One Side Will Have To Go By Philip Larkin Analysis

In this poem, Larkin explores how we cope with inevitability and inescapability of death. After waking up in the pre-dawn darkness, the speaker thinks about his own death. The realization that each day brings him closer to the end plagues the speaker's own life and thoughts. He is not in anguish at having wasted his life since he has accepted that it was his destiny to have to overcome difficult odds, but rather, he is simply terrified of his own personal death. In stanza three, the speaker believes that religious faith and rationalist assurance prove unable to console the speaker. Religion has simply gone beyond intolerable for the speaker, and rationalism fails to realize that the idea of losing sensation is what makes death so terrifying. By stanza four, the speaker deems

The urban world outside prepares to return to life after slumber, but to the speaker, the darkness is still present. Larkin states, "One side will have to go" (line 44), referring to life and death. Unfortunately, life must leave the speaker, and death remains inevitable. The speaker's emotional predicament is the result of the conditions of individual life in the 20th Century. Physically, people were relatively stable but were also mentally and spiritually overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness and isolation. He awakes by himself, having no one to share his existence. Throughout the poem, the speaker laments that in death, there will be "nothing to love or link with" (line 29), further worsening the fact that the speaker does not have any companions in the first place. The speaker's own fear of death largely substantially contrasts the societal norms that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World imposes on its citizens. Children, for example, are conditioned to see death in a societal context in which the individual has no meaning. Emotions such as sadness and isolation are suppressed, and natural occurrences including families and natural births are eliminated thus making death