Love Songs in Age - Larkin

Love Songs in Age is a poem again about music but it also encompasses this aspect of time. It is about a woman who is rummaging in the attic trying to find something and she comes across her old sheet music.

Within the first stanza of this poem we get the sense that the woman has kept away these sheets of music for a very long time. The fact that they are 'bleached' and 'marked' suggests an everyday kind of neglect, that they have been forgotten and abandoned for a very long time. The finding of this music also brings back happy memories for this woman about her family. They are 'coloured by her daughter' this gives a sense of a family atmosphere. However, if she has aged this gives us a perception of time and like the poem 'Reference Back' gives us a sense of how fast it has gone. We also get the personification of these sheets of music 'so they had waited'. It's as if they are waiting to surprise the woman in a good way so that she could reminisce about good times. Again in this stanza the word 'widowhood' highlights her old age as a person now.

Within stanza two she begins 'relearning how each frank submissive chord'. The words 'frank' and 'submissive' give off the connotations of being in control, that this music can be controlled by her touch. The discovery of this music makes her memory of learning the chords flood back to her. When the woman begins learning all the chords again we get a sense that she reminisces over 'being young'. When she listens to this music she starts to remember her youth. This is why Larkin seems to describe this as if it is a 'spring-woken tree' because this has all of the connotations of becoming alive and this reflects in youth where you still have hope and promise and you haven't made any major life choices yet. Through this, this poem also links nicely to 'Dockery and Son'. The replaying of the music almost gives this woman the feeling of being young again. The music has 'hidden freshness' that she never thought she would of found again if she were not to stumble across it in the attic.

The last stanza is more philosophical in it's nature and has links to love and time. The woman starts to think of her love life and how unlike the music she can control she had no control over love. Words such as 'glare' and 'brilliance' give us a sense that she was literally blinded by it all. In other words, during her youth she was to young to make conscious decisions, she was literally blinded about what to do. Through all the memories of her decisions in her life she is moved to tears. The quote 'promising to solve, and satisfy, and set unchangeable in order' links to the ending 'It had not done so then, and could not now'. Larkin is making the comment that this woman can not change time. The aspect of love did not solve, satisfy and promise now and now that her husband is dead is does not now. Larkin's main message in this poem again seems to be to choose loneliness over a relationship because it is more satisfying in the end.