Larkin’s poetry can be dark, amusing, cynical or deeply reflective, all communicated in a distinctive voice. Explore those features of style that gives Larkin’s poetry its distinctive voice.

Larkin’s style is an incongruent blend of formal structure and ordinary colloquial diction which often includes crude language and sardonic humour. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Larkin distinctively communicates his rather fatalistic but at the same time amusing views of life. Larkin’s style is a ‘piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent[Footnote]’. Philip Larkin approaches profound topics such as religion, death and the restrictions of society from a peculiar angle and employs his trademark style of transparent expression, humorous and coarse diction which gives him his distinctive voice.

‘Highly-structured but flexible verse forms[Footnote]’ is the best representation of the Larkin’s use of structure in his poem ‘Church Going’. It is evident that the poem has a rhyme scheme of ABABCDECE and uses iambic pentameter. The rhymes are soft and regular (‘silence/reverence’) except for the addition of a non-rhyming line which breaks the sequence. This creates a sense of ambivalence towards religion: he is both attracted to and uncertain about it. In the second stanza, he bluntly tells us that the church ‘was not worth stopping for’ and that he hears the ‘echoes snigger briefly ’after reading a passage from a Bible. However, later on in a more poetic voice he contemplates the necessity of a place to ‘grow wise in’; he now feels ‘pleases(d) to stand in silence’ in the church. By the end of the poem, it is this second voice that is the more convincing. We now know that despite Larkin’s earlier flippancy his sincerity has won out. He is anxious that if we lose the churches, places where we can contemplate the transcendental aspects of life, we will be left only