's work contains the theme of death. This theme is most present in her earlier poetry. Plath seems to be almost fascinated with death. Her elegant use of words makes the reader feels as if the icy breath of death is upon their neck. Yet death is not always welcomed as a theme in Plath's work. Her early work shows a distinct tension between the allure of death and human's nature to resist it. Often this "death" is accompanied by an overwhelming sense of doom. A distinct origin for this doom is not clear but nature is often a catalyst for it. Varying aspects of nature serve as agents of doom. Even the most innocent things such as grapes on a grapevine or moon can manipulate themselves into inevitable doom. Plath's poems also contain a preoccupation with danger. This danger does not come from external sources however but from inside the mind. Sylvia has been hailed as a kind of "archangel of confessional poetry" and her poetry has been described as being "at once confessional, lyrical, and symbolic". The styling that has led to the continuity of her art and its relevance to society can be attributed to many factors and techniques common among her poetry and prose, namely her unique uses of rhythm and meter, her prevailing themes of death, feminist criticism, her use of the technique of doubling and her unique approach to characterization. Plath's approach to rhythm and meter in her poetry was all her own. Her earlier poems were composed slowly and with great care, while her later poems were written at a greater and increasing speed. The older poems follow, for the most part, a rhythm and meter that is a sort of "finger - count" with each line of each stanza set to a rigid standard of syllables. Her newer poems however, fall into a less rigid set of standards, and are composed of a rhythm and meter that is more of an "ear - count"as Plath would speak the poems as she wrote them "out loud as they came in the urgent and accelerating rhythms of her own voice". Since Plath would speak these poems in "her own voice" as she wrote them, the poems' rhythm and meter cannot be considered anything less than unique.