The Coursework Option

I want to get onto our final text, Tony Harrison's 'V' at the end of this week/beginning of next week. This week is about finishing off the Larkin work. We need to produce a piece of coursework.

REMEMBER! Both pieces of coursework need to total 1500 words, so this piece needs to be 1500 minus whatever your first piece was. So not very long.

The Coursework Option

1. Write a section of biography; relate what you find in the poems to what you find in the work. Focus on a specific element i.e. Larkin and Women, or Larkin and Politics. Look at more biographical info on Larkin here and here:

http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/L/larkin/

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18715

You can use all of the notes on this blog to help you, you should use the notes. Also, consider these questions:

• Is an author's biography important when we are trying to make sense of a work?
• Is Larkin's biography essential to our understanding his work?
• Are the views and attitudes presented by the poet in life more important than what appears in the poetry?

If you finish, you can do this task aswell, to give yourself another option:
Write a letter to Larkin, giving him advice. Choose one of the poems or one of the themes to focus on. Give him advice about:

• Women
• Being happy
• His attitude
• That you admire him
• That you pity him
• How you feel about him
• Or anything else you feel like writing, as long as i has a point of reference

Cut Grass

Cut Grass

Cut grass lies frail: Brief is the breath Mown stalks exhale. Long, long the death It dies in the white hours Of young-leafed June With chestnut flowers, With hedges snowlike strewn, White lilac bowed, Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace, And that high-builded cloud Moving at summer's pace.

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Can you reorganise this poem into its correct line lengths? Do it (cut and paste into word), and then do the following. HINT: the short focus given by the lines brings everything into sharp focus. The regular rhyme is a challenge to create.
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TASKS

1. Create a Powerpoint which responds to the imagery in the poem. BE AWARE that this is an opportunity for you to reflect on the English Setting to this poem, so look for English images if you can.
2. Also clear up any vocab questions you may have.
3. Answer the following questions in your pairs. if you;re not sure about one, go onto the next.

• What is this poem a reflection on? What is the poet's message?
• What groups the images? Where do they appear in the poem, and why there?
• How does the subject matter of this poem challenge what you have come to expect from Larkin?
• Is the poem more profound than the other poems you have read

Note to self:

(undercut or overcut; bridge swung over abyss)

Self’s the Man

We’ve seen in ‘Toads’ Larkin questioning attitudes to work; his technique is to set up an antagonistic portrait (in Toads of the jobless) and then compare his own situation. He normally concludes that he is different but just as bad.

Larkin ‘playing his own game’ – Larkin knows what he likes. ‘We all live in our own private hell’.

Working Class details.

.

Are you going to get married when you’re older? What will be your reasons for marrying? What do you imagine your domestic, everyday life will entail? What concessions will you have to make.

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In what other poems are the working class and their details discussed?

Look at a selection of the vocabulary from this poem:

Perk – little advantage or bonus
Clobber – (slang);stuff; clothing.
Drier; abr. Tumble Drier
Supper;dinner.
‘Have a read’; colloquial phrase; sim. ‘have a think’; have a lie down’; have a brew’.
Nippers – children


These are working class attitudes and their objects under examination, like he feels a grim thrill in description. This is a poetry of the everyday, a domestic portrait. Everyday characters doing everyday things, which Larkin despises and sets himself apart from, but which in the end he cannot help but see himself as just as bad as.

Domestic portraits with sad objects – the working class again. Remember he said:

"I want to see them starving,/The so-called working class,/Their wages yearly halving,/Their women stewing grass..."

What does this quote suggest about L’s attitude to the working class. Is this view supported by this poem?


Again an autobiographical element.


Is it more selfish to get married or not get married? Is it even worth thinking about marriage in these terms? How could not marrying be seen as selfish?


QUESTIONS

Why did Arnold marry in the first place?

What’s the relationship like, between Arnold and his wife?

What details do you learn of Arnold’s domestic existence? Is it a happy life, in Larkin’s imagining?

Does Larkin disparage these details? B

‘To compare his life and mine
Makes me feel like a swine’.

Is Larkin saying his life is better or worse? What does he not want to deal with? What do we know of his life from the poetry?

At what point does the poem become a refection? What is the conclusion to this reflection?

How ultimately does L conclude that he and Arnold are the same? Is this a fair view of men and their motivations?

How ultimately does L conclude that he and Arnold are different?

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Fill in your table with details as the where opinions expressed in this poem agree with our themes.

Mr Bleaney - Philip Larkin

Mr Bleaney

Words from dictionary which are similar/homonyms – bleak; bleary; bleat; bleach(ed).

Poem about renting a bedsit
Poem with three characters
Poem about

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Philip Larkin – Mr Bleaney


II. ‘How we live measures our own nature’

How does the poem become autobiographical?


Key terms.


Projection/Identification
Assimilation
Self-fulfilling prophecy
How we are defined
The sadness of objects (as defined by our previous keywords).

-

Objects/location set the tone: analyse this using the keywords.
What, initially is the narrator’s attitude towards the place? What do we know about the place? Is it disparaged? What other sad objects can you think of?
Why does he take the room?
What else contributes to the feeling of desperation here, apart from the sad objects?

Which areas in the poem can you identify as beginning this process of assimilation?
Which lines in the third stanza begin the process of projection/identification?
How does he know his habits (S4) Can he know this detail?
Who is the subject of S6?
S7 = self-fulfilling prophecy.

Definitions to help

Projection - A defense mechanism in which the individual attributes to other people impulses and traits that he himself has but cannot accept. It is especially likely to occur when the person lacks insight into his own impulses and traits."
"Attributing one's own undesirable traits to other people or agencies."
"The individual perceives in others the motive he denies having himself. Thus the cheat is sure that everyone else is dishonest."
"People attribute their own undesirable traits onto others."

Identification
Psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides.
you identify yourself with (characteristics of) an object. For instance: I identify myself with a characteristic of my father and transform myself to assimilate this characteristic in my personality. I become a little bit like him. This latter has been used by Freud to define the formation of a personality.

Assimilation
To incorporate and absorb into the mind.
To make similar; cause to resemble.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true.


As soon as he takes the room, he starts to become Bleaney.

Biography - Questions

Is an author's biography important when we are trying to make sense of a work?

Is Larkin's biography essential to our understanding his work?

Are the views and attitudes presented by the poet in life more important than what appears in the poetry? In larkin there may be a disparity.

Construct your own Larkin poem to the same metre and rhyme scheme:

Choose one of the following themes:


Choose some of the associated vocabulary:


Stick to one of the metres analysed:

Build it up!

Wild Oats

'Why don't you do something about it then?!' - Larkin's tone of resignation and reader response.

Resignation is a quality of tone; if you are resigned to something you just accept that something is going to happen and refuse to try to do anything about it. It's the verbal equivalent of shrugging your shoulders.

We first encounter resignation in Mr Bleaney. There is this terribly bleak portrait of a man and his environment, but to me this feeling is made even more profound by the sense that the narrator is unwilling to do anything to improve his situation.

This invites criticism from cultures like ours which celebrate being proactive: you should always be looking to improve, especially if all this means (in the case of Mr Bleaney) is adding a lampshade and putting up some new and brighter curtains.

Willing suffering, resignation to suffering, or denying yourself a happiness is a curious positioning today, although it might be quite a Christian concept. It is at the heart of these poems.


Second best love - Resignation and priorites in 'Wild Oats'


Love themes from Love Songs in Age:

• regrets
  reality of human relations (love)
  anti-romantic reality
  shattering of dreams

This poem is more directly about the poet, not obscured or masked. It is the poet in confessional mode, and is revelatory of his personal life, which is mined here for material.

Questions

• S1 How do the two girls contrast one another? What are the key definitions of the girls? What does this reveal about Larkin's values/priorities? What about Larkin's secret want?
  What do we learn about how Larkin picks up women?
  How is the line 'But it was the friend i took out' a neat inversion?What do you think sparks 'the whole shooting match off' 'these days'?

• S2 What is the effect of the stanza break?
  What details do we learn of the relationship?

• S3 Parting, after about five
  Rehearsals, was an agreement
  That I was too selfish, withdrawn
  And easily bored to love'.
  
  Who says this? How do we know?
  Who does he keep pictures of and why? What has been the result of this?
  How does the final line finally indict the poet?
  

What do you think of the way Larkin has run his relationship? Is he just being an idiot, or a realist? What advice would you give him, so he would feel differently next time?

Love Songs in Age

Love Songs in Age


Key terms

A moment recollected in tranquillity
Involuntary Memory
Tradgedy of mature reality
Failure of romantic ideals

Poetry of thought
Poetry of regret
Forward looking/backward looking


A lot of thinking gets done in Larkin’s poems: a lot of his characters are trapped temporarily or caught by a moment ,an imagining or a memory.

QUESTIONS

• Can you summarise what actually happens in the poem?
  
  What details do we learn of the woman’s life?
  
  At what point does the ‘involuntary memory’ occur?
  What prompts this?
  What does the detailing on the imagery of the record sleeves tell us about the woman?
  
  
  What does the detailing on the auditory-imagery of the actual music suggest about the values of the music/youth? What does the music sound like?
• 
  What imagery does the poet attach to these sounds?
  
  How is love described? Did it fulfil its potential?
  The tragic finale: what does she do with the records? Why?
  
  
  When did she first play the records?
  
  Details of the memories:
  
  ‘The certainty of time laid up in store / as when she played them first’
  
  Tragic lessons learned.
  
  
  
  THEMES
  
  There’s a point in your life where your ‘time balance’ tips; there is more behind you than after you
  Love and old age are not compatible.
  Love is youth.
  Love is the solution to our problems.
  Love is promised to everybody; it is ours to accept or deny.
  Love is an opportunity that, when it arrives, we must take firmly.
  Certain objects are associated with love.
  You will always remember your first love.
  
  
  
  Letter to a lost lover. Write about what provoked the letter and regrets.
  
  
  Technique cute and brilliant, skilled rhyme.
  Regret theme – wild oats

What picture does the poem create of the people here?

There aren't so many people in the poem. Those we do see are referred to in passing: the poem is a sweeping observation, taking in many sights, almost as a bird flies or as a train goes. People appear almost incidentally, as if glimpsed from this train. Notice that the 'workmen at dawn' are shielded (hidden); the 'headscarfed wives' do not show us their faces; the 'cut-price crowd' are just that - a faceless mob.

Larkin also refrains from passing direct comment on these people. All we know of the 'residents of raw estates', for example, is their consumer habits, images which are developed in some detail. Perhaps Larkin is suggesting by placing this emphasis that this is all they infact are, how they choose to be and should be defined.

Nevertheless 'Here' is a picture of the land more than of the people.

Is this a ‘pastoral’ (dealing with an idealised/romanticised rustic or countryside life)?

The poem does deal with country life. It is hard not to read the following without a certain sense of romance being invoked:

Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river’s slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud

However it is also a portrait of an unnamed city, and you probably cannot have a 'city pastoral' (perhaps it is a cityscape):'

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:
Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water.

This too is a picture, but it is now a picture of human ingenuity, at work within nature. It is peaceful, and significantly, unpeopled. We might conclude that Larkin doesn't like people very much: when they intrude on the picture we get them as consumers, and only really as consumers. It is left up to us to judge whether they pollute the image or not.

After this interruption the poem returns to its rural theme, sweeping from the city and out to, 'isolate villages, where removed lives / lonliness clarifies.' More images gather, almost avoiding people. And the sweep ends only at the sea where we find 'unfenced existence: / Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach'. These last two lines are tricky, but they could be viewed as a release finally, from the pressure of observation and of 'fenced existence'; and of release from obligation into silence and, finally the lonliness the poet seeks.

Larkin - Useful Links

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18715

construct a portrait based on poem evidence; then read controversy.

Mr Bleaney - Philip Larkin

• II. ‘How we live measures our own nature’
  
  How does the poem become autobiographical?

• Key terms.
  
  
  Projection/Identification
  Assimilation
  Self-fulfilling prophecy
  How we are defined
  The sadness of objects (as defined by our previous keywords).
  
• Questions you need to be able to answer:

1. Objects/location set the tone: analyse this using the keywords.
2. What, initially is the narrator’s attitude towards the place? What do we know about the place? Is it disparaged? What other sad objects can you think of?
3. Why does he take the room?
4. What else contributes to the feeling of desperation here, apart from the sad objects?

5. Which areas in the poem can you identify as beginning this process of assimilation?
6. Which lines in the third stanza begin the process of projection/identification?
7. How does he know his habits (S4) Can he know this detail?
8. Who is the subject of S6?
9. S7 = self-fulfilling prophecy.

• Definitions you need
  
  Projection
• -A defense mechanism in which the individual attributes to other people impulses and traits that he himself has but cannot accept. It is especially likely to occur when the person lacks insight into his own impulses and traits."
  -Attributing one's own undesirable traits to other people or agencies."
  -The individual perceives in others the motive he denies having himself. Thus the cheat is sure that everyone else is dishonest.
  -People attribute their own undesirable traits onto others.
  
• Identification
  -Psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides.
  you identify yourself with (characteristics of) an object. For instance: I identify myself with a characteristic of my father and transform myself to assimilate this characteristic in my personality. I become a little bit like him. This latter has been used by Freud to define the formation of a personality.
  
• Assimilation
  -To incorporate and absorb into the mind.
  -To make similar; cause to resemble.
  
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
  -A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true.
  
• You should be able to answer this question with reference to the above terms:
• How does the poem become autobiographical?