The Explosion

“Aubade” by Philip Larkin (1977)

Perhaps Larkin’s signature poem, published late in his career, “Aubade,” French for morning song, examines Larkin’s apprehensions over death. He considers the tally of his life, what he has done and what he will never do given the inevitability of death. Unlike “The Explosion,” this is a dark poem. Nothing remedies the poet’s anxiety.

“Miners” by Wilfrid Owen (1918)

Written by one of the most influential British poets from the generation before Larkin, this poem is what “The Explosion” is not: an occasional poem, a disaster poem published just days after a particular catastrophe, the Minnie Pit collapse of 1918, in which more than 150 miners perished. Unlike Larkin, Owen projects himself into the suffering of the miners and then offers the reflection that these brave men died just to provide coal to prolong the brutal and pointless ongoing war in Europe.

“Convergence of the Twain” by Thomas Hardy (1912)

Larkin acknowledged his own development as a poet pivoted on his rediscovery of the compassionate naturalism of Thomas Hardy. Here, unlike “The Explosion,” the poet reflects on a particular mass catastrophe, the sinking of Titanic in the North Atlantic.