Philip Larkin – High Windows

Composed in 1967, at the height of the sexual revolution and the Summer of Love, Philip Larkin’s High Windows starts with the theme of freedom and generational shifts and ends with a mysterious and oblique sense of transcendence. Written in Larkin’s simple and direct style that characterized the poet as one of the most significant in British literary history, the poem calls out the tendency to view happiness elsewhere and in hindsight, as a kind of relief and an absence of whatever constraints we feel ourselves under at a particular moment in time.