Toads

Philip Larkin

Why should I let the toad work
  Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
  And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
  With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
  That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
  Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts-
  They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
  With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
  they seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
  Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
  No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
  To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
  That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
  Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
  And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
  My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
  All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
  One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
  When you have both.


When I first read this I noticed the alliteration.  In the third stanza, Larkin uses a lot of L alliteration and in the seventh as well with S's.  He also uses a number of different slant rhymes. For instance, in lines 9 and 11, he uses wits and louts.  I thought this poem meant that people spend an excess amount of time working rather just to be able to afford some extra things in life.  In the fifth line Larkin writes, Six days of the week it soils, I found this to be especially true. People dedicate their lives to work and often forget to actually live for once.  I took from the last stanza that both work and money co-exist and when you have both it's hard to lose either of them.