The Whitsun Weddings

Product Information

Seems more sentimental than many of Larkin’s other poems; this may be because the persona is female here. The 1960s was a decade of protest and change; the evolving civil rights and sexual liberation movements meant related topics that had been silenced were becoming increasingly discussed. As a result, more and more people began to question the concept of marriage as the bastion of accepted social roles surrounding family, sex, and gender. Verse movement is like the muscular contraction in the athletic body of the poem; one place to pay attention to it is at the ends of lines. Larkin’s sentence runs over the boundary where the line ends in the first three lines, then again in the fifth and eighth, pausing in between to create a complex rhythm. (Larkin, an enthusiast for New Orleans and swing-era jazz, has a hot feel for rhythm; all his poems swing, and swing hardest at the ends of lines.) We can analyse ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ as a celebration of marriage, albeit one that is tempered by Larkin’s own scepticism towards marriage, love, and relationships. It is partly the enigmatic and ambiguous nature of the images and tone of the poem which make the poem so richly complex, however we prefer to interpret its ‘message’. But Cupid’s arrow, that symbol of love, is already morphing into rain, with all its connotations of the everyday drab world we inhabit most of the time. Or should this rain be understood in the context of the other life-giving images of abundance and fertility we see towards the close of the poem, such as Larkin’s reference to the postal districts of London being like ‘squares of wheat’? (Are those arrows, and that falling rain, even a veiled allusion to what will happen on the wedding night?)

Here again, Larkin attempts to individualize them, however, the use of plurals –‘fathers’, ‘mothers’– suggests sameness. The speaker seems to be describing them from an omniscient standpoint, however the attempt to describe them in broad terms, and the use of the plural form, is reductive in its capacity. Andrew Crozier wrote, about this poem, “the people are generalized through grotesque detail which is away on the verge of registering distaste.” Given Larkin’s own views on marriage – he himself never married, and was sceptical of the institution to say the least – it’s tempting to see the rain in terms of loss and tragedy, as if Larkin is already aware of the truth that those wedding guests, and the couples themselves, are striving to keep at bay, namely that the rest of their married life will not live up to the promise of this day. Take along a notebook the next time you’re a passenger in a car or on public transportation. Pay close, sustained attention to what you see outside your window. As you turn those notes into a poem, think about ways to create a sense of movement within language itself. (For example, although Larkin’s poem includes time markers like “At first” and “All afternoon,” movement is also conveyed through enjambment, rhyme, and sound patterning.) The Whitsun Weddings is a collection of 32 poems by Philip Larkin. It was first published by Faber in the United Kingdom on 28 February 1964. It was a commercial success, by the standards of poetry publication, with the first 4,000 copies being sold within two months. A United States edition appeared some seven months later. For Larkin, the poet depended on his readers, and when a poet is abandoned, it is not entirely the readers’ fault. Modernism gets the blame for making poetry too obscure for the average reader, thus lessening the poet’s range. Larkin attempts to reach what he calls the ‘cut-price crowd’ in his poems, i.e. those who might not have an interest in poetry as such but lean towards materiality. His reader is the reader who has ‘no room for books’ and who prefers the ‘jabbering set’. He asserted that ‘the public for poetry is larger than we think, and waiting to be found if we look in the right places’.Larkin saw himself as an artist and therefore believed that the audience he was trying to reach could not understand him, even with his best attempts at communicating with them. As the train makes its way closer to London, the landscape grows more urban in atmosphere and a dozen more marriages will take place before the speaker arrives. As the train begins to move well past being only a quarter full, the speaker ponders how none of the grooms and their brides ever stop to contemplate how they will share something with each of the other newly wedding couples for as long as their marriage lasts. The wedding ceremony itself is over, and these newlyweds’ lives will soon reassert their ordinariness, and this special day will be over (‘the wedding-days / Were coming to an end’). And then we have that final image of the whole poem, which sees Larkin likening the brakes of the train as it pulls into its London terminus to an ‘arrow-shower’ that is already ‘somewhere becoming rain’. Throughout the poem, Larking presents a complexly cynical view of marriage which is typical of many of his works. This cynicism could be related to the context of the time in which the poem was written and published. Like with all Larkin poems, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is melancholy and bitter, with a vague sense that nothing will ever be right.

There is something alive about the records, as if through capturing the memories and experiences of the woman and her husband, they have been instilled with the life they represent

The Whitsun Weddings - Key takeaways

Continue to explore Larkin’s work with our discussion of his poem about the English countryside, and our compendium of Larkin facts; alternatively, discover more classic wedding poems here. If you’d like to read more of Larkin’s work, we recommend The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin . Dave Waite - Thanks for reminding me of this again. I'm not sure if this counts as a national favourite (Kipling's 'If' won a vote a couple of years ago). Larkin does not feature in the English syllabus at school; he has always been a slightly controversial figure. He was chosen by The Times as Britain's greatest post-war poet, but hints of racism, porn and sexism have affected his reputation. In the seventh stanza (lines 51–60), the speaker describes this part of the journey as being a pause for relief after so many marriages happened that day. As the other passengers looked out at the urban landscape, they didn't think about how they and the other passengers were both connected yet separate. Although they may never meet again, they had all experienced the same thing during this short stretch of the journey. The speaker thought about the sprawl of London as a field of wheat. As each line unfolds, Larkin also controls the release of information: one line adds to the image of another without becoming overloaded by too much detail. The technique is classical: clarity, concision, and balance of image, action, and statement. But the style is all his own. The image of the grinning and pomaded girls “in parodies of fashion” is classic Larkin, demonstrating his flair for making vivid and distinct even those shared characteristics that turn individual figures into “types.” One finds it again in the fourth stanza, in “mothers loud and fat,”“an uncle shouting smut,” and in the perms, gloves, and fake jewelry to which people seem grotesquely reduced: As if out on the end of an event

The title poem describes a train journey taken by the speaker on Whit Saturday, during which he observes a series of weddings taking place in various towns along the way. Larkin was a bachelor who worked as a university librarian in Hull. He never attended paraliterary/cultural activities (such as poetry readings, lectures, and talks) and ignored and disliked foreign literature. He never went abroad, though he loved jazz and frequently reviewed it in the 60s. He preferred his own company, but he was popular with people because of his insistence on communicating with his readers – and writing in layman’s terms. His poems are ambiguous, but never obscure, and the world we find in Larkin is the world we live in, after all, and hint at happiness that is far beyond our scope. Larkin manages the easy naturalness of his voice so flawlessly that one hardly notices the poem’s rhyming stanza structure (ABABCDECDE), a kind of shortened sonnet (the quatrain is Shakespearean, the sestet Petrarchan). Keats invented this stanza for his summer odes, and Larkin’s formal allusion evokes the summer season, its redolent promise and pastoral sweetness. Just as Keats never loses sense, in the summer odes, that abundance comes from the process of mutation, of organic breakdown, in Larkin there is never any sweetness without much sour. The fantasy of the pastoral landscape, its farms and hedges, gains grittier reality with the “floatings of industrial froth,” like the plumpness of Keats’ sensual imagery and musical phrasing in “To Autumn” turned rancid: the smell of grass competes with the stale smell of the cloth seats inside the train carriage. Such pungent realism goes a long way in setting the stage for the plausible yet fantastic coincidence of coming upon a sequence of wedding parties: At first, I didn't notice what a noise It contains many of Larkin's best known poems, such as " The Whitsun Weddings", " Days", " Mr Bleaney", " MCMXIV", and " An Arundel Tomb". Larkin's use of language is a spare, precise Style and his ability to convey complex emotions such as regret and melancholy with simple words and images is well-known.

Comments from the archive

In the fifth stanza (lines 31–40), the colours of these clothes and accessories marked the girls in the wedding parties from the others. The speaker noticed that the weddings were coming to an end, and newlyweds were entering the train. As the train begins to move, the speaker watched the facial expressions of children and fathers on the platform. The poem comprises eight stanzas of ten lines, making it one of his longest poems. The rhyming scheme is a,b,a,b,c,d,e,c,d,e (a rhyme scheme similar to that used in various of Keats' odes). The event will be followed the next day by the unveiling of a commemorative Larkin plaque at King's Cross station by Baroness Virginia Bottomley, the High Sheriff of Hull. Fig. 2 - The speaker describes a train journey they took from Hull to London. 'The Whitsun Weddings' themes In all his poems, therefore, there is this attempt to reach out to people. It is usually in the final stanza, such as in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, that this attempt to reach out dwindles down to nothing: to a hopeless, melancholy, fleeting presence of emotion.