Phillip Larkin- Home is so sad Analysis

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

As if to win them back. Instead, bereft

Of anyone to please, it withers so,

Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,

A joyous shot at how things ought to be,

Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:

Look at the pictures and cutlery.

The music in the piano stool. That vase.

• The speaker describes a home with a personality different from the sweet stereotype; portraying it as a place of loneliness and longing after its inhabitants have long deserted their dwellings. 
• The final, minor sentence which contains a noun 'That vase' is a climax and an anti-climax. Larkin is reflecting on the futility of life, and its lack of meaning. The sentence provokes a sense of nostalgia, through its use of deixis, as though Larkin is being overwhelmed by past memories contained within the vision of the vase.
• Brokenness of a family that has grown up and moved on. There used to be life here but now there is only an imprint left.
• Personification- Perspective of the rooms themselves.
• Enjambment between the last line of the first stanza and the first line of the second stanza. The effect created is a disruption of thought; and if anything, the readers are distanced from Home instead of being closer to it. Offers us a rather bitter account of neglect in a bland tone which reveals little or hardly any emotions due to the lack of evocative language. 
• The seemingly childish title of the poem might point to self-awareness and the concomitant self-mockery of the concept of loss and regret. 
• Throughout the two stanzas there is a lack of adjectives and imagery, for example ‘Look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool.’ Larkin chooses to strip this description to the bare minimum in order to make the poem relate to the reader, as it could be anyone’s lost home.
• The noun ‘withers’ is describing the house as if it is dying and persona feels the sadness of this loss.  The adjective ‘bereft’ is emotive as it has a duel meaning of without and also a sense of loss. The house, for the persona, has been robbed of its inhabitants.