“Compare the Ways in Which Larkin and Abse Write About Time and It’s Passing.” in Your Response, You Must Include Detailed Critical Discussion of Love Songs in Age and One Other Poem by Larkin.

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“Compare the ways in which Larkin and Abse write about time and it’s passing.” In your response, you must include detailed critical discussion of Love Songs In Age and one other poem by Larkin. Many poems in Philip Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ are connected through one common factor: Larkin’s rather dismal attitude towards time and the passing of it. In many of his poems Larkin presents time as a menial entity resulting in an inevitable mortality. However, on further examination Larkin reflects back on time in a nostalgic manner. In order to emphasise Larkin’s outlooks onto time and it’s passing, one can highlight the similarities and differences between Larkin and Abse’s poetry. In ‘Love Songs In Age’, Larkin illustrates the view that time and it’s passing merely leads to many disappointments. The enjambment he uses amongst all three stanzas, “and stood/relearning” in the first and second and “more/the glare” between the second and third; this implies the suggestion that love cannot stop the passing of time and the instances that happen within it, for example the death of the woman’s husband. During the first stanza, Larkin uses imagery to create a memoir of the music sheets that the woman has found, “one marked in circles”, “and coloured”, suggesting that the joy of life, love and happiness isn’t appreciated until age shows what one has missed during their youth. We can then imply from this suggestion that Larkin feels time is only appreciated during the older years of one’s life. In contrast, we can see that Larkin may mock the way time is spent as he brings in such detail to such trivial things, like the way the “covers pleased her”. Within the second stanza, Larkin tells of how we have “the certainty of time laid up in store,” insinuating that we have the belief in us that we have an infinite amount of time and only when time has passed us do we

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