The Full Text of “Dockery and Son”
The Full Text of “Dockery and Son”
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“Dockery and Son” Introduction
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In "Dockery and Son," Philip Larkin takes a characteristically bleak look at a midlife crisis. The poem's speaker, a middle-aged Englishman, attends a memorial service for his old university friend Dockery and reflects on how differently their lives have turned out. Having died young, Dockery nevertheless found the time to raise a son (who's now attending the same college his father did). The speaker, meanwhile, has remained single and childless—choices that, as he looks back over them, don't really feel like choices so much as "habit[s]" that "harden[ed]" into his life story before he knew it. "Life," this poem's dour speaker concludes, is "first boredom, then fear," and people don't have as much control over their own fates as they might wish to believe. Larkin first collected this poem in his 1964 book The Whitsun Weddings.
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“Dockery and Son” Summary
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The poem's speaker recounts a fragment of a conversation he had with the Dean of the Oxford college he went to as an undergraduate—a discussion of a now-dead former classmate, Dockery, whose memorial service they're attending. The Dean tells the speaker that Dockery's son is at the college now, and goes on to ask if the speaker keeps in touch with any other old friends from that time. But the speaker drifts off into memories of how he and his friends used to get in trouble. They'd be standing together in front of the Dean's desk in the morning: wearing their academic robes, unfed, and still half drunk, trying to explain their misbehavior. The speaker wanders off and tests the door of his former dorm room—
But he finds it locked. The lawn of his college spreads out before him, and he hears the familiar sound of a bell. Then he departs to catch his train, with no one paying any attention to him. The familiar landscape of the city, with its canals, wide skies, and colleges, slowly vanishes. The speaker is still thinking about Dockery, reflecting that his son (who's at their old college now) must have been born when the speaker was 21. That means that Dockery must have had this son when he was only 19 or 20.
Could the Dockery who fathered a son have been the same shy schoolboy who shared a room with their friend Cartwright, who died in the war? The speaker starts to think that this all just goes to show...something, but drifts off to sleep before finishing his thought. He only wakes up as the train goes past the industrial stink and glaring light of Sheffield's factories. Here he gets out to change trains, eats a horrible pie, and walks to the end of the platform to observe that the moonlight is reflecting off the train tracks.
Having no family, he reflects, still strikes him as a pretty ordinary way of life. But he also feels numb and stunned at the realization that a lot of his life has already passed, and that he's lived very differently than his old classmates have. Dockery, for instance, he thinks: when Dockery was only 19, he must have taken a good hard look at what he wanted, and then had the ability to.... But no, the speaker decides, it's not just that Dockery was more capable or decisive than he was. Rather, the speaker marvels:
Dockery must have been so sure that he should have a family! And why would Dockery have felt that adding more people to his life would improve him? To the speaker, the idea of family felt like it would spread him thin, not add to his happiness. The speaker wonders: where do we get these apparently inborn ideas about life from? They're certainly not conscious beliefs, or expressions of our deepest desires. Those things end up closed off to us, like doors that have swollen and stuck. Rather, these choices are just ways of life, habits people fall into—until, all of a sudden, these habits turn into all that people have left—
And into the explanation of how they ended up living like this. When people look back, the speaker thinks, these unchosen habits rise up like a blinding sandstorm, taking different shapes: for Dockery, the choice to have a son, and for the speaker, the choice to have no family. The speaker's lack of a family itself feels like a son in some sense: a choice that imposes itself harshly upon him, as a son might impose on a father. Life, the speaker concludes, starts out boring, and then gets frightening. Whether people do anything with their lives or not, life passes, leaving in its wake only the remains of a series of permanent and unconscious choices—and then old age, and then inevitable death.
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“Dockery and Son” Themes
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Fleeting Time, Middle Age, and Mortality
"Dockery and Son" charts the midlife crisis of a speaker who appears to have a great deal in common with Philip Larkin himself: both are middle-aged, mid-20th-century Englishmen with a dour turn of mind. Attending the memorial service of his old university chum Dockery, this poem's speaker finds himself reflecting on the fact that his life is halfway over already (if he's lucky!), and he's made a lot of permanent decisions without really having meant to. Middle age, in this poem, is a time when people must face the fact that much of life has passed, the past can't be changed, and death is on the way.
Attending the memorial service of his old classmate Dockery, the speaker, a man in his early 40s, finds much to think about. Dockery was "junior to" the speaker at school, a year or two younger than the speaker was—and he's already dead. That thought is sobering in itself. But the speaker is perhaps even more profoundly disturbed to learn that Dockery had a son when he was 19 or 20 years old, a son who's now attending the same Oxford college that the speaker and Dockery did in their youth. The speaker, meanwhile, remains single and childless.
Facing Dockery's death—and the existence of Dockery's son—gives the speaker a "shock." Both of these facts remind him "how much ha[s] gone of life": how many years he's lived, and how many permanent decisions he's made about his life without consciously meaning to. In the middle of his life, he's forced to reckon with the fact that years of absentminded "habit" have now become "all [he's] got": the way he's lived has permanent consequences. Though he never particularly wished to have a family, for instance, he must now accept that he very likely never will. Middle age, for this speaker, means admitting to oneself that not everything is possible anymore.
What's more, Dockery's death forces the speaker to face his own mortality. All he sees before him now is "age, and then the only end of age": in other words, he'll get older, and then he'll die, and there's nothing at all to be done about that.
This poem's portrait of middle age suggests that it's a time of resignation and reckoning. In the middle of one's life, this speaker feels, the time of possibility is over, and one must simply deal with the consequences of one's past choices until death comes along.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-48
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Conscious vs. Unconscious Choice
Reflecting on his experience of life at middle age, this poem's speaker feels as if he didn't really mean to end up where he has. His life, he feels, hasn't been guided by his choices, but by "innate assumptions"—inborn attitudes—planted in him by "something hidden from us." What people do with their lives, in this speaker's view, isn't really up to them: something inherent in people's characters determines how they live, and their conscious desires and beliefs have little to do with how they end up living. Unconscious habit and preference shape people's fates much more than will and intention do.
The poem's speaker is led into these reflections when he attends a memorial service for his old friend Dockery, with whom he was an Oxford undergraduate some 20-odd years ago. Dockery has died young, in his 40s—but he's also had a son, a son who's now in his late teens or early 20s. The speaker, who has remained childless and single, wonders how Dockery could possibly have made such huge life choices when he was only a young man, and why Dockery felt so differently about those choices than the speaker would have. To Dockery, he reflects, "adding" a wife and child to his life must have felt like "increase," like something that would make Dockery's life feel greater—whereas to the speaker, the idea of family always seemed like a "dilution," something that would spread him thin.
Though he feels differently about family than he imagines Dockery must have, the speaker also doesn't feel that he consciously chose to act differently than Dockery did. He didn't choose to remain single because it was what he thought was the "truest" choice, or what he "most want[ed] to do." Rather, he just fell into the "habit" of solitude—only to look up now in middle age and discover that his habits have "harden[ed]" into a permanent choice.
This, the fatalistic speaker feels, is true of people's choices in general. People don't make conscious decisions so much as they act on "innate assumptions," attitudes and preferences that seem to be born with them. In this vision, Dockery's choice to have a child was no more conscious than the speaker's "habit" of solitude was: Dockery just happened to be the kind of guy whose "innate assumptions" led him to reproduce. "Something hidden from us"—some unknowable force—shapes people's characters this way, the speaker concludes, and thus no one has as much say over how their lives go as they might like to think.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 12-19
- Lines 25-48
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Dockery and Son”
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Lines 1-3
"Dockery was junior ...
... visitant, I nod."Dockery and Son" opens on a scene of formal English awkwardness. The poem's speaker, a middle-aged man, has returned to his old Oxford college for the memorial service of his university friend Dockery. Dockery, readers gather, must have died quite young, for he was "'junior to'" the speaker at Oxford, maybe a year below him.
The speaker has fallen into polite chit-chat with the Dean of the college (that is, the man in charge), who's reminiscing about the speaker's time at Oxford with Dockery. Many years have passed since the speaker was at Oxford, enough years that Dockery's son is now attending the same college he once did. But the Dean is still the same person. Nothing here seems to have changed—nothing, that is, but the speaker, who is now "visitant" here, an outsider, and no longer a young man.
The speaker appears to be in rather a dark frame of mind. Readers gather that he's attending Dockery's memorial service when he describes himself as "death-suited"—a turn of phrase that suggests he's wearing a black suit he only puts on for funerals. He must therefore have attended enough funerals to acquire what he thinks of, bluntly and comically, as a death suit.
There's a pun here, too. If the speaker is "death-suited," he might be feeling especially aware that he's suited for death: destined to die, just as Dockery was. (Perhaps he might even imagine being buried in his death-suited death suit one day.) The memorial service of an old friend might make a person feel particularly aware that there's no telling when the end will come. "Dockery and Son" will be, among other things, a reflection on how quickly time escapes and how abruptly death shows its face.
Philip Larkin will deliver his death-suited reflections on middle age and mortality in a sharp and witty form. The poem is written in steady octaves (eight-line stanzas), and mostly in iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "I try | the door | of where | I used | to live.") This elegant, traditional rhythm—the meter of Milton and Shakespeare—strikes a comic contrast with the speaker's very contemporary tone. The colloquial language the speaker uses will make it clear that he's a sardonic, gloomy, middle-class Englishman of the mid-20th century: in other words, a fellow with more than a little in common with Philip Larkin himself.
The speaker's assumptions about what the reader will understand likewise make the poem feel immediate and familiar. He never says directly that he's visiting Oxford, for instance; he expects the mention of students in black academic gowns, a Dean, a "canal," and "colleges" to make that clear. He also begins the poem in the present tense. The reader gets to ride along with him, sharing his thoughts as they come.
The poem, then, narrates the speaker's experience as if it's happening right this moment, and largely as if he's talking to himself. This is an inward, reflective poem, capturing the immediate experience of a midlife crisis.
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Lines 3-7
"And do ...
... incidents last night"? -
Lines 8-12
I try the ...
... Slowly from view. -
Lines 12-18
But Dockery, good ...
... who was killed? -
Lines 18-22
Well, it just ...
... an awful pie, -
Lines 22-25
and walked along ...
... Unhindered moon. -
Lines 25-29
To have no ...
... from the others. -
Lines 29-35
Dockery, now: ...
... it was dilution. -
Lines 35-38
Where do these ...
... tight-shut, like doors. -
Lines 38-44
They’re more a ...
... son’s harsh patronage. -
Lines 45-48
Life is first ...
... end of age.
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“Dockery and Son” Symbols
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The Locked Door
Visiting his old Oxford college for his friend Dockery's memorial service, the speaker "tr[ies] the door of where [he] used to live," but finds it "locked." This locked door symbolizes the inaccessibility of the past.
The poem's speaker can visit his old college and find it just the same: it's presided over by the same stuffy old Dean who used to scold him, and the same "known bell" chimes nearby. However, he himself has changed irreversibly. He's no longer a college kid, but a gloomy middle-aged man, and there's no changing his age or the choices he's made. Locked out of his former rooms, he's also symbolically locked out of his youth and his past.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 8-9: “I try the door of where I used to live: / Locked.”
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The Train Tracks
The crisscrossing train tracks the speaker observes from the platform at Sheffield symbolize the many different paths a life might take—and suggest that people might not be altogether in charge of where their lives go.
When the speaker changes trains at Sheffield, he has been thinking about how differently his life and his old classmate Dockery's life have gone. Dockery has died at a young age, while the speaker lives on; however, Dockery has also had a son, while the speaker is single and childless. As the speaker reflects on these diverging experiences, it's no wonder that his attention should be drawn to the "joining and parting lines" of train tracks, each pointing toward quite different destinations. His and Dockery's adult lives, like trains on rails, have started from the same "station" (in their case, an Oxford education) and then moved along their own paths. To the speaker, those paths feel as firm, set, and undeviating as a railway. He doesn't precisely feel he or Dockery made a choice to live the lives they've lived, any more than he feels a train has the freedom to go exactly where it likes.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 21-25: “Sheffield, where I changed, / And ate an awful pie, and walked along / The platform to its end to see the ranged / Joining and parting lines reflect a strong / Unhindered moon.”
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“Dockery and Son” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Juxtaposition
"Dockery and Son" is built on the speaker's juxtaposition between himself and his old school friend Dockery and particularly between the choices they make about their lives. Dockery, now dead, was a little younger than the speaker, but the two of them studied at Oxford at the same time. From there, their paths diverged. Dockery had a son when he was only "nineteen [or] twenty"; the speaker, meanwhile, has remained single and childless.
Dockery's choice to have a child at such a young age strikes the speaker as just about incomprehensible. To him, having a family would mean "dilution": he would have felt diminished, thinned-out, by a wife and children. By contrast, he imagines, Dockery must have felt that "adding" people to his life "meant increase"—that a family augmented him.
The speaker comes to no grand conclusion about why Dockery made one choice and he made another. Rather, his juxtaposition between the two of them points toward some bigger mystery. "Something hidden from us," the speaker says, gives people "innate assumptions" about what they want: unknown forces, in other words, shape people's personalities and choices, and people's conscious desires and intentions have little to do with what happens to them. The fact that Dockery and the speaker came from such a similar background but ultimately lived such different lives "just shows" that there's really no explaining why people do what they do. The best the speaker feels he can do, here in his middle years, is accept that he has ended up in a lonely life based only on the force of "habit" and unconscious impulse.
The poem also juxtaposes two different sides of English life in the 1960s (when this poem was written): a world of hoary old traditions and a world of grim industrial modernity.
At the beginning of the poem, the speaker is back in Oxford for Dockery's memorial service. Everything here seems exactly the same as it was when he studied here: a "known bell chimes," and the "door of where [the speaker] used to to live" is just where it was; the college even has the same "Dean," the same blustery old fellow who used to scold the speaker and Dockery for their drunken misdemeanors. Dockery's son is attending the same college now, and readers gather that he can expect to have much the same university experience as his father did. The speaker's picture of a changeless Oxford suggests an England of ground-in and immovable tradition.
When the speaker changes trains in Sheffield, meanwhile, he sees quite a different world. Sheffield (a city in the north of England) is all "fumes / And furnace-glares," overpowered by the stench and harsh light of factories. All there is to eat here is an "awful pie." This modern industrial world looks particularly ugly compared with the gracious, "dazzlingly wide" lawns of Oxford.
In this rather gloomy juxtaposition, English tradition feels staid and stolid. But English modernity feels oppressively ugly, smelly, and distasteful. In the bleak vision of the middle-aged speaker, there's really no winning.
Where juxtaposition appears in the poem:- Lines 1-7
- Lines 9-12
- Lines 12-18
- Lines 20-22
- Lines 25-44
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Simile
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Enjambment
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Repetition
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Imagery
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"Dockery and Son" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Junior to you
- Death-suited, visitant
- Black-gowned
- Half-tight
- Anyone up today
- In '43
- Get
- Public-schoolboy
- Unhindered
- Dilution
- Innate
- Warp
- Patronage
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(Location in poem: Lines 1-2: “"Dockery was junior to you, / Wasn’t he?" said the Dean.”)
That is, "in a younger class than you." Dockery, in other words, might have been a freshman at university when the speaker was a sophomore.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Dockery and Son”
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Form
"Dockery and Son" uses a regular, steady shape: a sequence of six eight-line stanzas (or octaves), measured out in iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "I try | the door | of where | I used | to live"). This elegant form would feel timeless—if it weren't for the speaker's voice.
Though the poem's form is one that any English poet from the Middle Ages on might have chosen, the speaker's tone is colloquial and very contemporary. The speaker sounds like Larkin himself would have, using the vocabulary and idioms of a mid-20th-century, Oxbridge-educated, middle-class Englishman. Larkin also liberally enjambs his lines, letting sentences run right over stanza breaks—an effect that makes the speaker sound as if he's caught up in his thoughts, lost in gloomy reverie about mortality and middle age.
The comic contrast between a rigorous, old-fashioned form and a matter-of-fact 20th-century voice supports this poem's mixture of dark humor and middle-aged gloom. This form also reflects the poem's themes. The casual "style / Our lives bring with them," the speaker reflects, suddenly "harden[s] into all we've got"; the speaker's everyday voice is likewise bound by a rigorous shape.
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Meter
"Dockery and Son" is written—for the most part—in iambic pentameter. That means that its lines each use five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 8:
I try | the door | of where | I used | to live:
Since Chaucer, this meter has been one of the most popular in English poetry; using it here, Larkin taps into an old tradition. The choice makes thematic sense for a middle-aged speaker who's recognizing that he's caught up in an old, old rhythm. With his life already half-over and his choices irreversible, the speaker now faces the prospect of death—in the same iambic pentameter in which poetic generations before him have done the same.
Larkin doesn't stick to pure iambic pentameter all the way through. Like many poets who use this meter, he introduces little variations for color and emphasis—as in line 30, which starts with a trochee (the opposite foot to an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm):
Only | nine teen, | he must | have ta- | ken stock
But Larkin takes even bolder liberties. A few lines break from iambic pentameter altogether. The famous (and famously pessimistic) line 45 provides a good example:
Life is first boredom, then fear.
While there are still five strong stresses here, Larkin strips out nearly all of the unstressed syllables in the line, making this dark vision feel super-concentrated.
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Rhyme Scheme
In this poem, Larkin uses a rhyme scheme both subtle and complex. In the first half of the poem, the octaves (or eight-line stanzas) divide into rhymed groups of four lines that follow predictable patterns. The first stanza, for instance, uses alternating rhymes in an ABAB CDCD pattern, like so:
[...] junior to you, [A]
[...] "His son’s here now." [B]
[...] I nod. "And do [A]
[...] Or remember how [B]
[...] and still half-tight [C]
[...] before that desk, to give [D]
[...] "these incidents last night"? [C]
[...] I used to live: [D]The second stanza starts out with a similar alternating scheme (EFEF), but then introduces a different, enfolding GHHG rhyme pattern:
[...] must have been born [G]
[...] I was twenty-one. [H]
[...] did he get this son [H]
[...] Was he that withdrawn [G]Notice the way that the rhyme between "born" and "withdrawn" reveals the speaker's mid-20th-century, middle-class English accent!
The third stanza also mixes these two four-line rhyme patterns, starting out with an enfolding pattern in lines 17-20 and concluding with an alternating pattern in lines 21-24.
But in the final three stanzas, the rhyme scheme goes askew. (Readers, please note: to avoid the unhelpful impression of alphabet soup in this rhyme scheme mapping, we've started mapping each new stanza's rhymes fresh from A—but the rhymes in each stanza are in fact different):
ABCADCBD
ABBCADDC
ABBCADDCThe unpredictable rhyme in the fourth stanza breaks from the patterns of the first three stanzas, reflecting the speaker's sudden awful clarity: his "shock" about his own loss of control, his helplessness in the face of his past choices (or the lack thereof). Readers can share the speaker's feeling of losing one's grip as the rhyme swerves from relatively steady patterns to an unprecedented and chaotic one. Then, the fifth and sixth stanzas resolve into a new pattern as the speaker comes to his grim conclusions: our habits "harden into all we've got," and "life is first boredom, then fear."
The poem's rhyme scheme thus reflects what's going on in this speaker's psyche. Readers can hear his midlife crisis arriving—fittingly, right in the middle of the poem.
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“Dockery and Son” Speaker
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This poem's speaker (like many of Larkin's speakers) is a voice for Larkin himself. Like Larkin, the speaker is a middle-class, Oxbridge-educated Englishman of the mid-20th century, who was 21 years old "in '43." He's considerably older than that now, as readers can gather from the math he does about his old classmate Dockery's university-age son. (Larkin composed this poem in 1963, when he was 42.)
Attending an old classmate's memorial service in Oxford, the speaker finds himself in the midst of a midlife crisis. Dockery, the speaker's dead friend, was younger than the speaker, a fact that leaves the speaker reflecting uneasily on his own life. Dockery died young—but he nonetheless found time to raise a son, a young man who's now attending the same Oxford college that Dockery and the speaker did. The speaker, meanwhile, has "no son, no wife, / No house or land": he's still living a bachelor's life.
These life choices, as the speaker reflects on them, don't exactly strike him as choices: just "habit[s]" that have "harden[ed]" into permanent realities behind his back. Looking at Dockery's short life, this speaker finds himself feeling unhappily dazed by how quickly these habits harden, and how quickly death arrives.
Perhaps he also feels a little inadequate or defensive about the non-choices he's made. For a moment, he fantasizes that Dockery must have "been capable" of making decisions that he himself never felt equipped to—then turns aside from that thought to blame a set of mysterious "innate assumptions," inborn and unchangeable attitudes, for his lonely state. Though this speaker has always felt that having a family would "dilu[te]" his life rather than "increas[ing]" it, readers get the sense that this feeling also worries him a bit. Standing right in the middle of his life, the speaker's primary feeling appears to be: well, it's too late to do anything about it now.
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“Dockery and Son” Setting
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"Dockery and Son" is set in the time and place it was composed: England in the 1960s. More specifically, the poem follows the speaker on a long, depressing journey. He spends the morning in Oxford, attending a memorial service for his old friend Dockery. Then he gets on a train that will carry him back to his home in the north. (Readers familiar with Larkin's life can guess that the speaker's destination is Hull, where Larkin worked as a university librarian for many years: this poem is heavily autobiographical.)
Everything in this poem's setting feels weighed down, in different ways, by time. Ancient tradition and ugly change alike feel burdensome to this speaker.
In Oxford, for instance, the same old "known bell chimes" over the same old college where the same old Dean presides—and Dockery's son is going there now, doing just what his father and the speaker once did, acting out the same old pattern of life. This changeless landscape reminds the speaker of his own age and of how irreversible his choices are: when he rattles "the door of where [he] used to live," he finds it locked, a symbolic image that suggests there's no going back to one's youth.
When the speaker changes trains in Sheffield, meanwhile, he's confronted with a modern hellscape of "fumes / And furnace-glares" where the only meal in sight is an "awful pie." If the past feels deadening and inaccessible, the present feels simply unpleasant and taxing, hard on every sense. This poem's setting offers a bleak view of life in general and of 1960s England in particular.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Dockery and Son”
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Literary Context
Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was one of the UK's most popular poets, and "Dockery and Son" is one of the most famous of his works. Larkin wrote this poem in 1963 and collected it in his landmark 1964 book The Whitsun Weddings. Along with several other well-known poems from that collection—including "Mr Bleaney," "Sunny Prestatyn," and the title poem—"Dockery and Son" captures a slice of post-WWII English life, finding ominous undertones in an ordinary situation.
Larkin was a member of a group of mid-20th-century English writers that the literary critic J. D. Scott dubbed "The Movement." (Larkin's good friend Kingsley Amis was another notable figure in this crew.) The Movement poets rejected many of the wild formal and stylistic experiments of the earlier 20th-century Modernists—writers like T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Ezra Pound. Instead, they adopted a plainer style and treated characteristically English themes.
Larkin gained a reputation as both a brilliant stylist and a literary curmudgeon. He once famously declared that "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth." Though much of his poetry takes a tone of blunt realism bordering on bleak cynicism, some of his works, like "An Arundel Tomb" and "The Whitsun Weddings," sound a few redemptive notes as well.
Historical Context
"Dockery and Son" feels markedly autobiographical. The poem's speaker was 21 years old "in '43," attended an Oxford college, and lives up north—all details that align with Larkin's life. Educated at St. John's College, Oxford, Larkin eventually became Head Librarian at the University of Hull. He would quietly hold this position for the rest of his life, even though he became a wildly popular and bestselling poet and could easily have given his job up to write full-time.
Speaking of his life in Hull, Larkin once remarked that he "rather like[d] being on the edge of things"—a preference that clearly extended to his skepticism about the literary and social establishment, as well as his distance from the London-centric English arts scene. Larkin turned down a number of literary honors, including the office of Poet Laureate—Ted Hughes took the role instead—and an OBE.
Larkin's general withdrawn, hermit-like skepticism also comes through in this poem's portrait of England in 1963. While Larkin would elsewhere remark on the new freedoms this year in particular brought to the world, those liberties are nowhere to be seen in the England of "Dockery and Son." Far from a flower-child fantasia, this 1963 still feels like a place of postwar depression, in which one might have been friends with a "Cartwright who was killed" in World War II. The landscape is marked by ugly industrial "fumes / And furnace-glares," but also trammeled by the weight of tradition: Dockery's son goes to just the same Oxford college as his father did, and that college hasn't changed one bit in the intervening years.
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More “Dockery and Son” Resources
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External Resources
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A Brief Biography — Read the Poetry Archive's short biography of Larkin (and listen to some recordings of Larkin reading his verse aloud in his wonderfully dour voice).
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An Interview with Larkin — Read a 1973 interview in which Larkin discusses his poetry—and, in particular, his philosophy of writing "fairly simply in the language of ordinary people."
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The Philip Larkin Society — Visit the website of the Philip Larkin Society to find a wealth of information on Larkin, including recent scholarship.
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Portraits of Larkin — Admire some portraits of Larkin (who looks just as you'd expect) via London's National Portrait Gallery.
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Larkin and Monica Jones — Read the novelist Margaret Drabble's reflections on Larkin's relationship with Monica Jones. While Larkin (like this poem's speaker) never married, he did have an intense long-term relationship with Jones, a professor of English literature.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Philip Larkin
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