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Failure - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Wild Oats is about Larkin's own failure in love, with the title being an ironic use of 'sowing one's wild oats' to amplify his own lack of romance.
    - - juxtaposes 'two girls' with 'twenty years' to put a microscopic focus in a macroscopic timescale, to highlight how much weight this event has for Larkin
      - he refers to the girls as 'faces' which may display his foggy memory, as well as his misogynistic view of women, as the use of synecdoche suggests he views them only for their appearance, explaining his failure
      - he also contrasts the bosomy rose - probably Jane Exall - with her 'friend in specs', to show the expectation of love vs the reality
    - - Indeed, Larkin had his own unconventional love life, in which he never settled down and once entertained 3 women at once
      - this was probably influenced by his own pessimistic views on marriage, which he calls a 'revolting institution' (Larkin), influenced by his own parents loveless marriage which drove his mother Eva Emily Day to attempted suicide
    - - The contrasts display how much Larkin has failed in love, and will always be haunted by the 'two snaps' of the bosomy rose.
      - a wide gulf between what he hoped would happen, and what really did
    - - indeed, Larkin is an 'easy misogynist' (Jardine)
  - - - Uses contrast to showcase the gulf between her hope before the wedding day, and her bitterness now
    - - 'beloved sweetheart bastard' utilises an oxymoron, and plosive alliteration, to establish an atmosphere of tension, and highlight that something is wrong with the love in this poem
      - 'love's hate' uses another oxymoron, and enjambment to exhibit the wide contrast between the success of love, and failure
    - - This poem utilises the narrator of Ms Havisham from Dickens' 'Great Expectations', but drops the title of 'Ms' or 'Mrs' to highlight the bitterness she feels at being denied this epithet, as she failed in love
    - - Uses the same contrasts as Wild Oats to amplify the failure, to put success directly against failure
    - - Indeed, Duffy's work shows that 'love involves as much suffering as it does joy' (Preston). In line with this view, she has used equal weightings of 'love' and 'hate'
      - 'we can see the nostalgia and disaffection of Phillip Larkin' (Jones)
- - - - Suggests that failure is inherent to mankind, by adopting the symbol of the apple, connoting original sin
    - - describes the core as 'shied' which could be a reference to the coconut shy, a notoriously hard fairground game. Alternatively, it could be a personification of the apple, as if suggesting it is embarrassed by its association with mankind's failure
      - Larkin describes the failure as 'spreading', likening it to an infectious disease. It also suggests the failure is within us, in our blood, as it is inherent and intrinsic
      - Larkin also suggests that failure is repeated, it never ends, by using repetition - 'earlier and earlier'. This also encourages us to look backwards in time, as failure has always been there
    - - The coconut shy is a childlike reference, suggesting that failure starts at a young age
    - - uses the symbol of an apple to imply original sin, and failure is inevitable
    - - Larkin is indeed a 'hopeless and inflexible pessimist' (Appleyard), and sees no hope in life as it is filled with relentless failure
      - this may explain why Larkin felt so relaxed and accepting when he reached death, saying 'I am going to the inevitable' (Larkin). He believed it was better than endless failure in life
  - - - adopts the tool of inevitable time, to again suggest that failure is inevitable, as the passage of time is
    - - uses zoomorphism to describe the heart as 'gnawing', as it has a mind of its own and can't be controlled, failure is out of her control
      - she describes the clocks that 'slid' back an hour, the ease of the vern slid implies how natural and inevitable this was
      - 'of course, unbendable rain' - highlights how it can't be stopped or reversed, with 'of course' highlighting her awareness of this. Also, this is pathetic fallacy to reflect the narrator's feelings
    - - Duffy 'examines love in many forms' (O'Reilly)
      - the title 'mean time' links to Greenwich Mean Time, a universal measure of time, to highlight how universal the failure of love is
      - The title is a polysemy that could reference the inevitability of change, as well as the adjective 'mean' evidencing its cruelty
    - - uses time and the sense of irreversibility to suggest failure is inevitable
    - - Duffy wishes to show the universality of failure by adopting a different persona, she 'presents disappointed figures' (Cash)