High Windows & MCMXIV by Philip Larkin

1. High Windows&MCMXIVby Philip Larkin İrem Bezcioğlu 1491182

2. High Windows • When I see a couple of kidsAnd guess he's fucking her and she'sTaking pills or wearing a diaphragm,I know this is paradiseEveryone old has dreamed of all their lives—Bonds and gestures pushed to one sideLike an outdated combine harvester,And everyone young going down the long slideTo happiness, endlessly. I wonder ifAnyone looked at me, forty years back,And thought, That'll be the life;No God any more, or sweating in the darkAbout hell and that, or having to hideWhat you think of the priest. HeAnd his lot will all go down the long slideLike free bloody birds. And immediatelyRather than words comes the thought of high windows:The sun-comprehending glass,And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

3. Larkin employs words that have more than one connotation. • Example: The long slide: A slide can be the familiar playground slide which children ride for thefun of it and it is also a slipping or a regression (as in the verb backsliding). Larkin intends both meanings.

4. Loss of religion: As the youth journey down the long slide there will be no “God any more”, no sweating about hell. The sky becomes endless, nowhere and nothing. But the sky at the end of the poem is described as “nowhere” (like God, who is omnipresent), “nothing” (like God who is not a physical being) and endless (again, like God). Maybe Larkin is trying to say that no matter how far you go down the slide, God is still there.

5. Loss of youth: At the start he describes the couple, as if he is jealous or is regretting lost days. At the end the narrator stands inside, looking longingly out the windows at the endless, boundless freedom of the outside.

6. High Windows is a poem about distances: the distance between age and youth, between high window and pavement, heaven and hell, man and God.

7. “MCMXIV” are the roman numerals for “1914”. • “1914” is the beginning of the First World War = The Great War = The war to end all wars = The war that would be over by Christmas

8. MCMXIV Those long uneven linesStanding as patientlyAs if they were stretched outsideThe Oval or Villa Park,The crowns of hats, the sunOn moustached archaic facesGrinning as if it were allAn August Bank Holiday lark; And the shut shops, the bleachedEstablished names on the sunblinds,The farthings and sovereigns,And dark-clothed children at playCalled after kings and queens,The tin advertisementsFor cocoa and twist, and the pubsWide open all day--

9. And the countryside not caring:The place names all hazed overWith flowering grasses, and fieldsShadowing Domesday linesUnder wheat's restless silence;The differently-dressed servantsWith tiny rooms in huge houses,The dust behind limousines; Never such innocence,Never before or since,As changed itself to pastWithout a word--the menLeaving the gardens tidy,The thousands of marriages,Lasting a little while longer:Never such innocence again.

10. Thanks for listening !