In "Afternoons," Philip Larkin uses a poem in three stanzas to describe the inevitable degeneration of youth into early middle age as couples have children, who will "push them / to the side of their own lives." The poem is written in blank verse, without rhyme, but its rhythm is regular, lending the poem cohesion and enforcing the sense of life's monotony Larkin is conveying.

Larkin's language choices both set the scene and emphasize his theme of emptiness. An "estateful" of washing awaits the women who were once young lovers: the quantifier indicates that the people described are living on a council estate, one of many new developments that grew up in the UK after World War II to house the working class, many of whose old neighborhoods had been lost to bombings. The men are "in skilled trades," such as carpentry and plumbing. Larkin sets this description in juxtaposition to the fact that the albums labeled "Our Wedding" are now gathering dust on top of televisions. The "skilled trades" comes first, the men's lives as lovers behind them.

Now, the "hollows of afternoons" are for collecting children from school, the couples' identities lost to parenthood as "the wind ruins their courting-places." The summer of their lives "is fading." Larkin repeats the motif of weather to highlight the movement of life towards its autumn, symbolized by the leaves falling "in ones or twos" by the recreation ground. At the end of the poem, the children are intent on finding "unripe acorns," which we may infer symbolize the beginning of other lives which will progress in the same fashion as their parents' did.