What Ideas About Love and the Past Are Explored in ‘Love...

Throughout Love Songs in Age and Wild Oats, Philip Larkin uses various literary techniques, such as imagery, structure and symbolism to convey certain aspects of love and the passing of time. These aspects are illuminated by Dannie Abse in Down the M4. Love Songs in Age pictures a woman, perhaps Larkin’s mother, who has kept the musical scores of songs she used to play, perhaps on the piano, and rediscovers them after many years, when she is a widow. In the poem, Larkin uses lexical choice to explore how the idea of love is often distorted and in reality, love fails to live up to its promises of ‘freshness’ and ‘brilliance’. In the third stanza, the concept of ‘much-mentioned’ almost clichà ©d, love is presented in its ‘brilliance’, love†¦show more content†¦The imagery conjures thoughts of gorgeous petals, yet we often forget about the prickly stem on which the rose sits. This word is used in both, the first and third stanzas, to depict the beautiful woman who the narrator falls in love with. Her beautiful face and body allure him into affection, leading him to overlook her harsh ‘thorns’. Ironically rose also suggests favourable, comfortable, or eas y circumstances, a definition that is the complete opposite of what the unattainable lover instigates in the narrator’s life. The speaker also uses words such as ‘cathedral’, ‘ring’, and ‘clergy’ in the second stanza, to implicitly state that he proposes to the beautiful lover, and is denied many times. In the third stanza, Larkin’s creative use of the word ‘snaps’ in describing the pictures of his lover he carries around. Instead of simply calling them pictures or photographs, he substitutes a word that resembles what the woman in the picture did to his heart! In the last lines of the first stanza the speaker ends with ‘But it was the friend I took out’, considering he rambles on about how beautiful and great her friend is, it is confusing and ironic that he chooses the girl in ‘specs’. The speaker continues on in the second stanza and says ‘I believe I met beautiful twice’ the uncertainty of how many times he met her is not genuine and is only meant to look like he does not consider or remember how many times they met, when realistically