Home is so Sad

Home is so Sad

Home is so sad by Philip Larkin is a poem about a house that is personified ( anthropomorphism)  as a person who is sad. The themes in the poem include loneliness and negation and is a sad poem, based on Larkin’s return to his family house.

Summary

The first stanza in the poem is about the homes's feelings by saying that the "Home is sad". It also shows that the house is a dump because " it stays as it was left" which shows that Larkin left the house in a dump and it has been that way until Larkin came back. The stanza continues by saying that all it wanted to do was to comfort and to please those that it sheltered. The house is broken hearted and been left to rote and decay away.

The second stanza starts of with Larkin saying that the house feels unfamiliar to what it was before, and he wants to change it back to what it used be. Larkin then describes objects in the house ("pictures, cutlery, music, piano stool, vase") to show different memories of events that happened in the house that were happy and cheerful. However the poem is not about the home being sad, it instead is about Larkin being sad at home.  

analysis

Throughout the two stanzas, there is a lack of adjectives and imagery, such as the final list: “Look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool.” Larkin chooses to strip this description to the bare minimum in order to make in more universal; it could be anyone’s lost home.

The house is personified throughout the poem, “It stays as it was left” “As if to win them back” “bereft / Of anyone to please, it withers so”. This personification adds to the sensitivity of the poem, and when it “withers” it is as if the house is dying, and persona feels the sadness of this loss. “Bereft”, in particular, is emotive, with its duel meaning of “without” and also “a sense of loss”. The house, for the persona, has been robbed of its inhabitants, “theft”, and no longer as “heart” to “turn again to what it started as”.

Yet, in the final stanza, that idea of “how things ought to be” for the house, even in the past, was merely “a joyous shot”, “long fallen wide”. Like the ‘Whitsun Weddings’ there is much promise in the idea of “home”, yet like marriage in that poem, it doesn't quite deliver. The “music in the piano stool”, similarly, reminds us of love’s failure in ‘Love Songs in Ages’.

“Home is so sad” because while time passes outside, it remains frozen within, a snapshot of how life once was. Those memories burst out on examination, but the house now, just as it was unable then, isn’t quite able to live up to its expectations.