In stanza 3 Larkin leads us a little closer to the men. One is shown as innocent, playful as he chases after rabbits. But on his return from the chase another side of his nature is seen. He is gentle; does not trample on the nest of lark’s eggs and returns them to where he found them. These actions are Larkin showing the many sides to human nature, how human moods can continually shift depending on situations. Larkin may be trying to evoke empathy for the man as he asks the reader note his sensitivity and gentleness. This introduces the reader more to the men so the tragedy seems evermore terrible.
These men are shown to be part of a close community simply, elegantly suggested by, “Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter” yet Larkin himself was not a family man, never marrying of even showing a want of a family during his life. The poem ‘This be the Verse’ shows Larkin’s view on parents that ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do’. Yet by showing family members all entwined in this community the reader has a greater sense of the loss once they are gone. The families are under grave threat due to the mining accident suggested in the lines, “Through the tall gates standing open”
These are the gates of fate, inescapable. This may be Larkins way of showing how death is unescapable, humans can deny it at times as shown in the trees when the tress do ‘Their yearly trick of looking new’. Similar to the way humans hide behind makeup, plastic surgery etc.But the explosion seems to show a final acceptance that old age is simply a factor of life and happens to all. For Larkin this is perhaps appropriate as this is the end poem in the collection and in the previous poems his main issues have revolved around his inability to accept that youth does not last.
Larkin then shows the men’s fate met. He delivers the news without melodrama; we knew the explosion was coming from the title. The world of nature is unmoved by the catastrophe, “cows stopped chewing for a second” showing how life goes on, people die everyday yet the world doesn’t stop but only affects those close to the victims yet Larkin leaves the aftermath, the rescue, the grief unmentioned as sun dims when the dust from the explosion was blasted high into the sky.
In the second part of the poem the focus is changed. Now it is the wives who are central. It is said that the poem is based on a real event and that the wives of the dead miners had visions of their men at the moment of the explosion.
Larkin uses this knowledge to transform what would be a sad and meaningless accident into an occasion of transformation and grace.
In the religious imaginations of the wives the men are seen “for a second” as transformed into gold, metal of purity and endurance. In this new changed appearance they will live in the memories of their wives. The poem ends with the image of the unbroken eggs. The eggs are also transformed; now they may represent the hope of resurrection or the preciousness of memory or the strength of the bonds of love.
In this poem Larkin offers readers the renewal vision that flashed into the shocked serious hearts of the miners’ wives. For once the readers are shown a hope that Larkin himself leads us to think he wants to believe one of ongoing life after death, the poem is an appropriate one for the end of the collections and as it gathers together his many views and ideas portrayed within the book it could be said to be the key to the collection.
