No Road

Question 1

What is the main technique employed by Larkin in No Road?

Answer 1

Extended Metaphor

Question 1

In No Road, what is significant about Larkin’s use of a line break to split the opening sentence - ‘let the road between us/fall to disuse.

Answer 1

The line break acts as a representation of the new separation between the speaker and the unnamed character.

Question 2

No Road was written in 1951, soon after Larkin had called off his engagement to…

Answer 2

Ruth Bowman

Question 3

The end of which relationship is thought to have shaped the poem No Road?

Answer 3

The end of Larkin’s brief engagement to Ruth Bowman.

Question 4

‘time’s __________ agents loose’ (No Road)

Answer 4

eroding

Question 5

In No Road, why does Larkin refer to ‘time’s eroding agents’?

Answer 5

Time is presented as a slow, but inevitable, force of change. Whereas the couple in the poem struggle to separate and move on, time is presented as an undeniable force that will cause the break.

Question 6

In the final stanza of No Road, how and why is there a shift in the pronoun usage?

Answer 6

The plural ‘us’ from the first stanza is replaced by the singular forms ‘I’ and ‘you’. This conveys the increasing sense of separation towards the end of the poem.

Question 7

‘To watch that world come up like a cold _________’ (No Road)

Answer 7

sun

Question 8

In No Road, why does the narrator compare a life without his partner to watching a ‘world come up like a cold sun’

Answer 8

To present how such an existence would be unnatural and lifeless.

Question 9

At the end of No Road, the syntax becomes muddled and confusing to represent the speaker’s guilt and anxiety. He ultimately has to accept that is ‘ailment’ is that…?

Answer 9

He prefers a simple life of solitude to the complexity and compromise of being with another.