Indledning
We’ve analyzed a fair few Philip Larkin poems over the last year or so, and had largely said everything we had to say about his work. But we’ve been inspired to write about ‘Going, Going’ because of popular demand, of a kind.
Another of our posts, an analysis of another Larkin poem titled simply ‘Going’, has been receiving a great deal of traffic, but people have reached it by searching for an analysis of ‘Going, Going’. Which is a completely different poem.
Since ‘Going, Going’ is fine late Larkin, we thought we’d offer some thoughts on this poem, which you can read here.
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Uddrag
How should we analyse ‘Going, Going’? It’s a typically Larkinesque poem – not just because of its glum and pessimistic view of human ‘progress’ (compare here many of the other poems from High Windows, only a handful of which are celebratory), but because of the linguistic and rhetorical strategies Larkin employs to make his point.
These are worthy of analysis because they are part of his signature style. Consider the way Larkin repeatedly reduces England – not just the less desirable aspects, but the positive ones too – to individual features and symbols.
This begins with the countryside being summoned up by the alliterative ‘fields and farms’, and continues throughout the poem, with the civil servants and councillors approving the takeover bid being reduced to ‘spectacled grins’, and with old England being summoned up by ‘shadows’, ‘meadows’, ‘lanes’, ‘guildhalls’, and (alliteratively again) ‘carved choirs’.
The new England – the nightmare future England Larkin’s poem imagines – is simply ‘concrete and tyres’.
The people who make up this quasi-dystopian England of the future are gendered as ‘crooks and tarts’, suggesting crime but also financial greed and gain (‘tarts’ suggesting prostitutes, and ‘crooks’, in the context of the poem, invoking financial fraudsters more than small-time villains).
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