High Windows

Philip Larkin wrote “High Windows” in formally conservative quatrains. From a formal perspective, “High Windows” is very approachable: It is of a comfortably short (but not too short) length, written in lines of roughly regular and equivalent length, devoid of indentations or formal variations, and organized into the most common of all English poetry stanza forms, (four-line) quatrains. The poem eschews regular meter, despite its flirtation with iambs in the first stanza. The poem begins with a mostly metrically regular first line, which follows the iambic pattern of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable until its “COUple of KIDS” (Line 1) breaks the pattern. Its second line is written in perfect iambic meter, however: “and GUESS he’s FUCKing HER and SHE’S” (Line 2). If Larkin followed his pattern of utterly nondescript formal choices, the iambic lines would be pentameter, or five feet (units of meter) long. Instead, they follow the tighter pattern of tetrameter, or four feet.

At the crucial fourth line, which gives Larkin a chance to re-establish the rhythm, the poem instead drops a foot and varies the iambic with apparent glibness: “i KNOW this is PAraDISE” (Line 4).