Significance of Religion as a Social Institution for Common People: Structural Analysis of Philip Larkin’s “Church Going

Abstract

Social institutions give meaning to our lives and bring social cohesion. This research study is designed to do the structural analysis of “Church Going”. It aims to analyze the signifiers used in the text about religion and how these signifiers explain the significance of religion as a social institution for twentieth century people. We have found a few studies about Larkin in which critics have taken into consideration the context and biography of Larkin for criticism of his works. But this study is an initiator to analyzing Larkin’s works by applying the Structural approach and does not get attached to the context or prevailing situation of the poet. This research article will give a rich and valid explanation of “Church Going” because as Booth said, “trust the poem and not the poet” (1995, p. 129). After paradigmatically and syntagmatically analyzing and interpreting the structures of the poem, we have found that the speaker of a poem is a modern man who is curious about the role of church for its believers and continually inquiring about it through predictions and rhetorical questions. Tone and diction of the first five stanzas reveal the mocking and sarcastic attitude of the speaker but in the last two stanzas the tone is changed and the speaker gets to the satisfactory and reliable conclusion that whatever happens churches or Christianity will never be barren because of the rituals performed there (birth, marriage and death) and it is also the house of cure and wisdom. This research is limited to “Church Going” but for a more valid interpretation of the significance of religion for twentieth century people, multiple researches need to be carried out on other texts of that time.