The Explosion

Given that Larkin could have used any regional bird’s eggs to make the point about nature’s continuity, he chooses a lark. Since Chaucer, in a line of poets that would include Shakespeare and the great Romantics, the lark has found a niche in British poetry as a joyous symbol of regeneration, a blithe spirit that embodies the glory of the sunrise and the sheer thrill of new beginnings that is available every morning, celebrated by the lark’s distinctive song, as lilting and breezy as carefree as the bird itself. As James Baker argues, “no bird is…more airy and carefree or ventures higher” (Baker, James V. “The Lark in English Poetry.” University of Nebraska Press. 1950, p. 1).

Thus, the lark symbolizes the bold embrace of hope and nature’s bold reminder with every sunrise of the self-serving irony of despair. That the poem closes with the lark eggs still intact despite being tampered with by the miner gifts the poem with its quiet optimism. The poem reassures a world regularly upended by catastrophe, routinely stunned by accidents great and small, that tomorrow there will indeed be a glorious sunrise.