Poem: Arrival

Commentary

  Arrival written by Philip Larken highlights the plight of man in this modern world full of stress, noise and people.  It revolves around the theme of isolation. Philip Larken wants to live a detached life towards the ends of his life. All the worldly aspects of life, he wished to stack at the back of his mind and enjoy peace and serenity. In quest of anonymity he has probably migrated to a new city.

   The poem is a kind of lament wherein the poem wants to get over his past and get on with a life of seclusion. The narrator is considered to be the poet himself since he talks in first person throughout the course of the poem. The tone is that of funereal dismal aloofness.

“For this ignorance of me

Seems a kind of innocence.”

These lines from stanza 3, lines 1 and 2 strikes as the master chord summarizing the content of the poem.

Written in three stanzas, each stanza describes a different phase. The first stanza talks of the arrival in a new city, the second stanza talks of all the past that he wishes to disregard and the third stanza talks of the future that he shall face in this present condition. Each stanza consists of eight lines with short sentences. This is probably to relate the brevity of life through laconic use of language. The poem is not heavily punctuated but has a few occasional breaks just as life has the occasional halts. However, towards the ends of the poem, the poem is punctuated heavily with the help of many commas and semi-colons to show its rough and slow end until a final full stop.  The language is colloquial making use of figurative language at a variety of occasions. He creates images occasionally such as visual images in stanza 1 line 3,

Join now!

“Whose white shelves and domes travel

The slow sky all day.”

In stanza 2, lines 5 and 6, the reader is provided with an aural image,

“Find voices coined to

An argot of motor-horns,”

There is an allusion in stanza 3, line 5.

“Its milk-aired Eden.”

Here, Eden is the place where Adam and Eve lived before the Fall. The poet also uses similes in stanza 2, line 3

“Shovel-faces like pennies”

and in stanza 1 line 7,

“And the curtains fly out like doves”.

Just as pennies are of low value and a bad penny refers to an ...

This is a preview of the whole essay