Summary of Coventry Patmore's The Toys

Introduction

            Coventry Patmore was born in the year 1823 and he died in 1896.  He was a famous poet and a critic.  He was a religious man and his poems establish his religious beliefs.  The poem The Toys, talks about a father’s love to his son and about the fatherly relation of God to man.

Reason for Punishment/Mind of the Poet after Punishing

The poem opens with the words, “My little son”.  His son had spoken like a grown up man, so the father has scolded and struck his son.  The father regrets and feels bad for his behavior.  The son is motherless.  The mother dies as a patient.  The poet uses the word patient as a pun.  If the mother had been alive, she would have been patient but she died of illness.  The father sends his son to bed without a kiss.  The son spoke like a grown up man was the crime, but the father calls him as a little son, this shows that the father is sad for punishing his son.

Son’s Bedroom

The father goes to his son’s room.  The son is in the bed.  He is asleep.  The father could see the eyelashes of the son as wet.  His son has cried for a long time.  The father cries in return.  Beside the bed, the father finds a box of counters, red-veined stone, a piece of glass, six or seven shells, a bottle with blue bells and two French coins.  All these toys are arranged in a proper order.

Poet’s Prayer

The father prays to God.  He realizes that truth that every human being is a product of God.  God has created human being in his own image.  The father says that God has molded man from clay.  God will never punish a man even after his death.  God is great.  He forgives everyone.  Man does not understand the good qualities of God.  Man behaves childishly in this earth.  God is a better father than a human being is.

Conclusion

Through this simple poem, Coventry Patmore conveys the greatness of God.  He uses simple language and vivid images to convey his thought.

Summary of Philip Larkin's The Explosion

Introduction

Philip Larkin is one of the most important poets of the late 20^th Century.  The Explosion is written in 1970 and it is published in his 1974 collection, “High Windows”.  Philip Larkin wrote this poem in 1969 after hearing of a mining tragedy in the north of England. He felt great sympathy for the miners and wanted to write this elegy in their honour.  This poem could be comfortably divided as the morning before the explosion, at the time of explosion and the aftermath of explosion.

The Morning before Explosion

                Larkin begins the poem with an emphasis of the word explosion.  He builds the poem’s theme by repeating the word immediately after its presence in the title.  The poem is more of a narration than being descriptive.  Larkin describes the day of the explosion.  He narrates how the miners, being very optimistic and casual, went to the coal mine.  Larkin says that the men marched towards the pithead and on their way they saw the slagheap spread in the sun.  Larkin uses words like shadow and slagheap symbolizing the impending dangers of the miners.  He warns the readers about the darkness shrouding their day in a subtle way.  The men walk casually down the lane in their pit boots, coughing, laughing and shouldering each other, as they always do.  One of the men chases a rabbit, probably running across them into the fields.  He is said to be returning to the team with a nest of lark’s eggs.  He shows the eggs to the group of men and leaves it in the grass.  They enjoy talking with themselves.  They call each other with nick names and laugh all through their way until they enter the tall gates of the coal mine.

At the Time of Explosion

                Larkin spends one stanza (just three lines) to describe the scene and effects of the explosion.  At noon a bomb explodes in the coal mine and kills many men, who went to work with jubilance.  They are happy innocent souls and their death should create tremors in human mind.  Larkin, on the other hand, narrates the incident in a simple tone.  He says  

At noon there came a tremor; cows

Stopped chewing for a second; sun

Scarfed as in a heat-haze dimmed.

                There is no violence in the poem, as it was foretold in the earlier stage.  It is shown as an incident and no human being is much bothered and smothered by this, except for the personification of the sun and a second’s inaction of a cow.  Larkin has penned an elegy of the post-modern era.

Aftermath of explosion

                The mood, the speaker and the place change in the last few stanzas of the poem.  The aftermath of the explosion happens in the chapel, where everyone condoles and mourns for the dead.  The priest in the church prays and he assures the living relatives of the dead miners have gone earlier to God’s house and the living people would see them soon.  When this is said the wives of all the men could see their husbands in larger than life size form.  The men shine and glow like gold and they have radiance of the sun.  They glitter and glow brightly.  And a wife could see her husband carrying the lark’s egg unbroken.  The final line about the man with the eggs is much interpreted line of this poem.  Larking, probably, ends this poem with a positive and not been elegiac in his tone.  The eggs in the hands of the dead man is symbolic life and it is promising the bereaved wives about the life even after someone’s loss.