CPR Classic Readings: Philip Larkin's "Here"

A close analysis of Philip Larkin’s poem “Here”, relating it to his more famous railway-poem, “Whitsun Weddings”. The essay attempts to discover the source of the poem’s mysterious power to disturb and to move. It is due in part to the mastery of its structure and its wonderful sense of balance. However more crucial to the poem’s success is the sense of transcendence the poet manages to achieve in the intriguing final stanza, in which we are taken into a less concrete world, one of light and air, after the closely-focused details of the urban scene depicted in the previous stanza.