Poem Summary

In "Dockery and Son" a middle-aged man revisits his old college and is told by the Dean that Dockery, a younger contemporary, now has a son studying there. On the journey back he compares his own childless life with Dockery's, asks why two men wanted such different things, and reaches a bleak conclusion about habit, ageing and death.

The poem is spoken by a man in the first person. In stanza 1 he is a visitor at his old college, dressed in dark clothes, listening to the Dean, who says that Dockery's son is there now. At the end of the stanza he tries the door to his old college room. Stanza 2 begins with the result, a locked door, and then he leaves and takes a train. During the journey (stanzas 2 and 3) he works out how young Dockery must have been when he became a father, recalls a man named Cartwright, later killed, dozes and changes trains at Sheffield. In stanzas 4 and 5 he looks at his own life, unmarried and childless, and asks what lies behind such different assumptions. In stanza 6 he decides that habit hardens into what we are, and that life, which has boredom and fear as its two stages, ends in age and death.

The situation. The speaker is a middle-aged man, roughly forty if we work out the poem's arithmetic: Dockery is the younger of the two, and Dockery has a grown-up son. He is back at the college where he was a student. Readers take it to be Oxford, Larkin's own university, although the poem never names the place. He is dressed in dark, sombre clothes, and he feels more like a ghost than a guest among the young. The Dean greets him and, in lines 1 and 2, reminds him that Dockery came to the college after him and that Dockery's son is at the college now. The speaker only nods. The conversation goes on (spoken words are marked by quotation marks in lines 1 to 4 and in line 7), but the speaker's real response is private: memories of his own student days rise up.

The locked door. At the end of stanza 1 (line 8) he tries the door to his old college room, where he lived as a student. The very first word of stanza 2 gives the result: it is locked. A lawn stretches out, bright and wide, a bell he knows rings, and he catches his train, unnoticed by anyone.

The train and Dockery. From the train window he sees a stretch of canal and a sky of clouds, and his thoughts turn to Dockery. He tries to work out how old Dockery must have been when the boy was born, and the answer, nineteen or twenty, seems remarkably young (lines 12 to 16).

Memory, sleep and Sheffield. In stanza 3 his thoughts drift back to college rooms and to a man named Cartwright, later killed, a death mentioned briefly and without fuss (lines 17 and 18). He yawns, falls asleep and reaches Sheffield, where he has to change trains. The stanza ends with the ordinary business of waiting on the platform, which includes a snack, and a glimpse of the railway lines that fork away from one another (line 24).

The comparison. Stanza 4 is where the poem's real subject appears. The speaker surveys what he does not have: a wife, a child, a home or property of his own. Going without these had seemed ordinary to him. Beside Dockery's example it looks bare. At first he explains Dockery's early fatherhood by imagining that Dockery, even at nineteen, had weighed up his wishes and was well able to carry them out (lines 30 and 31). Then, in line 32, he breaks off and corrects himself: the difference between the two men was not planning or ability.

The argument. Stanza 5 gives the answer as the speaker now sees it. Dockery was simply convinced that a child would enlarge his life (line 33). The speaker asks why Dockery believed that adding a child meant a gain (line 34), when to himself it would have been a weakening, a dilution (line 35). He then asks what the source of such inborn assumptions is (lines 35 and 36). It is not our firmest beliefs or our strongest wishes (line 37). They are more a manner of living that arrives with a life (line 38) and starts as habit (line 39), which then sets hard (line 40). The beliefs and wishes just ruled out in line 37 are the ones compared in line 38 to doors that warp shut.

The conclusion. In stanza 6 the speaker looks back at these hardened assumptions and sees them loom like vast, dense clouds of sand (lines 41 and 42). In Dockery's case they stand for fatherhood; in the speaker's case they stand for nothing, a word he repeats across the line break (lines 43 and 44). He adds a sour qualification, that a son also has a hard, patronising side. Then the poem widens from two men to everyone. Line 45, a notably short line, names the two stages of life as boredom and fear. Life goes by regardless of whether we put it to use (line 46), it leaves behind only what some hidden force decided for us (line 47), and it ends with old age and, last of all, death (line 48).

What the poem is about. On the surface it is about a man, a locked door and a train journey. Underneath it is about how little control people have over the course of their lives, and about the discovery that the married father and the unmarried bachelor are carried along by the same unseen current.

How to summarise it in an examination. Use three steps: the situation in one sentence, the key events in order (the visit, the locked door, the journey), and the argument in one or two sentences (the speaker compares himself with Dockery, decides that neither chose, and ends with age and death). Keep to about eighty or a hundred words unless told otherwise, write in the present tense and do not quote.