Welsh Valley Cinema 1930s

The fourth of my student's commentaries:

Welsh Valley Cinema is about a cinema we think set in the slums in the 1930’s. Back in the 1930’s we researched that there was not much entertainment around especially for the working class. Round about then the TV was being developed so we thought that the only entertaiment around would be the cinema. The poem is based in Wales so we researched and found out there was a cinema in Haverford West called ‘The Palace’. We think that he may be referring to this cinema. The poem is about the cinema being an escape for the working class, for them to imagine dreams of what they would love to do, but by the end of the poem the people in the cinema are back to reality once the performance was over- “sank to disappear, a dream underground”. The word “thrill” suggests it was an excitement and a big thing to go to. I imagine working in the mines was not fun, so the cinema was the place to go.

We think that Welsh Valley Cinema has links to Larkin's poem Sunny Prestatyn because the girls in the advertisements provide an escapism for the viewers similar to the cinema. The working class dreams are shown through a film and the posters portray the stereotypical women that most men want. This poem is also similar to Essential Beauty because it's about people who do not really go out to pursue what they want to do –“stare beyond this world, where nothing's made”. They think that there is nothing outside the working class society that they cannot achieve when really they can. We thought of Love Songs in Age because the music is descibed as “musical asthma”, which implies that the music took his breath away, similar to Love Songs in Age, as the music she has is “much-mentioned brilliance, love”. Meaning that the songs mean a lot and are hard to put away- “ To pile them back, to cry,”