An other’s absence is difficult to endure. Everyone at sometime in his or her life experiences this. Whether it be the loss of someone because of death, a change of living residences, or the isolation one feels after a lover has left, nothing can replace that person. It is a uniqueness that cannot be replicated and the memories that have been left will always linger with the one who has stayed behind. Philip Larkin, in his poem Home is so Sad, beautifully portrays this experience.
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone left to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
The rhyme pattern in both stanzas is ababa ababa. Larkin begins the poem by using the word home instead of house. The first sentence is very blunt, as Larkin does not refrain from giving the reader the full emotion he is about to illustrate and let us in on. For such a private poet it is an open statement. He does not even bother to compare it by saying it is as sad as something else, no simile necessary. It wasn’t just a house, which is just a building in which people reside. It was a home in which there were people who cared for and loved each other. This is the difference between the two words. He then goes on give us the current emotion that is present, sadness – it is an utter desolation, really; this is shown by using the adverb so, as it intensifies sad. Home is not just sad, it is so sad, so very sad. It is also a full sentence in itself.
Next, Larkin describes the manner in which the home remains. Nothing has been removed or altered since someone left – “It stays as it was left” – and there is no intention on the person who is left behind to change anything. There is a reason for this lack of alteration in the space, the main one being the fear of erasing a specific memory of the one who is no longer there. But Larkin also tells us the other reason, as there is some hope of the person’s return, with the space “[s]haped the comfort of the last to go/As if to win them back.” There is that flicker of hope that the person may return and fill the space that is now vacated.
However, what hope there might have been is hopeless, and the poet goes on to imply such. He uses the effective word bereft, which both fulfills the rhyme pattern and because of its meaning. It isn’t just an absence that is being endured; it means being deprived or lacking of something and when applied to a person, it means lonely and abandoned. The full line reads “Instead, bereft/Of anyone left to please, it withers so[.]” It is significant that the line break comes at bereft, because what follows on the page is blankness, the blankness that is present due to the absence of the person who is no longer there. The home that is left unchanged and in which the person who is left had some hope to win that person back, is now in a state of decline. The dust is left where it settled. The fifth and last line in the stanza then continues, “Having no heart to put aside the theft[.]” And that is what it feels like, a theft, when the significant other has been taken from someone. Even though death is part of life and is natural, this theft always feels unnatural. The theft cannot be forgotten, it cannot be put aside, as it were, as if it were a trivial thing. It is consequential that not only the line, but the stanza, ends with theft because the space that follows the word on the page and breaks the two stanzas reveals the emptiness that is there after the theft – the crime – that occurred.
The second stands begins with a continuation of the line, “And turn again to what it started as,” which is understood in the whole to mean that there was an attempt to return to things as normal, but this is impossible, no matter how one tried. And turn to what? “A joyous shot at how things ought to be,” at how one hoped things should have been, without such loss. But this joyous shot leads to nowhere and in fact it fails and has “[l]ong fallen wide” of its mark. The third line in this stanza resembles the third line in the first stanza with the first half being the end of one sentence and the second half beginning another one.
The poet then brings the reader in by using the second person pronoun, besides it just being colloquial speech, and he then points to everything in the room as they have been left, everything with a reference to what was, “You can see how it was:” he says, “This is how is used to be when [NAME HERE] was here.” And then he tells us what to look at as he says, “Look at the pictures and the cutlery./The music in the piano stool. That vase.” The things he points out are just things, but they are things with a history, things that were parts of a life that is now utterly changed. The pictures in which there are moments that will be forever remembered still hang on the walls. The cutlery that was used for meals with that someone just lies on the table next to the dishes on a table remaining set and decorated as in many houses, as well cutlery being displayed in a bureau. Then there are the sheets of music that is left unplayed in the piano stool that has not been sat on. This was music that was shared between lovers. Now there is silence and the piano is untouched, the keys covered. And most heartbreaking is the last sentence that consists of only two words, “That vase.” It is offhanded and pained at the same time. One sees an empty vase standing on a table, its mouth open and surrounded by air – emptiness that fills the room.
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