Coming — Philip Larkin

Model Answer: The line uses personification — houses are given "foreheads," making them appear human. The light "bathes" the facades as one might bathe a face. "Serene" gives the houses a quality of calm, peaceful dignity. Together, the effect is of a quiet domestic scene made gently human by the spring light — the houses seem like passive, patient presences absorbing the first warmth of the approaching season. The personification transforms an ordinary suburban street into something tender and alive.

Model Answer: The image uses two devices simultaneously. "Fresh-peeled voice" is synaesthesia — a sound described in terms of touch and texture (as if the voice has a skin that has been removed, exposing something raw and bright). "Astonishing the brickwork" is personification — brickwork is given the capacity to be astonished. The combination creates an effect of maximum contrast: the thrush's song is so unexpectedly vivid and fresh against the dead, cold, grey winter surroundings that even inanimate matter responds with something like shock. The image captures the specific quality of birdsong in late winter — its startling brightness against silence, its quality of announcement.

Model Answer: "Deep" suggests spaciousness and depth — a garden that seems large because it is bare of leaves and growth. In summer, a garden is enclosed by foliage; in late winter, stripped of its canopy, it opens up, seeming deeper and more extensive. "Bare" confirms the seasonal emptiness. Together, "deep bare garden" conveys a space that is both open and somehow cavernous — the thrush sings in a large, empty, resonant space that amplifies its voice against the silent winter environment.

Model Answer: The description deliberately rejects the Romantic idealisation of childhood as a time of innocence and joy. Larkin's childhood was not golden or memorable — it was simply routine, unremarkable, already half-forgotten. "Forgotten boredom" has two layers: the boredom of childhood itself (its tedium), and the forgottenness of it (it has not been preserved in memory with love or nostalgia). This reveals a speaker who cannot access a happy childhood to explain his present happiness — making the happiness that follows all the more mysterious and poignant. He feels childhood happiness without having owned it originally.

Model Answer: The simile compares the speaker's response to spring to a child who accidentally walks into a room where two adults have just made up after a quarrel. The child cannot understand why the atmosphere has changed — what caused the fight, what resolved it, what reconciliation means — but can feel the resulting lightness in the air. The "unusual laughter" is the evidence: laughter that is slightly surprised, slightly relieved, slightly freer than normal. The child catches this atmosphere and "starts to be happy" — not because of understanding, but in spite of its absence. The speaker's happiness at spring's coming is exactly like this: he cannot fully explain why the birdsong and longer evenings produce joy, he simply starts to be happy. The happiness is pre-cognitive, atmospheric, borrowed.

Model Answer: The two things compared are: (i) the arrival of spring (announced by longer evenings and a thrush's song); and (ii) a child walking in on adult reconciliation. Both are experiences of a changed atmosphere — a lightening, a renewal — whose cause is not fully understood. Spring arrives without fully explaining itself; reconciliation happens before the child's understanding. In both cases, the response is happiness without full comprehension. The comparison illuminates the poem's central insight: the most genuine happiness may be the kind that precedes understanding, that arrives before we have time to intellectualise or qualify it. Larkin, a deeply thoughtful adult, finds that adult consciousness actually impedes joy — and that the deepest happiness is the childlike kind: irrational, caught, not earned.