Review of MCMXIV

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4th form copy of MCMXIV + review by MR law

Those long uneven lines

Standing as patiently

As if they were stretched outside

The Oval or Villa Park,

The crowns of hats, the sun

On moustached archaic faces

Grinning as if it were all

An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached

Established names on the sunblinds,

The farthings and sovereigns,

And dark-clothed children at play

Called after kings and queens,

The tin advertisements

For cocoa and twist, and the pubs

Wide open all day--

And the countryside not caring:

The place names all hazed over

With flowering grasses, and fields

Shadowing Domesday lines

Under wheat's restless silence;

The differently-dressed servants

With tiny rooms in huge houses,

The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word--the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages,

Lasting a little while longer:

Join now!

Never such innocence again.

The reality of being written and published in 1960 is poignant in comparison to the vast majority of WWI poetry written in the trenches that include often graphic representations of the reality of warfare, an aspect that Larkin could not have fully related. this so called 'aftermath poem' deals with the effects of war and not with the actualities of war as exhibited by poets such as sassoon and owen.
The "dark clothed children" at face value, is only a reference to the fact that dye was not a very commonly used thing back in ...

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