Questions: Aubade: The Dawn-Greeting Poem

Question 1

A student describes an aubade as 'a poem celebrating the beauty of morning.' A more precise analysis of the form would note:

• A. This is correct—all aubades celebrate dawn's arrival, though some do so with complex imagery
• B. The aubade's defining structure is ambivalence, not celebration: dawn is simultaneously beautiful and unwelcome, marking a parting or loss. Calling it pure celebration misses the form's characteristic tension
• C. The student is wrong because aubades are always mournful—beauty is absent from the tradition
• D. Dawn poems that simply celebrate morning are technically aubades; the student's description is accurate for the classical tradition even if not for all contemporary examples

Answer: (B)

The aubade's defining tension—beauty as loss, arrival as departure—is what distinguishes it from a simple dawn poem. In the classical courtly tradition, the beauty of dawn is precisely what makes it the enemy: the most gorgeous light of the day is the one that ends the lovers' night. This ambivalence is structural, not incidental. A poem that simply celebrates morning without this tension of the unwelcome-yet-beautiful is not exploiting what is specific to the aubade as a form.

Question 2

Philip Larkin's 'Aubade' is set in the early morning hours and meditates on the terror of death, with no romantic imagery and no lovers. What connects it to the aubade tradition?

• A. Any poem set at dawn qualifies as an aubade regardless of subject matter or emotional register
• B. Larkin consciously invokes the aubade's structural situation—something deeply unwelcome arriving with the light—and extends the form's central parting from lover to parting from life itself
• C. Larkin was directly influenced by Provençal troubadour poetry and deliberately imitated its courtly love conventions in a modern idiom
• D. The poem is only loosely an aubade—it lacks the defining features of the form and should be categorized as a nocturne instead

Answer: (B)

Larkin's 'Aubade' exploits the form's deep structure without its surface content. The aubade's core situation is: something beautiful is coming (dawn), and it brings with it something the speaker most wishes to avoid (parting, exile from the beloved). Larkin replaces the beloved with life itself: each morning brings the speaker closer to death, and the light arrives not as promise but as reminder of extinction. The form's ambivalence—beauty as threat—is preserved and intensified. This shows the aubade's structural logic can sustain subjects far beyond its courtly origins.

Question 3

The ambivalence at the heart of the traditional aubade—that dawn is both beautiful and unwelcome—allows contemporary poets to use the form for subjects far beyond romantic parting, including meditation on mortality.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

True. The aubade's structural logic is a relationship between the speaker and an arriving light that is simultaneously gorgeous and dreaded. This logic is not bound to the content of courtly love—it can sustain any subject where beauty and unwelcome arrival are intertwined. Larkin's mortal terror is the most striking example: the light comes up every morning, reliably and beautifully, and reliably reminds him that he is moving toward death. The form's structure enables this extension without losing what makes it distinctively an aubade.

Question 4

In the courtly aubade tradition, dawn was welcomed by the lovers because it signaled the end of danger and the beginning of safe, open companionship.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

False. In the courtly aubade, dawn was the enemy of the lovers—it brought their secret night to an end and forced the departure that exposed them to the danger of discovery and the pain of separation. The aubade is addressed to dawn with dread, not relief. Donne's speaker in 'The Sun Rising' rages at the sun for intruding. The whole emotional charge of the form comes from the fact that the most beautiful light is the least welcome one. Dawn ends the night of safety and intimacy, not the night of danger.

Question 5

What is the structural tension that defines the aubade as a form, and how does Philip Larkin's 'Aubade' demonstrate that this tension can persist far from the poem's courtly origins?

Model answer: The aubade's defining tension is that dawn is simultaneously beautiful and unwelcome—it arrives with visual splendor while marking a departure the speaker most wishes to prevent. In the courtly tradition, departure is from the beloved. In Larkin's 'Aubade,' the unwelcome arrival is mortality itself: each dawn is one more sunrise closer to the speaker's extinction. The form's structure—a speaker awake before or at dawn, confronting the coming light with dread rather than welcome—persists, but the content of what dawn takes away has shifted from erotic presence to life itself.

This structural transfer is possible because the aubade's logic is abstract enough to sustain different contents while preserving its essential movement: beauty arrives, beauty threatens, the speaker is caught between. Larkin's version is arguably more austere than the courtly original—there is no compensating beloved, no resolution into comic grandiosity like Donne's, just the daily confrontation with extinction. The form enables rather than constrains this bleakness; without the aubade tradition's built-in expectation of beautiful-but-dreaded dawn, Larkin's emotional architecture would need to be constructed from scratch.