At a glance:
- Author: Philip Larkin
- First Published: 1974
- Type of Poem: Pastoral
- Genres: Poetry, Pastoral
- Subjects: Class consciousness, England or English people, Accidents, Death or dying, Working class, Mines, miners, or mining, Explosions or explosives
The Poem
“The Explosion” is a short poem of twenty-five lines made up of eight unrhymed tercets and a final, isolated one-line stanza. It is written in trochaic tetrameter with a number of metrical variations and substitutions. The speaker of the poem is an observer and commentator on the crucial event of the poem, an explosion at a mine. The language is clearly that of a speaker who is more highly educated than the working-class people that the poem represents. He is not involved in their lives but attempts to render their nature and experience as fully and truthfully as...
(The entire page is 1549 words.)
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