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Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.
Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,
And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;
For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there
At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable insided a room
The trafic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.
Philip Larkin
Read poems about / on: loss, women, children, red, light, time, woman, city, family, shopping, child
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Click here to write your comments about this poem (Ambulances by Philip Larkin)
Daphne Grant (12/13/2006 5:26:00 PM)
A very poignant and wistlful poem, of regret and pending sadness, for the author like everyone else knew that at some-time the ambulance may come for him. The ambulance in this poem represents things coming to an end. In the midst of life' etc. One reference was to the passing of fashion, this person is about to become history, like looking at old newspaper, when the news was urgent headlines but now it's history. |
Andrew Felton (3/13/2005 6:25:00 AM)
This poem superbly juxtaposes the meaning of death with the pragmatics of life. Life, in all its febrile practicality ('all we are') is blurred into a 'distance' when we are confronted with the ultimate reality of death. For Larkin, death is a 'solving emptiness' that comes to take away and reSOLVE the seemingly endless struggle of existence ('all we do') . Larkin also points to what Vernon Scannell called 'the huge inevitability of death' when he states that 'all streets in time are visited'. There is a sense that we cannot escape death (a major Larkinian theme) but simultaneously it does come as a reSOLUTION, albeit a frightening and mysterious one. For Larkin, life is that 'unique blend of families and fashions' which is suddenly terminated, not just be physical death, but by the realisation of it, as we are 'borne away' in an ambulance. At this point, we realise that (in Shakespeare's parlance) this 'tale told by an idiot...full of sound and fury' is about to end. Perhaps the central message of this poem is to engage in a stoical attitude to life because, in the end, all its convoluted intricacies are going to dissipate ('loosen') and we are left in 'deadened air', distanced from love and the many aspects of life which enabled us to maintain a grip on it.
Andrew Felton BA (Hons) , MA |
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Philip Larkin
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