Literary Devices

This lesson identifies the main literary devices in Philip Larkin's "Church Going" and explains what each one does. It covers voice and diction, imagery, personification and other figures of speech, irony and the title, symbolism, and the poem's form and syntax.

Larkin's devices are quiet ones. The speaker's colloquial voice, set against the technical vocabulary of the church, creates distance and humour. Sound words such as thud and snigger, and the echoes that seem to mock the speaker, bring the empty building to life. Irony runs through the poem and is summed up in its double-meaning title. The church itself is the central symbol, supported by the ruin and by the ground and the dead of the last stanza. In form, the poem uses seven nine-line stanzas in loose iambic pentameter, with sentences that run across line endings and a long closing sentence. For each device the lesson shows how to name it, locate it and explain its effect.

Philip Larkin writes in a plain, conversational style, so the devices in "Church Going" do not decorate the poem; they carry its meaning. A good answer on devices does three things for each one: it names the device, it locates it by stanza or line number, and it explains the effect on the meaning or feeling of the poem. The sections below follow that method.

Voice and diction

The poem is spoken by a first-person speaker, a persona who sounds like an ordinary, educated man thinking aloud. In the early stanzas his diction is colloquial and offhand: he uses vague everyday words for sacred objects and qualifies what he says. Against this the poem sets the technical vocabulary of the church: font, lectern, pyx, rood-loft, and the old-fashioned words plate and parchment. The speaker knows the vocabulary but not what it means to a believer, so the contrast between the two registers measures his distance from the church. In stanza 7 the diction becomes abstract and weighty (compulsions, destinies, obsolete, hunger), and this change of register marks the move from joking to seriousness.

Imagery

The poem draws on several senses. Sound: the thud of the door (line 2) and the echoes in stanza 2. Touch: the speaker's hand moving round the font. Atmosphere: the silence is called musty, a word we normally use for stale or damp air, so that silence seems to have a physical presence. Sight: brown flowers, brass objects at the altar end, a roof that looks freshly done, and then, in the middle stanzas, a ruin of weeds, brambles, stone and sky. The final image is the burial ground around the church. The images begin as small objects in a room and widen to a landscape and finally to the dead, so the imagery follows the poem's movement from the personal to the universal.

Figures of speech

• Personification: in stanza 2 the building's echoes seem to snigger at the speaker, as if they were people laughing. The church appears to mock his play-acting, and the device turns an empty building into a presence.
• Onomatopoeia: thud (line 2) and snigger (stanza 2) imitate the sounds they name, which makes the scene audible.
• Metaphor: the silence is described as something brewed, like a drink left to stand, which suggests that it has built up over a very long time. In stanza 7 the word robed, which evokes ceremonial dress, suggests that ordinary human drives are given dignity and ceremony. The word gravitating (line 61) makes the pull towards the church sound like a natural force.
• Rhetorical questions: stanzas 3 to 6 are built largely of questions that the speaker leaves unanswered for a time. They show a mind thinking aloud and draw the reader into the argument.
• Catalogue or list: the inventory of furnishings in stanza 1, and the quick list of things that overgrow a ruin in the middle stanzas, pile up details like a man who is noticing and not preaching.
• Repetition: the word serious recurs in stanza 7 and becomes the poem's keyword.
• Contrast (antithesis): belief and disbelief, reverence and mockery, I and we, present and future. The poem is built on such pairs.
• Bathos and understatement: a solemn silence is followed at once by a pair of cycle-clips, and a gesture of reverence is carried out awkwardly. The comic fall from the solemn to the trivial lets the speaker avoid pretending to a piety he does not feel.

Irony and the title

Irony runs through the poem. The speaker says that the visit was hardly worth the trouble, yet he admits that he stops at churches often. He plays at reading out a lesson, but it is the echoes that mock him. He is not a believer, yet he behaves with reverence and ends by calling the place serious. The title is itself ambiguous. "Church Going" can mean the habit of attending church, and it can also mean the church going, that is, disappearing from the life of the community. The poem explores both meanings, and the second gives the first an ironic edge: the speaker is a church-goer only as a sightseer, in an age when churches themselves are going.

Symbolism

The church is the central symbol. It stands for religious faith and tradition, but by the end it also stands for the human need for seriousness and for the great events of life and death. The cycle-clips are a small symbol of ordinary modern life carried into a sacred place. The ruin in the middle stanzas symbolises the decay of belief. The ground and the dead of the last stanza symbolise mortality, which the speaker treats as the deepest source of seriousness. The silence is a symbol too: it holds the accumulated weight of everything that people have felt in the building.

Form and syntax

The poem has seven stanzas of nine lines each, in loose iambic pentameter, with a rhyme pattern that repeats in every stanza. The rhyme is handled so lightly that the poem sounds more like speech than song. Sentences run over line endings (enjambment) and halt in the middle of lines at colons, semicolons and full stops (caesura), so the verse follows the rhythm of thought. The first two stanzas are in the present tense, which makes the visit feel immediate. The grammar also shows the poem's progress: short, separate observations in the first stanza, a long chain of questions in the middle, and a closing sentence of six lines (lines 58-63) that moves steadily to the dead and gives the ending dignity and calm.

How to write about a device

Use the pattern name, place, effect. For example: in stanza 2 the echoes seem to snigger at the speaker; this is personification, and it makes the building appear to mock his play-acting, which shows how uncomfortable he is. Avoid listing devices without explaining them, because examiners reward the effect and not the label.