‘They are to be happy in’
He is saying that days are meant to be happy but often they are not. He then asks the meaning of life.
‘Where can we live but days?’
He does not answer that question himself but instead says that:
‘Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor’
To solve this problem we need a priest and a doctor. The doctor represents the physical problems in life, and the priest represents the spiritual aspect. The long coats in the next line symbolise expertise. The fact that priest and doctor are at the end of the poem suggest that these are the last people we see in our life.
‘What is our Life?’ is a 16th century poem written by Sir Walter Raleigh. It says that life is a brief play which we all take part in. The only thing we can do is die. Life is like an actor on stage. It is a comedy. However, death is serious. We have a specific part to play. It is not all random. Everything is planned and written down.
It commences by asking the question of what is life. It says that life is a passage of events and emotions:
‘A play of passion’
Our entertainment is problems and decisions that are presented to us:
‘And what our mirth but music of division?’
Our mother’s womb is the place where we prepare for the journey ahead. ‘Short comedy’ is used to show that our life is happy but in the end it is too short and worthless:
‘Our mothers’ wombs the tiring houses be
Where we prepare for this short comedy’
Heaven is always watching us and judging us on what we do:
‘Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is
Who sits and marks what here we do amiss’
Our graves are the place where our life on earth is over:
‘The graves that hide us from the searching sun
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done’
After our life on earth we move to heaven or hell, depending on how many sins we have committed. When we die it is serious, not a joke:
‘Thus playing post to our latest rest,
And then we die in earnest, not in jest.’
‘Days’ and ‘What is our Life?’ are similar in many ways. Both poems suggest that life might not be as important as we think it is. They both say that life is meant to be happy but sometimes it is not. They both begin by asking a question ‘what is life?’. They both end by a representation of the end of life. Even though the structure of both poems is different, they are both ten lines long. They both say that life is a time and a place. To show that life is a time Larkin says days ‘wake us time and time over’, and Raleigh says that life is a ‘short comedy’. The stage and ‘tiring houses’ all imply that life is also a place. They both suggest that we can ask the question of what is life but it cannot be answered yet.
To conclude, both poems have many similarities even though they are separated by many years. This shows that that no matter how far we might have gone in other aspects of life, we still cannot clearly and definitely answer the question of ‘what is life?’. It is an eternal question.
