Last Visit to 198 Cathedral Road

This poem is about re-visiting the place where his parents used to live before they passed away. I get the impression that the parents passed a while before he visited the house as there was "so must dust". At the end of the poem he is left alone similar to A Winter Visit as he has a dying mother, who is near the end of her life. A big key theme in this poem is death, he does not call the 'living room' its normal name any more and calls it the "Dying room" implying both of his parents passed away in the room. If we imagined this room it would be dark, dusty and haunted, as the house has had no care or attention since the parents passed. Abse personifies the vase-" the vase that yawned hideously", which makes the room seem more lifeless. Deterioration is another key theme in the poem-"photo phobic crack in the ceiling". Shows that the house is slowly deteriorating because its been abandoned.