What is No Road about?
- Ending of a relationship that the speaker is trying to make sense of their life, without their partner. Confusion/uncertainty/doubt.
What is the significance of the title No Road?
Extended metaphor of road = absence of relationship and a place (the future of the couple).
‘Since we agreed to let the road between us
Fall to disuse’
- Extended metaphor of the road = absence/end of their relationship. - Enjambment emphasises this separation.
- Passivity/neglection in allowing the relationship to become like this.
‘bricked our gates up, planted trees to screen us, And turned all times eroding agents lose’
- Tricolon/Listing actively measures the conscious efforts made to form barriers.
- Time has forced the separation, personified as a slowly destructive and undeniable force.
‘Silence, and space, and strangers - our neglect’
- Polysyndeton - suggesting their choice to isolate, reflects stages of disintegration of relationship.
‘Leaves drift unswept, perhaps; grass creeps unmown’
- Repeated prefix ‘un’ - relationship defined by sense of stasis - nothing has happened. ‘Perhaps’ - lacks certainty in why relationship has ended and must forge future without her.
‘So clear it stands, so little overgrown’
- Intensifier/anaphoric repetition - surprised by how little has changed, their connection remains. Sense of hope for relationship if an active choice was made.
‘A little longer, And time would be the stronger’
- Faith in time to force a change. Repeated personification of time, has the ability to disintegrate their remaining connection.
‘Drafting a world where no such road will run from you to me’
- Separation becomes more distinct, as change to singular pronouns from ‘we’ to ‘you’ ‘me’ . Attempts to make sense of this new identity.
‘like a cold sun’
- Oxymoronic simile. Separation is unnatural, strange, bleak and fundamentally devoid of something essential to his life.
‘Rewarding others is my liberty.
Not to prevent it is my will’s fulfillment.
Willing it my ailment’ ☆
- Syntax becomes confusing and shifts - ending feels muddled/complex with the language.
- Trying to grapple with why relationship ended and can come to no conclusion. Time is evidently more powerful than human action.
‘Willing it, my ailment’
His desire - his ailment/burden - is that he prefers solitude, concludes that being alone is much less complex.
Rhythm and Rhyme of No Road:
- Ends on a rhyming couplet emphasising inner conflict the speaker feels about ending of relationship.
- Sestets (6) - regularity - inevitability of time and steady disintegration of relationship.
A03: What did Larkin compare to Wordsworth?
‘Deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth’ : Inspired by a lack of.
A03: No Road was written in 1951. Who did Larkin break off an engagement to then?
Ruth Bowman
A03: Larkin was loosely associated with the Movement writers. What was their writing like?
Unsentimental, honest and rooted in everyday experience, rational, pragmatic.
