'Love Songs in Age' by Phillip Larkin

The title being 'Love Songs in Age' instantly suggests that this poem is going to include a theme of time. The speaker's thoughts are triggered by thinking about a woman in "widowhood" with her old song books full of love songs.

The woman kept her songs as they "kept so little space", suggesting she wouldn't have kept them if they took more space, perhaps they didn't mean much to her anymore, or the opposite, that she didn't want to think about them anymore but couldn't face getting rid of them because they had a sentimental value."The covers pleased her" suggesting that it is only the covers of the songs that please her now, not the actual songs, suggesting maybe a disappointment. The song books were "bleached from lying in a sunny place", "marked in circles by a vase of water", "mended" and "coloured, by her daughter". This shows that the books were forgotten about and not cared for, they had become part of the furniture. However, the neglect of the books wasn't purposely done, suggesting that in life some things just decay with 'age'. I think from within the first stanza there are suggestions that the song books represent more than just songs, I think at this point we can tell that maybe they represent a realisation of something, "they waited, till, in widowhood", suggesting that the books would wait until the woman was lonely and no longer as busy as she was before and then force her to reflect back on her life and the love songs and how they matched up to her own life perhaps. Also, the personification of "waitied" suggests them and everything they mean were going to jump out at the woman, suggesting that when she opened them up again she would be really affected, maybe they held a lot of her past.

The woman "relearned" the songs again, "how each frank submissive chord had ushered in". This suggests that she played the songs naturally and effortlessly but also played each note to the exact way it was supposed to sound, suggesting she was very connected to the music, like it was a part of her. However, in contrast to this the "hyphenated" words are referring to when a word is hyphenated over different notes in a songbook, but could also suggest that something is broken, possibly referring to love and heartbreak. Playing the music brings the "unfailing sense of being young", this could imply a sense of nostalgia, but also that playing the music brings life and awakens people like the "spring-woken tree". The spring tree could suggest that playing the music gave the woman hope and optimism for her future, possibly to do with hope for her love life as well. The "certainty of time laid up in store" when playing the music, when this is in context with the spring woken tree and being young I think that it suggests that when young, people can often feel very positive and motivated for their future, they're almost certain of what their whole life is going to involve. However, in reality, that is not the case as a lot of the time we can make life plans and decide what we want our future to be like, but what life really is is what happens while we're making these plans. This idea reminds me of another of Larkin's poems, 'Dockery and Son', suggesting that our life is determined by the choices we make, but often these choices aren't consciously made.

In the songs, there is a "glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love", the "glare" could be suggesting that love is blinding, that when in love or wishing to be in love, they lose sight of the other things in life which they could appreciate. The "glare" could also suggest that love is mentioned too much in the songs, that it's painful, the word glare suggests a physical pain however I think it's more likely to mean an emotional pain. Perhaps the mention of love could cause pain for people who are alone and want to be in love, or maybe for people who have lost their partners. The speaker says that love has a "bright incipience (that is) sailing above", suggesting that the idea of love is heavenly. Love is "promising to solve, and satisfy, and set unchangeably in order", suggesting that love songs promise that love will solve everything in life and make everything perfect. However, the woman "pile(s) (the songbooks) back" and cries as love "had not done so then, and could not now". This is saying that love doesn't solve everything and it never will, the promises are broken. Perhaps the reason for the woman's loss of faith in love and it being able to solve everything is because she is a widow and is feeling heartbroken, whereas if she never loved her husband then she wouldn't feel heartbroken. I don't think this is suggest that love is a bad thing, just that with love there also comes sadness and it can't solve all the problems in a person's life, it may ease them or it could create problems and maybe the speaker is suggesting that this is sometimes forgotten. The idea that love doesn't solve everything in a person's life reminds me of 'An Arundel Tomb', "nothing cures".