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Analysis and comments on Whatever Happened? by Philip Larkin

Comment 3 of 3, added on September 3rd, 2007 at 6:30 AM.

Hi. I am very happy here. I think that I will stand here for a long time.

BreleAlkate from United States
Comment 2 of 3, added on June 8th, 2006 at 4:20 PM.

I think he is referring to any one moment of our life - the shocking ones are the mose obvious. The very moment an event that has an impact on us is over, it starts to become history. It moves inexorably further away from us in time and changes as we remould it in our minds. We choose to remember what we want to, and forget the rest. We think this is helping us to see the event more clearly, but really it is only a way of fooling ourselves - we can kid ourselves that a boring day was wonderful, a terrible experience was just inevitable bad luck etc etc, and we invent reasons and excuses to back up our illusions. But, perhaps underneath all our reasonable explanations of what happened, the truth remains hidden inside us, and comes out to haunt us only in our nightmares...

Michaela from Spain
Comment 1 of 3, added on August 23rd, 2005 at 3:28 AM.

Philipp Larkins belongs to a new movement in Poetry. He writes about present day situations. In this poem he talks about horrible experiences that we try to repress. We distance ourselves like looking on a picture, we explain it rationally but we can not cope. These dreadful experinces only show up in our nighmares. As for Larkin he probably refered to the postwar period where people tried to get back to normality. For me it refers to any painful event in one's life that we can not manage.

Christina Steiner from Austria



Information about Whatever Happened?

Poet: Philip Larkin
Poem: Whatever Happened?
Volume: The Less Deceived
Year: 1953
Added: Feb 20 2003
Viewed: 4073 times


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