Philip Larkin’s Poetry: Themes, Form, Style, Imagery and Symbolism
“If, My Darling” an echo of “Spleen” of Baudelaire.
Ana Balakian defines the baudeleriano symbolism as “to refinement of the art of
ambiguity to express the indeterminate in human sensibilities and in the natural
phenomena” (1993, 1256), and certainly, at some moments Larkin it approaches the
undetermined thing: in that last strophe of “High Windows” or in the end of “Here”; in
those “warp tight-shut” (T316: 38) or in those “sand-clouds, thick and close” (T316: 42)
of “Dockery and Are”; or in that “peak that stays in view to wherever the go” (T284:
43) of “The Old Fools”. There is certain attempt here to express the uncertain, what one
resists to the words, as if outside something that names for the first time. Booth defines
this sudden appearance of the symbolic element when affirming, in its analysis of
“Ambulances”, that:
“On the one hand the prosaic phrases guarantee the more elevated and ‘poetic’
annaabi.ee 
