Ellie's AS Literature Blog: Love Songs in Age

Themes

How the experience of love changes with age, how love fails to deliver and ultimately disappoints

Content and Voice

The poem uses a third-person narrative voice to convey sympathy and distance. The poem pictures a women, possibly Larkin's mother, who rediscovers the music of her past after becoming a widow.

Analysis

The vague reference to "she" makes the poem universally applicable, speaking to people in general.
The fact that the songs "kept so little space" diminishes the memories and makes them insignificant as the memories of love occupy such a small space. Each song she rediscovers stores another memory and with each listed item, more everyday happenings are revealed.
"One bleached from lying in a sunny place" reminds the reader of a holiday or other relaxing time- light marked the song
"One marked in circles by a vase of water" could be a reference to flowers that her husband gave her being placed in a vase- symbol of love.
"One mended" in a "tidy fit" suggests organisation but also chaos as the house must have needed constant quick cleaning when children were around. Nowadays, the women's bones must be more brittle, making it harder to do such things with ease.
The song "coloured, by her daughter" is a reminder of happy family life and all it entailed. Each of the albums reminds the widow of a special part of that past time and the various effects of nature but also that problems or inconveniences mattered so little then.
"They had waited" personifies the songs as living embodiments of love waiting to be rediscovered. However, this can only happen in "widowhood", when passion in life is gone, as indicated by the caesura that marks the passage of time and the pause that occurs when her husband dies. The memories are fading as even the songs are tired-looking.
The fact that the songs were found when "looking for something else" suggest that they were discovered accidentally-serendipity (happy chance) or fate.
The oxymoron of "frank submissive chord" could allude to love being confusing and interpreted differently by different people. Youth was considered to be "unfailing"-forever lasting and spring imagery (" spring-woken tree") suggests an invigorating and fresh life that was just beginning.
This second stanza also becomes more melodious and like a ballad, mocking the effect that love has on people.
When we are young, we have “That certainty of time laid up in store”, the belief that we have so much time to do everything in life but only in age do we realise how limited we are and then nostalgia sweeps by.
Love is a "glare"- sharp, bright, intense but painful and damaging also. It is a cliché and "much-mentioned" idea that is over-exaggerated as "brilliance". The idea that it "broke out" suggests freedom and liberty when in fact, it is a trap. Love promises to "solve" and "satisfy" and at the time, appears to be the answer to everything. It is a solution that is a lie as we have unrealistic expectations for it. The loss of vibrancy may make the widow "cry" but putting back the songs also shows the women trying to forgot how love could not satisfy all in the end. "It had not done so then, and could not now." People are foolish to believe in love and that which it offers, as Larkin clearly points out with the cadence of the last line. Love promises but fails to deliver, although the poem may also be suggesting that we should love as much as we can in youth.
Enjambment is used by Larkin to represent the flowing nature of the music and that love cannot stop anything, especially death.
Youthful love: "brilliance", sudden, abrupt, all-consuming, fresh, exciting, foolish, deluded, invincible.
Love in old age: serious, lame, tired, hopeless, tarnished, worn, old, steady, a dying dream, all about commitment, hopeless.