First Sight
First Sight - meaning Summary
Innocence Confronted by Change
Larkin’s poem shows newborn lambs facing a cold, hostile landscape they cannot understand. The immediate scene is bleak: bleating, stumbling animals confronted by “a sunless glare” and a “wretched width of cold.” But the poem anticipates a hidden, imminent transformation: the earth’s "immeasurable surprise" that will awaken growth and make their future world “utterly unlike the snow.” It contrasts fragile innocence with inevitable natural renewal.
Read Complete AnalysesLambs that learn to walk in snow When their bleating clouds the air Meet a vast unwelcome, know Nothing but a sunless glare. Newly stumbling to and fro All they find, outside the fold, Is a wretched width of cold. As they wait beside the ewe, Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies Hidden round them, waiting too, Earth's immeasureable surprise. They could not grasp it if they knew, What so soon will wake and grow Utterly unlike the snow.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.