"Home Is So Sad" -- An Appreciation

Home is so Sad
Philip Larkin, 1922 - 1985

"Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase."

When I first read this poem, I was so carried away by the first two lines “Home is so sad…last to go” that I thought this entire poem was the poet describing how he feels about home: I take “home is so sad” to mean “thinking of home makes ‘me’ feel so sad” instead of “home” as a person, is “feeling sad”. Having this interpretation was because those two lines reminded me vividly of my own experience of leaving home. As an international student, I only get to visit home in the summer for a month. And this year, it was especially hard for me to leave for my senior year because my baby brother was born in May, and the trip back home in August was the first time I saw him. It only took half a day for me to get addicted to his presence in my life, to the point that I cried every night counting the days down. The last days before I left home, he couldn’t stop staring at me and giggling with his wide-eyed gaze as if he knew I would leave soon and tried to make me stay. This made me feel exactly that home, which was really my little brother, “shaped to the comfort of the last to go/As if to win them back.” And now every time I facetime my parents and baby brother, rather than the relief to know that their daily routine is not affected by my absence, and that “the pictures”, “the music in the piano stool”, and “that vase” remain the same as they are in my memory, I felt the intense temptation to go back to the life I was so familiar with and addicted to. The very fact that home “stays as it was left” makes me feel sad knowing that I can’t go back no matter how tempting it is. I wonder if Philip Larkin felt the same and wrote this poem to express the sadness of living with the temptation to go back home.

But this poem could also be taken another way, for as the poem progresses, it becomes clearer that “home” is the main character being portrayed in the poem. The extreme longing of the “home” for someone to return reminds me of The Great Gatsby. “Home” is personified as Gatsby. And home, as a physical and emotional entity, is supposed to be occupied by another being. In this case, Gatsby’s whole existence is completely occupied by his dream to have Daisy. The poem employs reverse chronology (assume it has a plot), for it portrays Gatsby’s tragic ending first. Gatsby is “sad” in the end after the hot and humid afternoon in the plaza when he takes his last effort to “win them back”, asking Daisy to tell Tom that she never loved him and leave him. But when Daisy chooses Tom, Gatsby is “bereft of anyone to please”, and “withers so”. Like a flower withers and dies after blooming, Gatsby’s death is almost predictable because losing Daisy is equivalent to losing the dream of having a life with her, the meaning he defines for his own existence. There is no point of living when the blooming season ends, as Gatsby has “no heart to put aside the theft”, being completely consumed by Tom’s “theft” of Daisy, and more so, the new superficial Daisy’s “theft” of the old innocent Daisy. The actual ending in the story simply intensifies the tragedy by casting Gatsby as the victim of the murder by the equally desperate Wilson, who, having lost his wife to the flamboyant and superficial world, is also a victim of the moral decay of the jazz age represented by people like Tom and Daisy. Presented at the beginning of the poem, the heart-wrenching ending of the story successfully absorbs the us into the intense atmosphere of sadness.

The second stanza elaborates on what leads to the tragic ending, as Philip Larking directs us to “turn again to what it started as.” It started as two innocent people, Daisy and Gatsby, falling helplessly in love back in Louisville. Gatsby takes Daisy as the equivalence of the dream he will dedicate his whole life to, so much so that when he first kisses her, he knows that if he puts all his hope and dream on her by kissing her, he will climb up the ladder he sees leading up from the tree to paradise. It is for this dream that he gives “joyous”, or even naïve and stubborn “shots at how things ought to be”. He builds
his wealth from scratch in order to be good enough for her by travelling around the world on a yacht with Dan Cody for years. He believes so strongly that they are meant to be even when she’s married that he builds his “palace” deliberately across the water from Daisy’s house, throws all those fancy parties in the hope that she will come in one day, and stretches his arm reaching for the green light from her house every night. But all his efforts were in vain because everything has “long fallen wide”. Daisy is no longer the innocent girl she used to be, for she and Tom are “careless” people as portrayed by Nick or Fitzgerald, who break others’ lives into pieces, find comfort in their extravagant and superficial life, and leave others to suffer the consequences. But Gatsby “stays as it (he) was left”, stuck in the past and could only “see how it was”. “How it was” is that he knew he must have Daisy, and now he still does. He could still, but only, see “that vase” – that Daisy – the old Daisy who would give him her whole as a virgin, wait for him to return from the war, and get herself drunk and try to call off the wedding after getting his letter. Tragedy happens when Gatsby holds on too stubbornly to his dream that no longer fits the changing world that becomes full of “careless” people like Tom and Daisy. And the ending awaiting such individuals like Gatsby is physical (sometimes) and spiritual death.

Thus, when fitting the story of Gatsby into the poem, the theme seems to be the accusation and criticism of the negative changes in the world that destroy individuals who refuse to change with it. But if we see this poem without the lens of The Great Gatsby, the theme does not have to be so dark and negative. On one hand, it could simply be one’s nostalgia of home, the feeling I had when I first read the poem. On the other, it could still be about changes, not the moral decay in The Great Gatsby, but the type of changes in daily life that we should deal with positively and flexibly. The change that happens in the poem is that the residents have left home. And such changes are not within our control and are sometimes necessary, just like the fact that I need to leave home in order to study in America. But “home” is too caught up in how things used to be, and thus tortures itself by wanting to “win them back”. By providing a negative example of what will happen if one refuses to cope with changes, the poem conveys the message that we should always be flexible and adjust ourselves to changes in daily life.