Practice Questions

This lesson is built around practice. It sorts the questions an examiner might set on "Dockery and Son" into six types, shows how to plan an answer to each, and gives model answers and outlines for a bank of fifteen questions, all written without quoting the poem.

The questions on "Dockery and Son" fall into six types: short-answer recall, line-reference questions, theme and speaker, devices and language, tone and mood, and long answers such as critical appreciation and comparison. For each type this lesson explains the command words, the method (point, evidence, effect, with line numbers) and the right length, then gives model answers or outlines. It also lists the key lines to know, the common mistakes to avoid and a checklist to use before you hand in an answer.

How to use this lesson. Try each question yourself before you read the model answer. Write your own answer in full, then compare. The answers here refer to lines by number and describe images in their own words, and you should do the same.

Length guide (a rough guide, not an official marking scheme). A short factual question needs one or two sentences, about 20 to 40 words. A question worth four or five marks needs a short paragraph of about 80 to 120 words, with two or three points. A long answer needs a plan and about 250 to 350 words: an introduction, three or four developed points with line references, and a conclusion.

Command words. State or name: give the fact. Explain: give reasons or meaning. Describe: say what it is like. Discuss: weigh more than one view. Evaluate: judge how well something works. Compare: say what is similar and what is different.

Type A: short-answer questions.

• A1. Who tells the speaker about Dockery's son, and what does he say? Answer: The Dean, in lines 1 and 2. He says that Dockery came after the speaker and that Dockery's son is at the college now.
• A2. What does the speaker do at the end of stanza 1, and what happens next? Answer: He tries the door to his old college room (line 8). The first word of stanza 2 reports that it is locked.
• A3. Where does the speaker change trains, and what does he do there? Answer: At Sheffield (line 21). He waits on the platform and has a snack (lines 22 and 23) and notices the railway lines that fork apart (line 24).
• A4. What, according to stanza 4, does the speaker lack? Answer: A wife, a child, a home and property (lines 25 and 26).

Type B: line-reference questions. Method: say where the lines come in the poem, explain what they say in your own words, name a device and its effect, and link the lines to the theme.

• B1. Read lines 1 to 4. Who is speaking, how does the speaker respond, and what does the compound word of line 3 suggest? Answer: The Dean speaks and the speaker only nods. The compound word describes his dark clothes in terms of death, so he looks like a mourner and almost like a ghost among the young, which brings in the first hint of death.
• B2. Read lines 9 and 10. What does the speaker find, and what does the detail of leaving unnoticed add? Answer: The door is locked, while a wide, bright lawn lies in the light and a familiar bell rings. He leaves unnoticed, which makes him an outsider in his own past.
• B3. Read lines 30 to 33. What explanation is given, what happens to it, and what replaces it? Answer: In lines 30 and 31 Dockery is explained as someone who weighed up his wishes and was able to act on them. In line 32 the speaker breaks off and rejects this. Line 33 replaces it with Dockery's conviction that a child would enlarge his life. The difference is assumption, not planning.
• B4. Read lines 41 to 45. What image is used, what does it suggest, and what is stated in line 45? Answer: The hardened assumptions are compared to vast clouds of sand, which suggests something huge, dense and suffocating. For the speaker they stand for nothing (lines 43 and 44). Line 45 states that life has two stages, boredom and fear.

Type C: theme and speaker.

• C1. What is the central theme of the poem? Outline: the question of choice. The speaker's explanation of Dockery is corrected at line 32; assumptions rather than plans decide; they begin as habit and harden (lines 35 to 40); a hidden force decides for us (line 47).
• C2. How does the poem treat the theme of death? Outline: dark clothes (line 3); Cartwright, later killed (line 18); two stages of life (line 45); death as the single end of old age (line 48). It is mentioned quietly until the last line.
• C3. How would you describe the speaker's attitude to his own life? Outline: mixed. A pang in the list of absences (lines 25 and 26) and the word nothing (lines 43 and 44); defensiveness in the claim of dilution (line 35) and the remark about a son's patronage (line 44); honesty in the self-correction (line 32); fatalism in the ending.

Type D: devices and language.

• D1. Name two similes and explain their effect. Outline: doors that warp until they will not open (line 38), a simile for our firmest beliefs and strongest wishes, make their closing-up physical and fixed and echo the locked door; clouds of sand (lines 41 and 42) make assumptions vast and suffocating.
• D2. What does enjambment contribute? Outline: about half the lines end without punctuation, and stanzas 2 to 5 run into the next; the poem reads as one train of thought on a moving train; only the last stanza ends with a full stop, so the ending sounds final.
• D3. What is the effect of the repeated word nothing? Outline: it ends line 43 and begins line 44; the echo makes the emptiness ring on and sums up the speaker's side of the comparison.

Type E: tone and mood.

• E1. How does the tone change at line 32? Outline: before it, a calm, reasoning voice explains Dockery; after it, an uneasy, probing voice that questions his own explanation, and then the amazement of line 33 and the questions of lines 34 and 36.
• E2. What is the mood of the last stanza, and how is it created? Outline: bleakness and dread, then cold acceptance; the short end-stopped sentences (lines 44, 45 and 48), the plain statement of boredom and fear, the pronouns we and us, and the lack of any appeal for pity.

Type F: long answers.

• F1. Write a critical appreciation of the poem. Outline: introduction (poet, poem, collection and date, subject); theme (choice and habit); form (six rhymed octaves, run-on sentences, only the last stanza ending with a full stop); language and imagery (plain diction, the vocabulary of business and sums, the locked door, the two similes); tone (dry, uneasy, resigned); evaluation (strengths and limits); conclusion.
• F2. "The poem suggests that nobody really chooses his life." Discuss. Outline: the evidence for (lines 32 to 40 and 47); the speaker's own claim treated as an assumption; the counter-view that the poem gives little room for real decisions or for fulfilment in family life; a judgement.
• F3. Compare the poem with "Church Going" or "The Whitsun Weddings". Outline: a shared frame (a visit to an empty church, or a train journey), a plain, self-aware voice, and a larger reflection; then the difference of ending: a sober respect in "Church Going", an image of arrows that vanish from sight and come down as rain, hopeful but uncertain, in "The Whitsun Weddings", and old age and death in "Dockery and Son".

The key lines to know. Line 3 (the visitor in dark clothes), lines 8 and 9 (the door), line 10 (the unnoticed departure), line 24 (the railway lines that fork), line 32 (the self-correction), lines 33 to 35 (convinced, increase and dilution), line 38 (the simile of doors), lines 41 and 42 (the clouds of sand), lines 43 and 44 (nothing), line 45 (boredom and fear) and line 48 (the end).

Common mistakes.

• Retelling the story instead of answering the question.
• Using the bare word sad for the tone, and mixing up tone and mood.
• Giving no line numbers, or quoting far too much.
• Treating the speaker as Larkin himself without saying that the speaker is a created voice.
• Forgetting the turning point at line 32.
• Making claims about Dockery's wife or son, who do not appear as people in the poem, instead of keeping to what the speaker says and thinks.

A checklist before you finish. Have you answered the command word? Does each point have a line number and an effect? Have you linked the point to the poem's theme? Is the length right for the marks? Have you said something about the title, the turning point or the ending where it was relevant?