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.