Here - Philip Larkin Student Revision Notes

Student Revision Guide
This Revision Guide offers 7 clear sections: Overview; Form and Structure; Close Analysis; Key Themes; Context; Critical Perspectives; Study Questions and Extension Activities.

The Close Analysis section follows four eight-line stanzas that travel east: the swerving journey through fields and industry towards the town; the cut-price crowd and its desires; the thinning edges beyond; and the unfenced existence at the coast, out of reach. Form and Structure covers the broadly iambic pentameter, the half-rhyme, and the long opening sentence that carries the reader across three stanzas. Context places the poem at the head of The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and in Hull, where Larkin worked from 1955. Critical Perspectives weighs Larkin’s portrait of the town’s residents as observation or condescension, and asks what the closing solitude offers.

Quotation Quilt
A selection of key quotations from ‘Here’, arranged to support the themes and concepts an essay on this poem is most likely to need.
Quotations are grouped by the swerving journey east; industry, fields and the approaching town; the cut-price crowd and their desires; the isolated villages and thinning edges; the unfenced existence; and the closing out of reach.