“Coming” by Philip Larkin is a poem about the arrival of spring and the feelings of contentment that come with it. The poem’s theme is based on the idea of renewal and joy that comes with the birth of spring. Spring, a metaphor for new life, is something that the poet looks forward to after the harshness of winter. The theme of renewal and the cycle of new life and joy comes through the mood and atmosphere the poet creates.
Larkin paints us a picture of a beautiful Spring day and the feelings that come from the light and sounds of the long-awaited season. Larkin says,
On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
The way the poet sets the atmosphere to create that theme of renewal is by using imagery like the words “light, chill and yellow” or “Laurel-surrounded” that bring to mind the picture of a Spring day. The way the poet describes the light coming over the horizon to touch the tops of houses helps to show how a person might see the first rays of sun after a long dreary winter. The idea of the thrush, described as laurel-surrounded, brings to mind the fact that the music that the thrush creates is just as full of life and represents the victory(laurels are for winners) of life and spring over death and winter.
The cyclical nature of the seasons relates well for the metaphor of life, with its seasons of despair and seasons of joy. Larkin describes the coming of Spring by using the metaphor of a child who comes on adults making amends after a fight. The child doesn’t understand why the unpleasantness is over or why he feels happy in the new agreement. Larkin, similarly, doesn’t understand why the Spring brings renewal, or why that makes him happy, but he knows that it does make him happy and is a good representation of life.
The poem "Coming" by Philip Larkin is rich with themes and symbolism. Larkin is a popular poet known for exploring themes connected to nature and the environment, relationships, and the inevitability of death.
In this particular poem, many of the words in just the few opening lines are soft and lilting, especially when read aloud: "longer" and "light" and "chill" and "yellow" (lines 1–2) share both alliteration and consonance and present a very pleasant image to the reader of the setting; the sounds "th" and "s" in lines 3–4 continue the welcoming, almost soothing imagery. The point suggested by so many warm, quiet sounds in so few lines is one of the houses' harmony with the nature in which they stand: the houses are indeed "serene" and "bathe[d]" in the beautiful last rays of sunlight as the sun sets in the evenings. These are not houses that feel ungainly or ugly, like intruders on a pastoral landscape. Instead, they seem to be one with their environment, both separate from and yet a part of it.
Lines 5–9 discuss the thrush (more of those soft "th" and "sh" and "s" and "l" sounds throughout) whose song brings about a personification: the brickwork is made to feel "astonish[ed]" by the bright, clear sound that echoes through the garden. Still, however, the thrush belongs in the environment that the author has created, right alongside the houses and the pale waning sunlight and the laurel and even the garden, though gardens imply that an outside force (a person) has acted upon the natural world, which would probably otherwise be haphazard, overgrown, and wild. This garden, though, "deep [and] bare" (line 7) as it is, welcomes the arrival of the thrush and its song, for "it will be spring soon" (repeated twice for emphasis, to underscore anticipation and hopefulness).
And finally, the speaker emerges (the poet himself as narrator inserted into the body of the work) but in such a way that he too seems like an integral part of the environment, the landscape of the poem, so to speak, that he has created. He arrives organically, just as much a part of the scene as the garden, the houses, the light, the thrush, everything else that he has already depicted, even though he is clearly outside the work (he imagined the scene, he wrote the poem). His arrival, like that of the thrush, is not an intrusion but a natural addition, and he too feels the hope and anticipation of spring as though he were again a child, "whose childhood / is a forgotten boredom" (lines 12-13). It is a pity that he had forgotten what it means to be a child, but the conclusion of the poem shows that memory shifting for him, rebounding with the kind of innocent faith and hope and virtue and delight for which children tend to be known, so that he (the poet in the poem) at last "starts to be happy" (line 19).
http://homepage.smc.edu/meeks_christopher/sound%20devices%20used%20in%20poetry.htm
http://www.english-for-students.com/coming.html
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