Aubade Study Guide

An aubade is a poem traditionally set at dawn or early morning, and typically about parting lovers. This “Aubade” doesn’t involve love, however, despite its fitting setting. In the poem, which uses an ABABCCDEED rhyme scheme, the speaker wakes up at four in the morning and spends the time until dawn contemplating death, first in the abstract and then in a directly personal manner. The poem takes a relentlessly pessimistic view of death, suggesting that there’s nothing we can really do to soothe our fears of it. Larkin began writing “Aubade” in 1974 and resumed it in 1977, after his mother’s death. It was published later that year, eight years before Larkin’s own death at the age of 63. “Aubade” is often regarded as Larkin’s final major poem, since he wrote little in the last decade of his life. James Booth, the author of a biography of Larkin, calls "Aubade" the poet's "final, uniquely definitive self-elegy."