Afternoons by Larkin- Stanza Three analysis( GCSE English literature Tuition Bolton).

That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives

The second stanza runs into the third. It spills over into the final ‘glimpse’ of the poem using enjambment to suggest unfinished business, the cyclical nature of existence perhaps. ‘Courting’ continues but the romantic participants change. We are always replaced in life. Life is a cycle and humans step on and off all the time. The use of parenthesis in the second line of the final stanza highlights the sense of being overtaken and replaced. The irony of course that the new ‘lovers are all in school,’ underlines the theme of transience, the way humans are endlessly supplanted by others and by ‘progress’.

Furthermore, the freedom of the children is paradoxical. One the one hand they are on the brink of new adventures and potential as symbolised by the ‘unripe acorns’, yet they are dependent also: ‘ Expect to be taken home.’ Life, it appears, is riddled with contradiction masking an unintelligible sorrow which eventually (we suspect) concerns our own ( inevitable) mortality.

Larkin’s sympathy for women is palpable in the poem. Women seem more disappointed than the men who a least have recourse to their ‘skilled trades.’ The sense of emptiness affects women on a daily basis, hence their recourse to the conversation of the ‘sandpit’. The poem sadly yet brutally suggests ‘their beauty has thickened’ as if their youthful attractions have curdled perhaps in a physical way as their waists gain weight after children as well as suggesting that ‘beauty’ is transient in general and that disappointment and disillusion govern the ‘Afternoons’ of women’s’ lives.

The poem’s final couplet leaves the reader with an unresolved insight into the human condition; particularly the experience of women. The ambiguity of the unnamed, ‘Something‘ makes the sense of marginalisation poignant. It feels as if the women detect their progressive redundancy or irrelevance, as they are supplanted by new ‘lovers’ and their own children grow from the ‘unripe acorns,’ without knowing exactly why this is happening. Perhaps ignorance is better than certainty because the latter leads ( inevitability) to the acknowledgement of mortality. The purposeful vagueness of ‘something’ veils the looming pain of recognition. Better not to admit the futility of cyclical existence perhaps.

The use of the personal possessive pronoun, ‘own’ has a quietly devastating effect. It reveals the extent to which we are powerless to maintain agency and autonomy when inhabiting our own existence. The poignancy is beautifully achieved and we are left with the barely veiled recognition that we share far more with the young mothers at the recreation ground than we may first admit. Despair is never far away in Larkin!