Larkin is often portrayed as being obsessed by death, but High Windows is as much about life as it is about death. How true do you find this statement?

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Larkin is often portrayed as being obsessed by death, but High Windows is as much about life as it is about death. How true do you find this statement?

Larkin was 52 when High Windows was published and the collection is dominated by poems about the loss of youth, time passing and the imminence of death. Even in poems not explicitly based on these themes, they are still hinted at. Although some of the poems are about youth, some about aging and some on death, in a way all these are referring to mortality. I agree that there are poems, such as Show Saturday and To the Sea, which celebrate aspects of life but there are far fewer poems about life than about death.

The Building is one of the bleakest poems, where Larkin describes a hospital and the stark inevitability of death. The poem builds up an atmosphere by the enigmatic treatment of the building; Larkin avoids spelling out that the building is a hospital but treats it as an atheistic cathedral, left in the atheistic society.  Larkin begins the account outside the building. It can be seen from far away and resembles a ‘lucent comb’, emphasising the busyness of the workers and the way in which individuals are depersonalised, like bees in a hive. Its height is repeated in the 4th stanza as evidence of its importance within today’s society. The comparison with the ‘handsomest hotel’ suggests that is far more important to everyone than anything that the commercial world can bring: emphasising that death will eventually come to us all. The ‘guests’ might never leave, and its porters are scruffy which slowly reveals to the reader that the building in question is in fact a hospital. The final giveaway is the ‘frightening smell’ which everybody associates with hospitals and creates a sense of unease. It is also a modern building, in contrast with the Victorian streets and church in 6th stanza, which signifies the increasingly atheistic society, and Larkin’s disbelief in an afterlife- which makes death seem even worse. The second stanza describes mundane and ordinary objects such as ‘paperbacks’ and ‘tea at so much a cup’ making the oddness of these people being in this place at ‘half-past eleven on a working day’ even more extreme- the life changing experiences occurring in a hospital are highlighted here. Those who wait, do so ‘tamely’, as with the elderly in ‘The Old Fools’ they have already lost their ability to choose. They simply wait to be fetched by a nurse, as if death itself is choosing them. We see the importance of choice again in the next stanza; the people are at ‘the vague age that claims/ the end of choice, the last hope’ an age which Larkin seems to feel he is fast approaching. This is where Larkin starts to analyse the situation and what it means: peoples ‘homes and names suddenly in abeyance’ shows that the waiting room is a neutral place so the rest of life outside the hospital doesn’t matter. They are all waiting in anticipation, making the people equal. The submissiveness of these people is underlined by the word ‘confess’ which also hints at the way that the hospital now takes place of the cathedral since no-one takes comfort in religion. This is signified by the locked church in stanza 6. They are in error, as if they have sinned, and the levels they go to are ‘appointed’ to them, as if decreed by God. The further you get away from the waiting room the more severe the ‘error’ alluding to Dank’s ‘The Divine Comedy’ with the levels of hell, again illustrating the hospitals displacement of religion. Poignantly, their eyes ‘Go to each other, guessing’ as if they might contact and share their worries, but when ‘someone’s wheeled past in washed to rags ward clothes’ the image of what they will become silences them. To communicate would risk acknowledging their mortality. The people described have lived in ‘self-protecting ignorance’ but this now comes to an end, expressing Larkin’s fixation on death. In stanza 8 the poem moves towards a conclusion, Larkin begins to spell out that we are all going to die in our own conclusion. The ‘unseen congregations’ in ‘white rows’ are patients in their beds but also the dead in their graves. Finally at the start of stanza 9 we are told that ‘All know they are going to die’ The hospital suggests a final end to human life and represents ‘a struggle to transcend/ The thought of dying’- it offers a limited hope but doesn’t keep death itself away, just the thought of it. Larkin is sure that we cannot avoid ‘The coming dark’ and the religious offering of ‘propitiatory flowers’ is futile.

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In The Old Fools, Larkin considers the incapacitated elderly and what they must think. He gives his view on what happens at death and speculates what it must be like. When Larkin wrote this poem in 1973 his mother was 87, and was in the decline described within the poem, in a nursing home.  Even the title of the poem is controversial, his language shows disgust: ‘drools... pissing yourself... ash hair, toad hands, prune face’. He describes their plight as a ‘hideous inverted childhood’. Some of the lines are mocking and the repetition of old fools in the body of ...

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This is, in many ways, a very good essay that responds sensitively to Larkin's poetry. Its problem is that it never really engages directly with the question, making a series of individual perceptive points rather than forming an argument.