"The Building"

Larkin put "The Building" in the middle of his collection for a reason, it is a pillar that supports the rest of the collection with its long lines and many verses, and because of this, is maybe a bit more clearer than some of his other poems in the ideas and views that are expressed through it. Of course, being a Larkin a poem, there is the obligatory underlayer which so many people miss, but in "The Building" it is easier to discern and comprehend.

The title of the poem, "The Building" already hints at the main theme of the poem. The word "building" is a very vague term and in it's vagueness one can make out the fright of the author for this building, he cannot specify that it is a hospital as if not saying the word will make it go away. At the same time in this poem, Larkin makes out the hospital as the real world, everything around it is fake so that the word "building" is put in contrast to his view of what it really is. The poem starts in this indistinct manner and moves onto a much more definite reality: death.

The first thing we discover about the building is the way it dominates the author's view, of all buildings he can see it is the tallest, it "shows up for miles". Although he doesn't want to know what it is, it dominates his view and his destiny - all men and women end up in the hospital before they die, and there is that sense again, of Larkin's fear of death. He sees that the hospital is the real life, all else is false, you delude yourself all your life about death, pretending that it doesn't exist yet when you get in the hospital you finally have to face the truth. He names the places he would like it to be: a hotel, an airport lounge, a bus, but he can no longer delude himself it is a hospital. From the outside everything seems confused, unreal, he cannot even make out if it is a hospital. All those places, which he would normally loathe: an airport lounge or a bus are better than a hospital that carries a sense of finality, you go in but you don't come back out, it's made to look like normal buildings and places but once your inside you know where you are. But at the same time, a hospital has similarities with these places, it is in a way a sum-up of life, "there are paperbacks", "the porters are scruffy" and people sit on "rows of steel chairs". Even when he sees a nurse, he cannot bring himself to make the connection, she is a "kind of nurse".

In a hospital you lose all sense of your own identity, "homes and names Suddenly in abeyance", everybody is the same, everybody is "Human". To Larkin it still seems "alien", he describes everything in unusual terms "Cups back to saucers". This is what frightens him, to lose his identity, to be stripped bare, to see "the end of choice, the last of hope". Larkin cannot admit that death is natural, especially at that "vague age", there has to be an "error", people come "to confess that something has gone wrong".

Larkin's description of the "Building" becomes negative and the feeling of approaching death is strong. He describes patients on the lift going up the hospital, all guessing which floor the other will get off at, all guessing how bad the "error" is in each. The "common thing" they share (approaching death) makes them all go silent. There are numerous rooms, some further away than the others and those furthest are closest to death "and harder to return from". What follows is a moment of looking back at life, symbolised by the patients looking down from their hospital rooms on the street, the fact that they are looking down makes it seem as if they are already dead, looking above, from heaven down on earth (the street), what they see might not be very nice but at least it's pleasantly familiar: "Red brick, lagged pipes, traffic...a locked church". Just as is the "kids chalk games" or the girls with the "hair-does". It's not meant as criticism of society or of the working class (as the pejorative use of "hair-does" or "cleaners" suggests and as his critics would say) but as an ugly description of life because he is jealous of it, he is jealous of those kids with "hair-does" who have their whole lives in front of them so he tries to convince himself that maybe it was not worth living. He views death as reality and life as a dream that collapses when you get "to these corridors" and where love and chances "are beyond the stretch of any Hand". Once again, we start thinking at this point that Larkin is being morbid and negative however, when examined closely, he is saying that the inevitability of death is neither good or bad because it is just the truth and that your only comfort when your old is that everybody, young or old are going to die one day:

"All know they are going to die.

Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,

And somewhere like this."

As in most of his poems, he starts with a fear of something, in this case death but comes to realise later on that in fact it is only an inevitable part of life. And he also comes to understand that if people weren't so scared of death than life would be less valued as he hints to in the last part of the poem:

"...a struggle to transcend

The thought of dying, for unless its powers

Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes..."

The poem ends disturbingly with "With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers". The structure of the poem with nine verses of six lines adds up to 63, but that last odd line makes it more regular, it makes 64 which suggests 8x8, so that the last line might seem a bit irregular and odd but it also completes the poem (and also the rhyme scheme).

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