Premium Essay

‘Church Going” Disected

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Submitted By ottdrew
Words 328
Pages 2
Philip Larking has a poem called Church Going written in an iambic pentameter consisting of seven stanzas, each including nine lines, of which the language is typical of Larkin - ordinary, conversational, and almost slangy. It talks about the relationship among people, religion and church. In this essay, I want to discuss the speaker's attitude toward religion and evaluate the poem, stanza by stanza. The poem explains the way how these relationships have become hackneyed to great extent, say, people do go to church without even pondering upon the reason to do so. In the first stanza, the speaker explains how cliché the entering to the church is and in the second stanza, he moves forward and emphasizes the condition of the roof and he believes that it is not worth stopping, and in the third stanza he questions the habit of church going, that is to say, the whole poem is trying to find the meaning of religion and in this way each stanza plays its proper role. In the first stanza we see a phrase "another church" which exposes that this church is like other `inspiration for him, explaining the atmosphere of the church by mentioning to the books and the unignorable silence that covers the church, say, he again enters to another church and he does not does not possess any feeling toward it. In the second stanza, he moves forward and refers to the roof where there are some biblical verses are printed in large type for reading aloud, he says: "pronounce "Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant", he points that people and whoever enters the church repeat the utterings that they do not know why they do because church going has become a habitual and it has lost its basic scope which should be considered as a place where people should have felt an spiritual feeling, and he donates an Irish six pence before leaving which could be interpreted in two

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