The Whitsun Weddings Lesson Plan

Why is home so sad? How does Larkin capture this sadness in his poem?

According to the poem, home is sad because it is dependent on the people inside it—it always "shapes" to fit their comforts, so when people leave, it withers, loses its significance. It is particularly sad because if you visit, you see the ghosts of the life it formerly held—the objects that once were significant and now are commonplace, the artifacts that are left as if by hands. Larkin uses very simple language in the poem to explain the emptiness of the home. He does not use many adjectives in his descriptions, which illustrates the plainness the objects have taken on. He ends with two short images: "the...