'Love Songs in Age' and 'Reference Back' are both poems by Philip Larkin that deal with the painfulness of memories and our subjection to time. In each, Larkin talks of the ways music can provoke memories, be it the sheet music 'Love Songs in Age', or the records in 'Reference Back'. The tone of the poems is very similar, with a negative opinion expressed in the final stanza of each poem, with 'Reference Back' dealing with the distortion of memories over time, and the theme of 'Love Songs in Age' being the overrating of love. Despite this, there are a number of differences in the way Larkin achieves his effects, in both the structure and language.
In 'Reference Back' the narrator is talking of visiting home, and the lack of communication between himself and his mother, and how this is the way it has always been. Larkin uses the word 'unsatisfactory' four times in the poem, to describe the hall, room, the mother's 'age' and the son's 'prime'.…
