Contents: Introduction 2

Metonymy and Synecdoche-The term "we’’ is used in the poem in a general way to make reference to the entire English society.
Personification-We find personification in the line "Every ship their sovereign knows’’.
Hyperbole-We find a hyperbole in the line "He rocks the cradle of the babe of Spain’’ where the narrator talks about the Flanders helping England and rooting for Spain at the same time.
Onomatopoeia-We find onomatopoeia in the line ’’So hear the scaly herd when Proteus blows’’.⁴

2.3. The analitical aspects of the characters of the poem.

William III, Prince of Orange
William III, the Dutch king of the time is personified through the entire nation. Dryden refers to the Dutch, meaning specifically William. He is the one who instructs his navy to continue to threaten Britain for the sake of naval superiority during the Anglo-Dutch War.
Charles II
Charles is the King of England during 1666. He is the one who builds the navy's supremacy as a global superpower because he wants to establish his empire's dominance. Charles is a proud king, however, and refuses to allow his country to recover after the war. He picks fights continually with neighboring countries, which decreases his popularity among his subjects dramatically. When tragedy strikes in the form of the plague, he is next to useless. He does, however, regain popularity when his decree saves the city of London from complete obliteration during the great fire.
Louis XIV
He was the King of France. Louis is to whom Dryden refers when he speaks of France. His aid in the Anglo-Dutch war is accredited with the English victory. Unable to be bothered with true aid to England, he proves an unstable ally who needs constant watching.
Death
Dryden personifies Death in the poem. He isn't someone to be feared; he's a familiar and almost welcome friend to the people. 1666 was a year filled with so much death, that the people ceased to shutter when he knocked on their doors.
God
As Christianity was the prominent religion of the time, Dryden focuses on God several times in his poem. God is credited with creating all life. It is then His divine right to end life when He sees fit, and the people do not question it. God's character is not really typified as either good or bad but merely expressed through his actions. In any situation, God is given praise eventually as His ways are considered mysterious and just in any circumstance, even when the people cannot understand His actions.
Analysis
The poem is built on a simple structure of four stanzas. The first and fourth lines rhyme as do the second, third, and fifth lines. The fourth stanza is a repeat of the first with one line slightly changed. The first stanza establishes the conceit of the poem. The poem describes the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the increased sexual freedoms enjoyed in British society but makes a declarative statement that "sexual intercourse began" in 1963. This creates an immediate divide between sex that occurred before 1963 and sex that occurred after. The second stanza explains that sex before 1963 was simply a matter of marriage and was more akin to a quarrel or an argument than what came later. Larkin also describes the "shame" that begins with sex and then spreads to the rest of one's life. Sex before 1963 was a shame-inducing tussle for marriage.
The third stanza describes sex after 1963. Everyone in the society begins to conceive of sex differently. Sex becomes a "brilliant ... unlosable game" and ideas such as shame and marriage are tossed to the side. The breaking of the bank described by Larkin suggests the image of a river beginning to overflow. Decades of repression and shame have created a swelling of sexual desire in the society. The wave of sexual freedoms that came after 1963 are like a river suddenly breaking its banks. The final stanza of the poem introduces a tinge of regret. The invention of a different kind of sex in 1963 was noticeable but it came too late for Larkin. He can notice and describe the change in attitudes but he is now too old to take full advantage of the shift in society. He is middle-aged and still riddled with the ideas of the past. He approves of the increased sexual freedoms but regrets that he has grown too old to fully appreciate what the change in society really means.
The poem also uses two key cultural texts as chronological markers. The first is the lifting of the ban of the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover(1927) by D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930). The novel contains depictions of sex that were deemed salacious at the time of publication. This portrayal of sex meant that the book was banned in Great Britain until 1960 when an obscenity trial deemed that the full, unabridged version of the novel could finally be published. The second cultural marker is the release of the first album by the Beatles. Please Please Me was released in 1963 and the ensuing global popularity of the Beatles helped change the shape of music and culture throughout the decade. Larkin uses these two moments to describe a specific moment in time. This suggests that the sexual intercourse described in the poem is a cultural as much as a physical phenomenon. The physical act of sex has not changed but the way in which society and culture views sex has altered irrecoverably. The use of cultural texts to describe the shift in attitudes toward sex repositions sex as a cultural issue rather than a physical one. Sex is not about marriage or rings after 1963 and it instead becomes an expression of a freer, more liberal cultural moment.⁵