First Sight Analysis

Author: poem of Philip Larkin Type: poem Views: 4

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasureable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

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||| Analysis | Critique | Overview Below |||

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In my opinion, I think 'First Sight' is perhaps one of Larkin's weakest poems.
The notoriously downbeat Larkin, a champion of The Movement, a depressive, neo-Modernist literary development of the mid-twentieth century, makes analogies and metaphors that seem to go against all he and his poetry stood for.
The Movement's main aim was to renege the sentimentality of nineteenth-century verse and create poetry that was more true to life, reflective of the struggles which characterise fifties/sixties society.
In this particular poem, however, Larkin makes use of the now cliched metaphor of lambs to signify new beginnings and innocence.
This alone is enough to disaffect me from this poem - it is childish and somewhat unintellectual that Larkin has exploited this wholly unoriginal comparison.
Surely a man of Larkin's literary capacity could have conjured a more potent and far-reaching analogy?

| Posted on 2009-05-02 | by a guest

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