Reaction to Here

I quite enjoyed Here and felt that the poem had a very calming message about isolation and loneliness and how it is not always a bad thing. 'Loneliness clarifies' I felt made me think of being alone in another, positive light and how being isolated enables you to see things clearly. 

Reaction to The Whitsun Weddings

When I first reading the Whitsun Weddings my initial reaction was that it was a deterrence to marriage but since reading it again and analysing it in detail, I realised that I was wrong.
 My opinion now on the poem is that the persona recognises that weddings can be happy and that married couples do have a future, even though it may not necessarily be for them. The persona however does mock the people he sees, with indications that they are common, particularly the uncle shouting smut and the girls who are parodies to fashion. I found that towards the end Larkin wrote in a more abstract way, allowing us to come to our own conclusions as to what he means and to a further extent what perhaps marriage means to us.

My first reaction to Larkin

My first reaction to the poems I read by Philip Larkin was that they all had a negative approach to the subject he was addressing. In Mr Bleaney, it sounded like death whereas in Toads Revisited, it sounded like the man in the poem did not appreciate things in life and doesn't have any friends as all he likes to do is work. The Witsun Weddings poem to me felt like a deterrence to marriage and I thought that the underlying message was that when you get married you don't live anymore. Take one home for the kiddies sounded to me a bit like living in poverty - 'huddled by empty bowls' made me think of vulnerability and being poor.