Critical evaluation of High Windows by Philip Larkin

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KATHLEEN BAKER.  ACCESS COURSE GROUP C                                              

Write a critical evaluation of a poem.                                                                        

   HIGH WINDOWS

     When I see a couple of kids

And guess he’s fucking her and she’s

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if

Anyone looked at me, forty years back,

And thought, That’ll be the life;

No God any more, or sweating in the dark

                                                 

About hell and that, or having to hide

What you think of the priest. He

And his lot will all go down the long slide

Like free bloody birds. And immediately

     Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless

    PHILIP LARKIN                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

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Philip Larkin was 52 years old when he published his collection of poems “High Windows” in 1974. He used plain speech to address his readers and the themes that run throughout the collection concern themselves with references to the past and future and to the generation gap that existed between Larkin, as a middle-aged man and the younger generation that he observes around him.  In the poem   “High Windows”   he begins by examining the sexual freedoms of the younger generation and compares it with his own lack of opportunity. For Larkin the young have been ...

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