2A – 2B English B January 2023

Unit 2: Experiences

Friday Night At The Royal Station House Hotel

By Philip Larkin
Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How

Isolated, like a fort, it is -
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

1. What is the form of the poem?

a) Villanelle b) sestina c) sonnet d) haiku
2. Can you find any examples of personification in the poem?
a)
b)
3. Why has Larkin used personification in this poem in this poem? What effect does it create?
4. Why is the form of the poem ironic? What is the effect of this irony?
5. Research the meaning of the phrase ‘objective correlative’? How is this modernist device used in Larkin’s
‘Friday Night…’
6. What can we deduce from the poem about the speaker’s identity? Why might he be writing the poem?
7. The poem lists many seemingly random and ordinary details. What symbolic meaning, if any, might be
attributed to the ‘full ashtrays in the Conference room’?
8. Larkin describes the hotel as being, ‘like a fort’. What could the hotel symbolize?
9. What do you think about the final lines? What does the speaker avoid doing?
10. Look at the rhymes in the poem. What do they express about the speaker’s experience?
11. What kind of experience is Larkin trying to describe in this poem? Why might people enjoy reading it?
12. What might be the significance of the detail, ‘an unsold evening paper’. What might Larkin be trying to
suggest through this detail?
13. Can you see an oxymoron in the poem? What effect does it create?
14. Can you see anything ironic about this poem? Does it create humour?