The poem “Here” consists of four eight-line stanzas. Each stanza has a rime scheme, but a reader might peruse the poem many times without even realizing that is has a rime scheme. The first stanza’s rime scheme is ABABCDDC.
First Stanza
The speaker begins by reporting, “Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows.” He employs an ambiguous use of the word “swerving.” At first one thinks of an automobile swerving, and then that thought seems to be supported by the second line, “And traffic all night north.” And then the swerving continues: “swerving through fields / Too thin and thistled to be called meadows.”
The speaker is in a vehicle or is driving through the areas he is mentioning, but instead of merely driving he is “swerving": “swerving to solitude / Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants / And the widening river's slow presence, / The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud.” It is the speaker’s mind that is doing the swerving, not necessarily the automobile in which he is riding, or perhaps driving.
Second Stanza
The first line of the second stanza is a continuation of the last line of the first stanza: “The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud, // Gathers to the surprise of a large town.” All of the "swerving" finally "gathers" the speaker to a large town; his swerving from industrial shadows through fields to skies and scarecrows, haystacks, the river, the clouds, and the gull-marked mud gathers him mentally and physically to the place where he finds surprisingly a large town at the end of it all.
Next, the speaker describes what he sees in the “large town”: “Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster / Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water.” He also sees the residents and reports on how they got there, “brought down / The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys, / Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires.” He then catalogues other items: “Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies, / Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers.”
Third Stanza
In the third stanza, he qualifies the residents as “A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling / Where only salesmen and relations come.” And once again, he catalogues what he sees: “Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum, / Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives.” The town the speaker is describing is Hull, a city in northeast England, and the “slave museum” refers to the home of the abolitionist William Wilberforce.
Fourth Stanza
The main theme in Larkin’s “Here” is suggested in the last three lines of the third stanza and the first line and a half in the fourth stanza: “And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges / Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges, / Isolate villages, where removed lives //Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands / Like heat.” Indeed, loneliness was Larkin’s main theme, even as he cursed the darkness, he held “loneliness” up like a torch.
