Philip Larkin – “Dockery and Son”

Philip Larkin's "Dockery and Son", from The Whitsun Weddings (1964), follows a middle-aged man who visits his old college, learns that a former junior now has a son studying there, and on the journey back begins to doubt that anyone really chooses the shape of a life. The sub-lessons cover the poet, the summary, a stanza-by-stanza reading, the themes, devices, tone and mood, critical appreciation and practice questions.

"Dockery and Son" is a reflective poem of six eight-line stanzas. A speaker who has returned to his old college hears from the Dean that Dockery, a younger contemporary, has a son at the college now. The news sets off a train journey of private thought in which the speaker, unmarried and childless, compares his life with Dockery's, asks why one man saw a child as a gain and the other as a loss, and concludes that habit and unexamined assumptions shape us more than choice does. The poem ends with a bleak view of life moving from tedium to dread and then to old age and death. The lessons in this section take the poem apart one layer at a time, from the poet and the plot to the stanzas, themes, devices, tone and the way to write about it in an examination.

This section is a complete study guide to Philip Larkin's poem. "Dockery and Son" was written in 1963 and collected in The Whitsun Weddings (1964). It is spoken by a middle-aged man who revisits his old college, is told by the Dean that Dockery's son is now a student there, and spends the rest of the poem, on a train and on a station platform, turning that news over in his mind. It has six stanzas of eight lines each, mostly in plain, conversational English, and it moves from a polite social exchange to a stark general statement about life, age and death. The eight sub-lessons are meant to be read in order.

6.1 About the Poet: Philip Larkin. This lesson introduces Larkin's life and his poetry: his plain yet reflective style, his recurring themes of time, death and the ordinariness of modern life, his notable works and his lasting influence. It is the background against which "Dockery and Son" should be read, as one poem in a larger body of work.

6.2 Poem Summary. This lesson tells the poem as a sequence of events and an argument. It follows the visit to the college, the locked door, the journey, the memory of a man from his student days, later killed, the change of trains at Sheffield, the comparison between the speaker and Dockery, the questions about the source of our assumptions and the final vision of life. It ends with advice on writing a summary of your own in an examination.

6.3 Stanza-by-Stanza Explanation. Here each of the six stanzas is read closely, with line numbers. You learn what each stanza does in the poem's movement, which images carry the meaning, how the stanzas are joined to one another and where the argument turns, in particular at the end of stanza 4, when the speaker corrects his own explanation of Dockery.

6.4 Central Themes. This lesson sets out the poem's main ideas: the passing of time, the question of choice and habit, parenthood and the road not taken, the irretrievable past, and death. It shows how the themes support one another and where each can be found in the text.

6.5 Literary Devices. This lesson names and explains the techniques Larkin uses: direct speech, the persona, imagery and symbol (above all the locked door and the railway), simile, antithesis, rhetorical questions, repetition, enjambment, rhyme, metre and the sudden short line near the end. Each device is tied to its effect, which is what examiners reward.

6.6 Tone and Mood. Tone is the speaker's attitude; mood is the feeling the poem leaves in the reader. This lesson charts how the tone shifts from awkward courtesy and dry irony to drowsy flatness, uneasy self-questioning, argument and finally resigned bleakness, and shows how word choice, syntax and rhythm produce each change.

6.7 Critical Appreciation. This lesson gives a method for writing a critical appreciation, a model answer written without quoting the poem, the context of Larkin's plain style, a comparison with other Larkin poems in the course and a fair assessment of the poem's strengths and limits.

6.8 Practice Questions. The last lesson is built around practice. It sorts the questions an examiner might set into types (short answer, line-reference, theme and tone, critical appreciation and comparison) and shows how to plan and write an answer for each.

A good way to use the section is to read the summary first, then the stanza-by-stanza lesson with the poem open beside you, then the themes, devices and tone, and finally to attempt the practice questions before reading the model answers.