Poetry Of Departures - Analysis

The poem’s real target: the romance of walking out

Larkin’s central claim is double-edged: the fantasy of sudden departure is genuinely seductive, and yet it is also a kind of performance that depends on the very comforts it claims to reject. The poem opens with a story heard fifth-hand, already turning escape into legend, almost As epitaph—a ready-made tribute to someone who chucked up everything. The speaker notices how the teller’s tone comes preloaded, Certain you approve, as if approval is the point of the story. That sets the poem’s core tension: leaving looks like moral cleansing—purifying, Elemental—but the speaker’s mind keeps revealing how staged that purity is.

Home as “specially-chosen junk”

The poem’s bitterness sharpens when the speaker admits, We all hate home, but he doesn’t describe home as trauma or poverty. He describes it as a curated nest: my room, specially-chosen junk, good books, the good bed, a life in perfect order. That list matters because it turns hatred into something stranger: not fear of deprivation, but a kind of claustrophobia inside one’s own good taste. Home is not simply imposed; it is assembled. The word detect makes the room feel like evidence at a crime scene—proof of complicity.

Why the departure story feels like sex or violence

When he hears He walked out, the speaker becomes flushed and stirred, and Larkin chooses shockingly intimate comparisons: Then she undid her dress and Take that you bastard. Escape, in other words, carries the charge of both erotic undressing and aggressive retaliation. It isn’t just relief; it’s transgression. The speaker’s imagination wants departure to be a clean, masculine act of refusal—one decisive motion that would cancel the slow compromises of domestic order.

The hinge: a fantasy that keeps him obedient

The poem turns on a sly admission: believing he could leave helps me to stay Sober and industrious. The thought of escape functions like a safety valve; it lets him tolerate his ordered life because it preserves the illusion of choice. Then he immediately contradicts that self-control—But I'd go today—as if the fantasy is always one bad afternoon away from becoming action. Larkin makes that contradiction feel truthful rather than inconsistent: wanting to leave and wanting to remain are not opposites here; they are mutually sustaining habits.

“Swagger” into roughness—and the suspicion it’s a costume

The imagined alternative life is vivid and oddly wholesome: nut-strewn roads, a ship’s fo'c'sle Stubbly with goodness. Even roughness is made appetizing, almost hygienic—stubble as virtue, poverty as authenticity. But the final refusal lands hard: it would be so artificial, a deliberate step backwards taken not from necessity but to create an object. The object is exactly what he already has—Books; china; a life—only now the life would be a posed artifact of rejection. The closing phrase Reprehensibly perfect condemns both versions: the tidy domestic “object” and the carefully crafted anti-domestic “object.”

A sharper question the poem won’t let go

If leaving is theatrical and staying is suffocating, what counts as a non-theatrical choice? The poem suggests the trap is not the room itself but the need to turn life—either settled or nomadic—into something you can point to and call complete.