17 pages • 34 minutes read
The Explosion
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Literary Devices
Form
Larkin, whose poems often upcycled non-traditional poetic forms, rejuvenates a little-used poetic form here: the tercet, stanzas of three lines. Traditionally, the tercet has been used as part of a longer poem with more traditional stanza lengths to create emphasis or as a pause to give a moment’s reflection. An entire poem constructed through tercets, however, is more remarkable. Although there are familiar examples—Percy Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” Alfred Tennyson’s “The Eagle,” Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night,” Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”—perhaps the most recognized use of the tercet is Dante’s epical Divine Comedy, which is indeed, like Larkin’s poem, set in unrhymed tercets.
Given its tight construction—its haiku-like minimalism, its emphasis on conciseness, and its sheer efficiency—the tercet is often used to enhance the feeling of a phenomenon that passes quickly. That phenomenon here is nothing less than life itself. Given the poem’s theme, how accidental death disrupts everything and puts an unexpected end to a life thought to have much time left, the tercet, with its concentrated emphasis on brevity, underscores that feeling of absolute and sudden ending.
Meter
“The Explosion” is set in tetrameter; that is, there are five units of two beats each in each line, although there are occasional variations to avoid predictability. That metric pattern is by itself not unusual. Conventionally, however, tetrameter follows a simple stressed-unstressed pattern: duh DUH. The emphasis hits the second unit of the two beats. That pattern is natural and achieves its tempo quietly and in a non-assertive way.
Larkin puts a spin on that metrical pattern. In the poem, Larkin uses trochaic patterning in which the emphasis is hit on the first syllable of the two-syllable units, not the second. For instance:
So they passed in beards and moleskins (Line 10)
That pattern, termed falling rhythm as each unit goes from stressed to unstressed, from upbeat to the downbeat, upends conventional recitation and, in turn, creates a stutter beat. The effect is like syncopation in the jazz music that so intrigued Larkin. The poem cannot be read with the conventional reassuring beat. An innovative and eccentric recitation strategy, trochaic tetrameter puts demands on the reader, particularly if the poem is being shared aloud. That stutter beat with its requisite off-step suggests the theme of the traumatic interruption of accidents. But the meter is subtle, a question of emphasis. It can be difficult even to hear, again like the explosion that barely registers above ground.
Voice
Two voices share this poem. The voice that relates this narrative is initially tuned to the working-class life of the miners who go off to their death. The diction in the opening five stanzas is clean, accessible, syllable-crisp, and direct, anything but ornamental; the presentation of the miners on their way to work is appropriately realistic, reflecting not only the miners and their culture but Larkin’s own acknowledged inspiration for the poem, a BBC documentary on mining.
Once the explosion has occurred, however, and the poem moves to the chapel, the voice ascends to the complex, thick rhetoric typical of religious services, emphasized by the italics. The vocabulary is more ornate, the sentences opaque, even fragmentary, and the argument itself is delivered in complex figures of speech, the world “as if” (God’s house; the coin; the sun; the faces of the dead) that reflect theological arguments. The figurative arguments are difficult to grasp, appropriate as they are offered to a working-class congregation struggling to understand the accident.
The closing line, set apart, returns the poem to the direct diction and accessible syntax of the opening five stanzas as the poet closes with the only abiding solution he can offer in the face of inscrutable death: nature’s continuity.
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By Philip Larkin
