Here

Here” is a sprawling, moving, and often majestic poem that takes the reader on a visual journey through the countryside and the town, before finally ending up on the coast Larkin uses long, flowing sentences which add a sense of continual movement & these sentences are full of rich imagery and description which fully immerse the reader in the poem.

The speaker begins by reporting, “Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows.” He employs an ambiguous use of the word “swerving.” At first one thinks of an automobile swerving, and then that thought seems to be supported by the second line, “And traffic all night north.” And then the swerving continues: “swerving through fields too thin and thistled to be called meadows.”

The speaker is in a vehicle or is driving through the areas he is mentioning, but instead of merely driving he is “swerving": “swerving to solitude of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants and the widening river's slow presence, the piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud.” It is the speaker’s mind that is doing the swerving, not necessarily the automobile in which he is riding, or perhaps driving

The first line of the second stanza is a continuation of the last line of the first stanza: “The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud, Gathers to the surprise of a large town.” All of the "swerving" finally "gathers" the speaker to a large town; his swerving from industrial shadows through fields to skies and scarecrows, haystacks, the river, the clouds, and the gull-marked mud gathers him mentally and physically to the place where he finds surprisingly a large town at the end of it all.

Next, the speaker describes what he sees in the “large town”: “Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water.” The Domes, statues and spires show a grand monumental skyline of the town. However Larkin then gives the town a negative comment by saying “cranes cluster” which shows the industrial (bad) side of the town. He also sees the residents and reports on how they got there, “brought down the dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys, push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires.” He then catalogues other items: “Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies, electric mixers, toasters, washers, drier. This describes the town as cheap and dull.

In the third stanza, he qualifies the residents as “A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling where only salesmen and relations come.” He also describes the people as urban yet simple, streetwise but not intelligent. Once again, he catalogues what he sees: “Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum, tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives.” The town the speaker is describing is Hull, a city in northeast England, and the “slave museum” refers to the home of the abolitionist William Wilberforce.

The main theme in Larkin’s “Here” is suggested in the last three lines of the third stanza and the first line and a half in the fourth stanza: “And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges, isolate villages, where removed lives loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands like heat.” Indeed, loneliness was Larkin’s main theme, even as he cursed the darkness, he held “loneliness” up like a torch.

The poem comprises four eight-line stanzas with an ABBACDDC rhyme scheme. However, Larkin makes considerable use of half-rhymes in this poem (e.g. solitude/mud, stands/ascends) and there are “rhymes” that are scarcely rhymes at all, such as dwelling/museum and trolleys/driers. The effect of this is to give the poem a relaxed, informal tone. Although the poem has structure it is not overplayed and one is barely aware of it as the poem proceeds.