Analysis of Take One Home For The Kiddies by Philip Larkin
Take One Home For The Kiddies is about children asking their mother to buy them some sort of small rodent, then it dying because kids are incapable of caring for anything.
Larkin describes the animal's life through its living arrangements - 'shallow' could refer to the short, meaningless life rodents live, in conditions where the sun shines in their eyes through 'shadeless glass' and with 'empty bowls' showing that even the shop owner doesn't care enough to remember to feed them. The rodent's deprivation is further shown in the next line:
In the second stanza the rodent becomes a 'living toy', showing how kids don't treat it properly. The excitement of a new toy 'soon wears off' and they move on to a game of 'funerals'. This shows how kids are unaware of the real world, treating everything like a game that doesn't have any consequences.
Larkin describes the animal's life through its living arrangements - 'shallow' could refer to the short, meaningless life rodents live, in conditions where the sun shines in their eyes through 'shadeless glass' and with 'empty bowls' showing that even the shop owner doesn't care enough to remember to feed them. The rodent's deprivation is further shown in the next line:
"No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass-"This makes us feel sympathy for the animals - taken away from their mother and kept in the dark, away from their natural habitat, just to satisfy some stupid kid who won't appreciate it.
In the second stanza the rodent becomes a 'living toy', showing how kids don't treat it properly. The excitement of a new toy 'soon wears off' and they move on to a game of 'funerals'. This shows how kids are unaware of the real world, treating everything like a game that doesn't have any consequences.
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