Toads was written by Philip Larkin and published in 1955. It’s a lyric poem with nine stanzas, each consisting of four lines. The emotions and subjects displayed in this poem are wit, humour, depression, manners and custom, work, intellect, conformity, pleasure and frogs. The poem is an analogy used by the poet to depict how the labor and hard work of people, which they do to afford the pleasures of life, itself ruins all the pleasures. Philip Larkin as a poet is very precise in his writing, his tone and words bring out the sense of the poem very clearly. He says what most of the people in this world go through, therefore one can relate really well with the poem. Let’s see how the poet uses toads to talk about work.
In this poem Larkin talks about two toads. One depicts the outside influence of the society on an individual’s work and the other depicts the inner being of a person that keeps prompting him to work. Larkin open the first stanza with a rhetorical question “Why should I let the toad work/Squat on my life?” (l.1-2) Here the toad symbolizes work, and the poet means to say that in the beginning work seems to be as ugly and burdensome as a toad, but gradually its true beauty is revealed. He also compares wit to a pitchfork, to say that he can use his wit as a pitchfork to drive away work which he calls a brute. Larkin’s use of words and metaphors has a lot of depth and impact. Meter is used here to give more feeling to the metaphors and the first and third lines end with a double accent, to give the right sharpness.
In the second stanza Larkin brings out the deadly side of work, that “Six days of the week it soils/With its sickening poison.” (l.5-6) The amount of poison that gets in is more than the good that it brings, which is to say that work which is done with a purpose to pay a few bills, overcomes a person completely.
The third stanza changes a bit, to acknowledge many people who escape work and “live on their wits.” (l. 9) There is use of alliteration here, “Losers, loblolly-men, louts” (l.11). These are people who escape work using their wits but haven’t turned into paupers.
Larkin talks of poor people in stanza four who live on the road and eat “windfalls” (symbolic of being empty) and “tinned sardines” (poor people’s food), yet remain happy. These poor people resemble the toad that lives on nothing yet stays happy. The poet goes on to bring out the nakedness of these people in the fifth stanza that their children walk barefoot and wives look skinny, yet they don’t starve and are alive.
In the seventh stanza Larkin finds the second toad stuck inside him and says “For something sufficiently toad-like/Squats in me too.” (l.29-30) He knows that he cannot throw away work because he doesn’t have the courage to do so and also desires those things in life which he can afford from the money he earns.
Larkin shows the affect of the second toad in him, which will never let him be at peace and coax him to gain success, which for him is “The fame and the girl and the money.” (l. 31) He can only achieve these things by surrendering to the poison of the toad and its play.
In the ninth and the last stanza, Larkin concludes the poem by acknowledging the existence of the both the toads in him, but they are not the same. Both the toads have their own influence on him and its difficult to do away with them. Larkins says “But I do say it’s hard to lose either/When you have both” (l.35-36), because even if you have one, the influence is that of having both. You can’t deny the power and the efficacy of the toad, so its best to learn to live with both the toads with contentment.
References
Enotes. 2012. Toads. 1 April, 2012.
http://www.enotes.com/toads-salem/toads
The Wondering Minstrels. 2012. Toads – Philip Larkin. 1 April, 2012.
http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.in/2000/09/toads-philip-larkin.html
Schoolworkhelper. 2012. Philip Larkin’s Toads: Summary & Analysis. 1 April, 2012.
http://schoolworkhelper.net/2011/06/philip-larkins-toads-summary-analysis/
