Literary Devices

This lesson names the main literary devices of "Dockery and Son" and ties each to its effect: form and sound, the speaker's voice, imagery and symbol, rhetoric, and plain language with irony. Every device is placed by line number so that it can be used as evidence in an answer.

Larkin builds the poem from six rhymed octaves whose sentences run over the line and stanza breaks, so the poem moves like a mind thinking on a moving train. The speaker is a created first-person voice who opens with the Dean's speech and later widens from "I" to "we". The images are ordinary and exact: a locked door, a bright lawn, a bell, railway lines, a simile of doors that warp shut and a simile of clouds of sand. Antithesis, rhetorical questions, repetition and a sudden self-correction drive the argument, while the language of business and arithmetic gives the poem a dry irony. A short, blunt line near the end carries the bleakest statement.

A literary device is a technique that a writer uses to produce an effect. For every device you name in an answer, say where it appears (give the line number), what it does and why it matters to the poem. The devices of "Dockery and Son" fall into five groups.

1. Form and sound.

• Stanza form. The poem has six octaves, 48 lines in all. The regular unit gives an orderly shape to a thought that feels loose and wandering, in keeping with Larkin's habit of setting uneasy feelings in controlled forms.
• Rhyme. The poem is rhymed throughout. Critics describe the base pattern as ABABCDCD, and the pattern varies from stanza to stanza and loosens as the poem goes on, with rhymes in the later stanzas lying further apart. In the last stanza the word that ends line 41 (the verb for looming up) rhymes with the word fear in line 45, which links the image of the assumptions to the poem's bleakest statement. The rhymes are often disguised by the run of the sentences, so the poem sounds like speech.
• Metre. Most lines have about ten syllables in a loose iambic rhythm that stays close to speech. A few lines are shorter. Lines 1 and 9 have about eight syllables, and line 45 is the shortest, at about seven. Almost all its words have one syllable, which makes it the bluntest line in the poem.
• Enjambment. About half the lines (25 of 48) end without any punctuation, so sentences run over the line ends. Stanzas 2 to 5 end without punctuation, and the sense runs on across the stanza breaks. Stanza 1 ends with a colon. The effect is the continuous flow of a mind thinking on a moving train.
• End-stopping. Only eight lines in the whole poem end with a full stop (lines 2, 9, 10, 14, 26, 44, 45 and 48; in line 2 the stop sits inside the closing quotation mark), and three of those are in the last stanza. After the long, running sentences, the short firm sentences of stanza 6 sound like verdicts.
• Colons. Three line ends carry a colon (lines 8, 29 and 37), and each introduces what follows: the result at the door (line 9), the thought of Dockery at nineteen (line 30) and the simile of the doors (line 38). The colon works like a signpost.

2. Voice.

• Persona and point of view. The poem is spoken by a created first-person voice, a middle-aged man, not necessarily Larkin himself. The visit and departure are told in the present tense (lines 3 to 10), which gives immediacy. A persona allows ironic distance: the speaker can be shown as partly deceiving himself.
• Direct speech. The poem opens with the Dean's words in quotation marks (lines 1 to 4 and line 7). This dramatic opening drops the reader into a social situation and sets up the contrast between what is said aloud and what is thought.
• Pronoun shift. "I" is used in stanzas 1 to 3 (lines 3 to 21). From line 37 the poem says "we", "our" and "us". The shift widens the poem from one man's experience to a statement about everybody.
• Questions. Questions appear in lines 2, 7, 16, 18, 34 and 36. The Dean's questions in stanza 1 are social, and the two in stanza 5 (lines 34 and 36) are the poem's big ones, to which the rest of the argument is the answer.
• Exclamation. The only exclamation mark in the poem is in line 33. It marks the speaker's exasperated amazement at Dockery's certainty.
• Self-correction. In line 32 the speaker interrupts himself. This speech-like device shows the mind at work and marks the turning point of the poem.

3. Imagery and symbol.

• The locked door (lines 8 and 9) is a symbol of the closed past, and the speaker's failed attempt shows his exclusion from it.
• The bright lawn and the bell (lines 9 and 10) contrast with the dark clothes and the shut door. The bell is a sound image that calls up the past, and the speaker's unnoticed departure completes the picture of an outsider.
• The dark clothes (line 3) are described in a compound word that ties them to death. It is a visual symbol of mourning and of age.
• The railway runs from line 10 to line 24. The train is a symbol of time's one-way journey, Sheffield is a junction where routes divide, and the diverging lines of line 24 can suggest the different paths a life may take.
• The simile of the doors (line 38) compares our firmest beliefs and strongest wishes to doors that warp in their frames until they will not open. It is a domestic, physical image of something closing up for good.
• The simile of the clouds of sand (lines 41 and 42) makes the assumptions vast, dense and suffocating when seen from a distance in time. The word clouds appears twice in the poem, as a plain sight from the train in line 11 and here in a darker form.
• A hidden force (line 47). The agent that decides for us is left unnamed, which suggests fate, instinct or chance, and the vagueness is the point.

4. Rhetoric.

• Antithesis. The words increase and dilution (lines 34 and 35) set two readings of one event against each other. Other contrasts are the open lawn and the shut door, and Dockery's son and the speaker's nothing (lines 42 to 44).
• Repetition. The word nothing ends line 43 and begins line 44, so the emptiness echoes across the break. The name Dockery recurs (lines 1, 12, 29 and 43) and keeps him in view. A repeated "no" builds the list of absences in lines 25 and 26.
• Understatement. The death of Cartwright is mentioned in passing (line 18), which makes it more chilling.
• Climax and generalisation. Line 45 is a short aphorism that states a general truth about life in two stages.

5. Language and irony.

• Plain, conversational diction. The words are everyday ones, and the details are concrete and unglamorous: Sheffield, a snack, a platform.
• The vocabulary of business and arithmetic. The word stock in line 30 and the words added, increase and dilution in lines 33 to 35 treat life like accounts or a chemistry experiment. The vocabulary echoes the title, which suggests the name of a family firm, and it shows the speaker's cool, calculating habit of mind. The irony is that feelings cannot be reckoned in sums.
• Irony. A visitor in funeral dress stands among the young. A title that promises a father and son delivers a man without a son. The speaker thinks he is analysing Dockery and ends by analysing himself, and his own confident claim that a child would dilute his life begins to look like one more unexamined assumption.
• Compound words. Compact compound words appear in several lines, for example lines 3, 38 and 42, and each packs a picture into a single word.

How to write about devices. Use the method point, evidence, effect. Point: name the device. Evidence: give the line numbers and describe the words in your own words. Effect: say what the device adds to the meaning, and then link it to the poem's argument that habit hardens and life goes by.