The Large Cool Store

Theme:

Clothing and fashion are the theme of this poem, watered down fashion at affordable rates, however Larkin comments on the working class and the illusions they have, that they think they're a better person if they try to dress better.

Content:

In this poem Larkin describes a shop selling cheap, slightly dated, fashionable clothes that Larkin doesn't approve/like, and looks down upon the people that wear them.

Structure:

The poem has an ABABA rhyme scheme throughout, like the lives of these working class people. It's repetitive, monotone and boring.

Analysis:

• The title 'The Large Cool Store', has two connotations for the word 'cool', that the clothes are cold, grim and just stored or that they are fashionable and trendy. The place is ambigious, unknown to the reader which store it could be. 'Cheap' is a good thing for the buyers but its more aligned with tacky and worthless. 'Simple sizes plainly' could describe the people buying them, the working class people, and Larkin looks down upon these ordinary, plain people. The colours described 'browns and greys, maroon and navy' are simplistic and dull, bleak and horrible to look at.
• In the second stanza Larkin imagines the lives of the shoppers. 'Who leave at down low terraced houses' the low meaning both physically low and also that they are of a lower status than he. 'Factory, yard and site' the places that these people could work is described as condescending. The 'heaps of shirts and trousers' make the clothes sound like rubbish, just dumped there. 'Machine-embroidered' suggests that the women are creating themselves through materialism, and use the clothes as a facade.
• Yet their clothes are contrasted with the 'Modes For Night', 'lemon, sapphire, moss-green, rose' all clothes that are fashionable, colourful and vibrant. These are seperate from the boring colours. 'Baby Dolls and Shorties' are fashionable bedclothes. The woman come alive at night, and become sexy and seductive. 'Flounce in clusters' is like the women that strut and show their clothes however are like clones, grouped together by the same fashion.
• 'They share that world' of fashion and class. The 'their' is used to seperate them from the upper class that they try to be.
• 'Seperate and unearthly love is' implies that Larkin doesn't understand love or women, that it's alien to him and becomes fake. The women can't reach these ideals and become unnatural because they try so hard. It's like a woman's nature to dream, mainly the younger people fantasising, 'young unreal wishes'. They want to live these fantasies because they have nothing better, and Larkin reduces love because it seems to be 'synthetic, new and natureless', fake and cold, a lacking fulfillment of expectstion, just an ideal and false impression that men have. Men build up female image only to be disappointed.