LITERARY DEVICE: Emjambment (Dian J)

Ambulances

Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.

Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,

And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;

For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there

At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable insided a room
The trafic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.


Philip Larkin's Ambulances is an extended metaphor comparing death to ambulances. The poem exemplifies the ways in which death is separated from the every day lives of people, although it is very common.

Larkin uses emjambment to emphasize the disconnect between people and death throughout the poem. In the first two lines, the lack of puncuation ironically causes the reader to stop at the end of each one. This causes a distinct separation between the ambulance and the city is is travelling through as well as the "glances" the ambulance takes in. In the next stanza, only the first and last lines are enstopped leaving everything in the middle enjambed. The "women in the shops" are detached from the "Wild white face" inside the ambulance. The third stanza is all endstopped, except for the first line. This one exception is very isolated within the stanza as it is the only line emjambed. The emjabment emphasizes that the "solving emptiness" is not apart of one's daily routine. The solving emptiness, a description of death, "lies just under all we do," not exposed. In the fourth stanza, Larkin uses emjambment in five out of the six lines, demonstrating the isolation of death throughout society. Speficially in the last three lines and into the last stanza, Larkin reveals that what unites one another across the years at last being to fall apart there (in the amublance and at the hospital), while emjambing all four of those lines.