Reaction to Essential Beauty

In Essential Beauty we see the ideal version of reality portrayed through advertisements and juxtaposed to the actual reality of people's lives. 

In the first stanza there are descriptions of how adverts portray reality, directly contrasted with the second stanza, with Larkin showing what life is really like. 

In the first stanza there is imagery of 'a glass of milk stands in a meadow' contrasting with the image in the second stanza of 'dark raftered pubs' milk, having a sweet taste, contrasting with the idea of the bitterness of beer inside pubs, and also the idea of meadows having no confines and giving an image of freedom, whereas 'dark raftered pubs' makes me think of being enclosed in a place that is unnerving. 

We get the impression from the second stanza that advertisements try to take advantage of the elderly by emphasising the importance of tradition from 'a halfpenny more' and 'to taste old age' suggests that elderly people will happily spend more on recognised, traditional brands.