High Windows (York Notes Advanced): York Notes Advanced: everything you need to catch up, study and prepare for 2021 assessments and 2022 exams - Softcover

Larkin, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1405861827 ISBN 13: 9781405861823

Publisher: Longman, 2007

Synopsis

For more than 25 years, York Notes have been helping students throughout the UK to get the inside track on the written word.

 

Firmly established as the nation’s favourite and most comprehensive range of literature study guides, each and every York Note has been carefully researched and written by experts to make sure that you get the most wide-ranging critical analysis, the most detailed commentary and the most helpful key points and checklists.

 

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. Written by established literature experts, they introduce students to a more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

About this title

Review

Philip Larkin ponders ordinary lives in his poems: a Saturday show; travelling salesmen; young love. At the seaside "Everything crowds under the low horizon: / Steep beach, blue water, towels, read bathing caps, / The small hushed waves' repeated fresh collapse / Up the warm yellow sand". There's an almost Shakespearian obsession with ageing and passing time in the poems collected in High Windows. "What do they think has happened, the old fools, to make them like this?…Why aren't they screaming?" Larkin asks of the elderly. His answer: "Well, we shall find out." In the titular poem he watches young lovers and wonders "if anyone looked at me, forty years back, and thought, That'll be the life". But it's hard to see into the future or the past: you have to strain, as if looking through a high window, and even then you may only get a glimpse of light through the "sun-comprehending glass."

High Windows was first published in 1974 and some critics disliked Larkin's work for its lack of experiment and familiar subject matter. Yet even at its most traditional, Larkin's writing can be striking as, in "This Be The Verse", it encapsulates prosaic truths with plain language and gentle wit:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

-- Tamsin Todd

Book Description

Re-packaged in the much-loved Faber typographic look.

Edition details

• Publisher: Longman
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1405861827
• ISBN 13: 9781405861823
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128