Loading the lesson
Loading the lesson
Search AllRounder.ai
Search the courses, subjects, tracks, games and features, or jump straight to a page.
Search the courses, subjects, tracks, games and features, or jump straight to a page.
Learn it your way
A short class with Sarah and her students. The other ways are under More.
Sign up free to listen. Transcripts are free to read.
Is this poem about a man who regrets not having a son?
At first it looks like it. He lists what he lacks, and he repeats the word nothing.
But he also says a child would have been a dilution for him, so he is not simply sorry.
Right. So what changes the question?
Line 32. He stops asking who is better off and starts asking what produces our assumptions.
So the main theme is not regret but how little choice we really have.
Good. Regret is the doorway, and choice and habit are the room you enter.
Where do you find the theme of death?
In the dark clothes in line 3, in the mention of Cartwright in line 18, and in the end of line 48.
Does the poem treat death dramatically?
No. It is mentioned quietly, almost in passing, until the very end.
And how is that linked to time?
The speaker sees the next generation at the college, and that makes him feel how fast time goes.
Then line 45 names boredom and fear as the two stages of life, and old age and death follow.
So time is the road, and death is where it ends.
Suppose the question is how the poem treats the past. What do you write first?
That the past is shown as closed, above all through the locked door.
And your evidence?
Lines 8 and 9 for the door, line 10 for the familiar bell and the unnoticed departure, and lines 17 and 18 for the memory of Cartwright.
And the effect?
It makes the speaker an outsider in his own history. And the doors that warp in line 38 echo the locked door, because they show even our firmest beliefs closing up.
Excellent. That is point, evidence and effect.
the arrival of Dockery's son at the college makes the speaker feel the passing of a generation.
the central idea, that lives are shaped by inborn assumptions that harden into habit and not by deliberate choice.
two lives are compared, and neither is shown as plainly better.
hinted at in the dark clothes and in Cartwright, and named in the last line.
the locked door and the unnoticed exit make the speaker an outsider in his own history.
the themes form a chain from time to comparison, habit, fear and death.
A theme sentence: The central theme of "Dockery and Son" is the idea that our lives are shaped less by choice than by assumptions that harden into habit.
A point, evidence and effect answer: Point: the past is shown as closed. Evidence: the speaker finds that his old room is locked against him (lines 8 and 9). Effect: he is made an outsider, shut out of his own history.
A linking sentence: The theme of time leads to the theme of death, since the speaker begins by counting the years between himself and Dockery's son and ends by naming old age and death as the end of life's journey (lines 46 to 48).
Time brings the news, habit sets the views, doors lock the past, death comes last.
Picture a clock on a bright lawn, a locked door beside it, an empty cradle and a black coat on a hook: time, the closed past, parenthood and death.
Clock, Door, Cradle, Coat: four objects for four themes, time, the closed past, parenthood and death.
H.A.D.E.S. - Habit, Ageing, Death, Estrangement, Sons (parenthood): the poem's five themes.
Term
What is the poem's central theme?
Click to flip
Term
Which line contains the self-correction that turns the poem towards this theme?
Click to flip
Term
How is death introduced before it is named in the last line?
Click to flip
Term
What does the locked door symbolise?
Click to flip
Term
How does the title relate to the theme of parenthood?
Click to flip
Term
Which two stages of life does line 45 name?
Click to flip
A central idea that a poem explores and returns to, as distinct from its subject.
The condition of having to die; the poem ends on this note.
The belief that events, including our choices, are fixed by earlier causes and not freely chosen; the poem leans towards this view.
A pattern of behaviour repeated until it becomes automatic; in the poem it hardens into character.
Something taken for granted without being examined; the speaker calls such assumptions inborn.
The weakening of something by adding something else to it; the speaker's word for what a child would have done to his life.
The feeling of being cut off from the place, people or past one once belonged to.
A phrase for the life one might have led had one chosen differently, here the life of a father and husband.
The central themes of "Dockery and Son" are time and ageing, the question whether lives are chosen or shaped by habit, parenthood and the road not taken, death, and the closed past. This lesson explains each theme with line references and shows how they link into one argument.
A theme is an idea a poem explores, and "Dockery and Son" explores several that depend on one another. The arrival of Dockery's son at the college makes the speaker feel time passing. Comparing his own childless life with Dockery's, he asks whether either man chose his life, and decides that assumptions harden into habit and that a hidden force decides for us. The poem keeps death in the background, in his dark clothes, in the mention of Cartwright and in the last line, and the locked door makes the past a closed place. The tone is bleak, but the poem is more honest than despairing, and it does not declare either father or bachelor the winner.
What a theme is. A theme is a larger idea that a poem explores and returns to, not simply its subject. The subject of "Dockery and Son" is a man visiting his old college and thinking about the son of a younger man. The themes are the bigger ideas this raises. They are woven together, so you will meet them in the same few lines again and again.
1. Time and ageing. The poem is set off by time: the arrival of the next generation at the college. The Dean's news (lines 1 and 2) shows the speaker that a man who came to the college after him now has a son of university age, and the speaker's arithmetic in lines 13 to 16 measures how many years have gone. The bright, open lawn (line 9) belongs to the young. The dark clothes (line 3) and the unnoticed departure (line 10) belong to the speaker. Later the poem states the point in general terms: life goes by regardless of how it is used (line 46) and ends in old age (line 48). The feeling is not warm nostalgia but a sudden, cold awareness of how much time has passed.
2. Choice, habit and unseen forces. This is the poem's central idea, and it unfolds through a correction. First the speaker explains Dockery's early fatherhood as the result of planning and ability (lines 30 and 31). Then he withdraws that explanation (line 32) and says that the difference lay in Dockery's conviction (line 33). To Dockery a child was a gain, and to the speaker it would have been a dilution (lines 34 and 35). He asks what the source is of such inborn assumptions (lines 35 and 36), and answers that it is neither our firmest beliefs nor our strongest wishes (line 37). They arrive with a life as a style or manner (line 38), begin as habit and then harden (lines 39 and 40). In the end life leaves only what some hidden force decided for us (line 47). The poem's claim is that what we call our choices are often unexamined assumptions that have set hard. That claim takes away the pride of the person who feels he planned well, and the comfort of the person who feels he chose freedom.
3. Parenthood, family and the road not taken. The poem sets two lives side by side: Dockery's, with a son, and the speaker's, with no wife, child or home of his own (lines 25 and 26). The title itself pairs Dockery with his son, like the name on a family firm, so it points at the continuity between generations that the speaker lacks. The speaker never says which life is better. He feels a pang in the list of what he lacks, and a defensiveness in his claim that a child would have been a dilution and in the sour note about a son's patronage (line 44). His final word for his own side of the comparison is nothing, repeated across a line break (lines 43 and 44). The theme is therefore less about parenthood itself than about how each of us experiences the life we did not lead.
4. Death and mortality. Death runs through the poem quietly. The first hint is the speaker's dark clothes (line 3), which make him look like a mourner. The second is the passing mention of Cartwright, later killed (line 18). The last is the final line, where death is named as the single end of old age (line 48). Between them stands the account of life in line 45 as two stages, boredom and fear. Fear is the key word: the poem suggests that the awareness of an ending, more than any single event, is what the long middle of life moves towards.
5. The closed past and isolation. The locked door (lines 8 and 9) is the poem's chief image of a past that cannot be re-entered. The familiar bell (line 10) calls up the place he once belonged to, and the remark that he leaves unnoticed makes him an outsider, a visitor in his own history. This isolation is not dramatic: nobody is unkind to him. It comes from the plain fact that time has moved on without him. It also links to theme 2, because the simile of doors that warp shut (line 38) shows our firmest beliefs and strongest wishes closing up as firmly as the door he found locked.
6. Boredom and the ordinary (a minor theme). The poem makes boredom the first of the two stages of life (line 45) and keeps its own scenery deliberately plain: a junction, a snack, a platform (lines 21 to 24). Larkin's idea is that ordinary life, not drama, is where most of living is done, and that its largest questions arrive in ordinary places.
How the themes fit together. Time brings the news; the news prompts a comparison of two lives; the comparison raises the question of choice and habit; habit leads to the picture of life as boredom followed by fear; and fear leads to death. Each theme is the cause or the consequence of the next, which is why the poem reads as a single argument and not a list of ideas.
The poem's message. The poem does not tell us how to live. It says that life is shaped by assumptions we do not choose, that it goes by whatever we do with it, and that neither the father nor the bachelor escapes ageing and death. Some readers find this bleak; others find a kind of comfort in its honesty, because it refuses to pretend.
How to answer a question on themes. Name the theme in your first sentence. Support it with two or three details, referring to them by line number. Explain how each detail develops the theme. Finish by saying what the poem as a whole suggests about it. Do not retell the story; analyse it.