Speaker's Choice Of Music example essay topic

Reference Back In Reference Back, Philip Larkin is referring back to the days where he would just sit at home listening to music. He wasn't listening to the music alone. "That was a pretty one" quotes the narrator. The other person present would appear to like the speaker's choice of music.

It would also appear that the music being played is fairly loud, "you call from the unsatisfactory hall to the unsatisfactory room". This quotation also gives us the speaker's opinion of the house he is in. The hall and the room are not good enough to satisfy the speaker. He may be listening to music quite loudly because he is unhappy in the place where he is.

The speaker doesn't appear to have much to do. "Playing record after record" suggests that he has listened through several records already. He follows this with a single word stationed between 2 commas - "idly". The use of commas either side of this word allows idly to be emphasised. He would appear to be making a point that he is doing nothing. This could be because he has nothing to do or because he doesn't want to do anything.

Either way, he is creating an image of himself sat at home wasting his time. This would appear to be the image he wants to create, as the 5th line reads "Wasting my time at home". The first stanza doesn't provide us with any idea what this music is, but the first clause of the second stanza does - "Oliver's Riverside Blues". Joe "King" Oliver was a jazz musician, and Riverside Blues was one of his records.

Oliver started his career in New Orleans, before moving to Chicago in 1922. This music is special to the speaker, hence why he says "I shall always remember" as if it's an old friend he doesn't want to forget. He refers to the music as a "flock of notes". Flock is a word more commonly used when talking about a sheep, giving the music a more naturalistic feel.

The use of the word "antique" in describing the jazz musicians indicates to the reader that the music is quite old, but still holds special value to the speaker, like an antique chair or other piece of furniture. It holds sentimental value, so the speaker can't cast it aside as if it's insignificant. The music represents an important time in his life, the time he listened to music. The music also brought him closer to someone, as mentioned in the final three lines of the second stanza.

Even though it was "Three decades" after the speaker was born, it was a "sudden bridge", he didn't expect this music to be the connection between himself and the other person. This person, in the first stanza, "looked so much forward to" the speaker wasting his time at home, playing this music, so this music is special to both of them. "Unsatisfactory" is again repeated twice at the end of the second stanza. This re emphasises the speaker's disappointment at the way his own life has turned out. His life may have gone better if he hadn't wasted his time "idly" listening to music. "Unsatisfactory" may refer to a how he dreamed about his life turning out, but it never turned out that way.

"Unsatisfactory age" indicates that both the speaker and the other person are getting old, and therefore this dream cannot come true now. The third stanza mentions time - "our element is time" suggests that the speaker feels that time has gotten the better of him and his companion. The speaker then begins to reminisce about life - "We are not suited to the long perspectives Open at each instant of our lives" he believes that he and his companion couldn't see the bigger picture when the time came when they needed to make decisions. This would suggest that the speaker feels that they have made the wrong decision on more than one occasion. These wrong decisions resulted in losses, maybe the loss of a dream or a loved one. "They link us to our losses" the speaker says, referring back to these "instants".

Some of these moments in his life where he has had to make a decision have bought back a memory of a time when he has made the wrong decision and lost something. The last word on the 19th line is "worse" and it is emphasised in much the same way as "idly" in the fourth line. The comma and colon either side of "worse" allows this word to stand out, and it epitomizes the speaker's feelings in the remaining three lines. He talks about things as they once were, "Blindingly undiminished" suggests that the thing he has thought he has lost is right there in front of him, unchanged. This realisation hurts him; "By acting differently we could have kept it so" says that he knows he is guilty for losing "it" and that if he had made a different decision or looked more carefully at "the long perspective" he may not have lost it.