Faith Healing - Larkin

From within the first stanza of this poem we are given a very clear description of this Faith Healer. 'Rimless glasses, silver hair, dark suit, white collar' gives across the connotations of someone business-like or professional. However, this faith healer is presented as having a sinister nature to him as well. He 'persuaded them onwards to his voice and hands'. This gives us an idea that he is herding sheep. It gives us further connotaions that these women are easily controlled in life and that they are vulnerable to the Faith Healer's power. This is probably because they are tricked into his religious faith healings so the women are literally easily persuaded. Although the faith healer is a professional person, it seems as though he has little time or love for any of these women. 'The deep American voice demands'. The fact that he is demanding these women to come over again gives a further representaion of his control. He is able to be forceful to these women so that he gets them to do what he wants them to do. He is also 'scarcely pausing' which again reinforces this idea that he has no care for these women. He is using this Faith Healing session as an act of performance. We see that he is not doing this for the love of the women, however for the business and profit that he will get out of it. Larkin uses this idea to give us an insight into the personality and characterisitics of this faith healer. We see during the end of the first stanza that the faith healer believes he is superior to God. He is 'directing God', we get the impression that the faith healer thinks he has power over God. This gives us further connotations that this faith healer is a fake or a con.

Within the second stanza there is a further repesentation of these women being herded through the word 'sheepishly'. The women are unable to control themselves, therefore Larkin is presenting them as pathetic and weak. We also get the impression that these women are also having problems at home through the quote 'To re-awake at kindness'. This supports the view that these women receive no love when they are at home. So Larkin is suggesting that it would be natural for them to seek love from the faith healer instead. The women are therefore vulnerable and weak in the world, because they can only rely on one person to seek love in life. We also get religious words towards the end of this stanza such as 'rejoice' and 'joy arrives'. This represents the view that these women generally believe that this faith healer is genuine. This just shows their lack of ability to think in life because they can't see past his appearance the true personality of the faith healer. Or on the other hand they trust the faith healer because they themselves have nobody in life.

In the final stanza of this poem we see that the persona is now talking to us through the quote 'What's wrong!'. The quote 'In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love'. Larkin is suggesting that within these women's dreams, they feel as if they are being loved, however this is not the case in real life or reality, we see that this is an idealised version of how we want to live our lives. It can never become possible in real life, only within our dreams. 'To some it means the difference they could make by loving others suggests that by loving other people in life this gives us a sense of puropse, something to do, aspire or achieve to in life. Then we move onto the quote 'By loving others, but across most of it sweeps as all they might have done had they been loved'. We are able to see a link of regret in their lives and dissapointment of what they have become. 'They had not loved enough' doesn't just apply to us, but to all of us. Larkin is examining the view that as humans are we even able to love at all. The use of personification is used in the final stanza to convey that the faith healer is unable to heal these women through when 'rigid landscapes weep'. It as if these women are crying to because they no longer have any trust in the faith healer. 'Ache' is used to convey this desire to love that these women so desperately need.