Breadfruit
Breadfruit - meaning Summary
Youthful Fantasy to Domestic Reality
Larkin depicts a contrast between lustful, exotic fantasies and the domestic routines that ultimately replace them. Young men imagine an alluring, foreign ideal that motivates consumer habits and social ambition. Those fantasies are never corrected so much as deferred into conventional adulthood: marriage, mortgage, children, and petty cares. The poem ends by showing the same image recurring in old men’s daydreams, suggesting a cyclical, unresolved longing beneath mundane maturity.
Read Complete AnalysesBoys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit, Whatever they are, As bribes to teach them how to execute Sixteen sexual positions on the sand; This makes them join (the boys) the tennis club, Jive at the Mecca, use deodorants, and On Saturdays squire ex-schoolgirls to the pub By private car. Such uncorrected visions end in church Or registrar: A mortgaged semi- with a silver birch; Nippers; the widowed mum; having to scheme With money; illness; age. So absolute Maturity falls, when old men sit and dream Of naked native girls who bring breadfruit Whatever they are.
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