High Windows

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1974

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form & Meter

Philip Larkin wrote “High Windows” in formally conservative quatrains. From a formal perspective, “High Windows” is very approachable: It is of a comfortably short (but not too short) length, written in lines of roughly regular and equivalent length, devoid of indentations or formal variations, and organized into the most common of all English poetry stanza forms, (four-line) quatrains. The poem eschews regular meter, despite its flirtation with iambs in the first stanza. The poem begins with a mostly metrically regular first line, which follows the iambic pattern of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable until its “COUple of KIDS” (Line 1) breaks the pattern. Its second line is written in perfect iambic meter, however: “and GUESS he’s FUCKing HER and SHE’S” (Line 2). If Larkin followed his pattern of utterly nondescript formal choices, the iambic lines would be pentameter, or five feet (units of meter) long. Instead, they follow the tighter pattern of tetrameter, or four feet.

At the crucial fourth line, which gives Larkin a chance to re-establish the rhythm, the poem instead drops a foot and varies the iambic with apparent glibness: “i KNOW this is PAraDISE” (Line 4). The line seems to delight in grating against the alleged rhythm, since it could have easily have been “i KNOW that THIS is PAraDISE,” which would have not only followed the iambic meter but also maintained the tetrameter. While it could be argued that these first two lines establish a very loose iambic tetrameter as the underlying rhythm of the poem, the constant variations and lack of any sufficiently regular iambic line after the first stanza make this reading shaky at best.

End Rhyme

End rhyme is the appearance of rhyming words at the ends of their respective poetic lines. While lacking a standard meter, “High Windows” is organized into a traditional rhyme structure. Although loosely held and rife with partial or imperfect rhymes called slant rhymes, “High Windows” is made up of quatrains with ABAB rhyming patterns. In other words, the first and third lines of each quatrain rhyme with each other, as do the second and fourth lines. The rhyme scheme is most irregular in the first stanza, pairing the utterly dissimilar “kids” with “diaphragm” (Lines 1, 3), and the only slightly closer “she’s” with “paradise” (Lines 2, 4). The following stanza also only rhymes its second and fourth lines, “side” and “slide” (Lines 6, 8). The full rhyme scheme is realized in the third stanza, albeit with the slant rhyme “if” and “life” (Lines 9, 11), though no more slant than its “back” and “dark” (Lines 10, 12).

While the meter of “High Windows” seems to somewhat regularly begin but quickly decays into formlessness, the rhyme scheme tightens as the poem goes along. The end rhyme is scarcely audible in the poem’s opening stanza, but by the final two stanzas it is aggressively obvious: “hide” and “slide” (Lines 13, 15), “He” and “immediately” (Lines 14, 16), “windows” and “shows” (Lines 17, 19), and “glass” and “endless” (Lines 18, 20).

Larkin’s use of rhyme in the poem, nested as it is between the traditional and easy xAxA and ABAB quatrain rhyme schemes, is understated and natural. Because the lines are often broken in the middle of a phrase, Larkin avoids sounding sing-song or like a nursery rhyme. Instead, his use of traditional poetic structures allows him to effortlessly cradle his alternatively witty and beautiful diction and rhetoric.

Enjambment

A poetic line is enjambed when the line break occurs against the grain of the syntax. If a line break coincides with the end of a sentence or the end of a clause, this is called a parsed line (and is not considered enjambed). Some of Larkin’s lines in “High Windows” are parsed with the syntax, like “dreamed of all their lives—” (Line 5), “forty years back” (Line 10), or That’ll be the life;” (Line 11). However, he also makes liberal use of enjambment in order to vary the flow of the lines against the rhyme scheme and to create additional meaning.

This guide has already discussed the mileage Larkin gets out of breaking his stanzas in between “going down the long slide” and “To happiness, endlessly” (Lines 8-9). The long pause allows sinister implications to accumulate to the “long slide” (Line 8) before being overturned by the end of the phrase—at least at the surface level. Much of the enjambments in “High Windows” function in the same way, creating space for more pessimistic reads of Larkin’s lines than the sentence signifies on its own. Even the sentence that begins “I wonder if” (Line 9) paired as it is with the delayed conclusion to the long slide casts doubt on the supposed “know[ledge]” (Line 4) the speaker has of the paradise ahead for the new generation.

Other enjambed lines create pauses that emphasize importance rather than cast doubt, like the break in “that shows / Nothing” (Lines 17-18). Here, “Nothing” (Line 18) receives special emphasis and, along with the capitalization that it receives as the opening of one of Larkin’s always-capitalized lines, suggests transcendence. Even when his enjambments do not accomplish some obvious shift or emphasis in meaning, Larkin uses them to create the subtle music that makes his poem beautiful: “He / And his lot” (Lines 14-15), “and she’s / Taking pills” (Lines 2-3), or “down the long slide / Like free bloody birds” (Lines 15-16).