Afternoons

'Afternoons'

• Faded youth and growing dissatisfaction with life
• Title suggest middle-age suggestings life is past it's best

'Summer is fading/Leaves fall in ones and twos'

• Even nature is trapped in a routine as the best time of the year is over

• Larkin wrote about how sodiers and civillians were dissillusioned by the government about when the war will end 
• He wrote about everyday things and relationships
• He didn't marry or have children

Semantic Fields:

Routine, order and boredom - 'Assemble' The mothers are like soldiers. 'Skilled trades' the fathers lives are at work. 'School' the new generation are in school where they will be taugh to do what their parents did.

Sibilance - 'Swing and sandpit' makes fun things sound ordered and regimented

Nature- 'Wind/ is ruining their courting places' wid adds life and chaos which is seen as inconvineent. 'Unripe acorns' the children haven't yet reached the same fate as their parents

Age and Time - 'young mothers' 'lovers' 'children' The three stages of their lives are represented by nature

Space - 'Border' nature (like their dreams) are kept away. 'Behind' and ' before' the women are trapped between husband and children

Repetiton - 'Still courting places ' the romance has ended. 'Something is pushing them/to the side of their own lives' Enjambment emphasises separation

• Free verse
• Orders into three eight line stanzas
• Represents the meaningless order and routine of people's lives

'From trees bordering/ The new recreation ground'

• Third person shows he is distancing himself from the topic like the trees from the playground

'behind them at intervals'

• Husband are separate from their wives

Third person illustrates that characters are alienated from each other and their own lives and this is a problem with society