Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.
In my previous blog entry about the poem, I discussed ways of evaluating the tone and message of the opening line of Larkin’s Afternoons. I suggested that the poem is concerned with the passage of time and the way we are aware of our own ephemerality or transience as we get older. We may lose our sense of agency and autonomy as we take on responsibilities.
In the rest of the opening stanza, Larkin creates a highly evocative sense of place underlined by loss. Thus he draws our visual attention to the ‘leaves’ falling which(metaphorically) seems to reflect the plight of the lonely ‘young mothers‘ whose desire to escape the emptiness of the ‘hollows of afternoons’ consigns them to the regulated, undifferentiated gathering of other young mothers who ‘assembled /At swing and sandpit.’ The sibilance of ‘swing and sandpit’ reinforces a sense of banality and routine. These are purpose-built pleasures. The adjective ‘new‘ attached to the ‘recreation ground‘ suggests that pleasures are licensed nowadays. Freedom to choose has been curtailed. Imagination and invention have been quashed by the responsibilities of family life, particularly for women.
Bathos is strongly experienced by the reader as we experience the way parenthood makes mothers adjust and make do with far little freedom that they experienced during the ‘summer’ of their lives. Compromise seems the overwhelming experience of mothers whose children enjoy their temporary liberation at the ‘sandpit’ unaware that they too will replicate the experience of their parents. The reader enjoys the irony of such repetition as it is understated and reveals the innate, untamed quality of childhood which needs to be ‘set free‘ temporarily from the regulation and discipline of home. The freedom of their children is comparative and finally, illusory. Childhood will yield to adulthood and with it, imprisoning responsibility. Women, in particular, seem to bear the weight of Larkin’s pathos and irony.