MCMXIV (1964)

(Phillip Larkin, 1922-1985)

Those long uneven lines

Standing as patiently

As if they were stretched outside

The Oval or Villa Park,

The crowns of hats, the sun

On moustached archaic faces

Grinning as if it were all

An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached

Established names on the sunblinds,

The farthings and sovereigns,

And dark-clothed children at play

Called after kings and queens,

The tin advertisements

For cocoa and twist, and the pubs

Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring:

The place-names all hazed over

With flowering grasses, and fields

Shadowing Domesday lines

Under wheat’s restless silence;

The differently-dressed servants

With tiny rooms in huge houses,

The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word – the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages,

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again.

Biography

On August 9, 1922, Philip Larkin was born in Coventry, England. He attended St.
John's College, Oxford. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in
1945 and, though not particularly strong on its own, is notable insofar as certain
passages foreshadow the unique sensibility and maturity that characterizes his later
work.

In 1946, Larkin discovered the poetry of Thomas Hardy and became a great admirer
of his poetry, learning from Hardy how to make the commonplace and often dreary
details of his life the basis for extremely tough, unsparing, and memorable poems.
With his second volume of poetry, The Less Deceived (1955), Larkin became the
preeminent poet of his generation, and a leading voice of what came to be called
"The Movement," a group of young English writers who rejected the prevailing
fashion for neo-Romantic writing in the style of Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Like Hardy,
Larkin focused on intense personal emotion but strictly avoided sentimentality or
self-pity.

In 1964, he confirmed his reputation as a major poet with the publication of The
Whitsun Weddings, and again in 1974 with High Windows: collections whose searing,
often mocking, wit does not conceal the poet's dark vision and underlying obsession
with universal themes of mortality, love, and human solitude. Deeply anti-social and
a great lover and published critic of American jazz, Larkin never married and worked
as a librarian in the provincial city of Hull, where he died on December 2, 1985.
(https://m.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/philip-larkin)
Iffa Rohma Hidayah

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Analysis of MCMXIV by Phillip Larkin

When reading MCMXIV , the first image that will come out in the readers' mind is an
old photograph of the old England when men like to wear hats, old-fashioned shops
everywhere, and so many children are named after the queens or kings. The fact that
the poet chose to use Roman numerals to write the title, which can also be written as
1914 or nineteen fourteen, is less hooking. However, the title itself is very important
in this poem. 1914 is the year of the outbreak of the first word war. It means that
men are required to enroll to fight in the war, or lots of them might do it voluntary.

The first stanza of the poem tells the reader that there are long uneven lines of men
standing patienly. Those lines are like being stretched from the oval, a cricket ground
in Kennington, or Villa Park, a football stadium in Birmingham. This is where the
readers can indicate that the poem takes place in England. The seventh and eight
lines tell that those men look happy as if it is the August Bank Holiday, a public
holiday on August 4th, and they are ready to watch a cricket or football match. Here
the poet intends to say that those men are willingly to sacrifice themselves to the
country they live in by going in a war.

In the second and third stanza of the poem, the poets describes the situation at that
time. He mentions the old-fashioned shops, old coins, dark-clothed children with the
name of Elizabeth, Charles, or Edward, advertisements, and pubs. He also describes
that the countryside of England does not care about the war as it is ruled by the rich
indicated in the last two lines of the third stanza "With tiny rooms in huge houses,The
dust behind limousines;". Here the poet intends to show the irony that only the poor
go to the war, and not the rich people who live in the silence of countryside.

The first two lines in the last stanza of the poem shows the reader that these people
are innocent "Never such innocence, Never before or since", but they have to face
the war. They have to leave their houses to go to the war without a word, without
exception as it is their duty to fight for their country. The sixth and seventh lines of
the poem "The thousands of marriages, Lasting a little while longer" indicate that
their marriage only last a while longer, for they have to be in the war for a long time
before they can go back to their family, or they might not be able to meet their family
ever again as death finds them first.