The Whitsun Weddings

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The poem 'The Whitsun Weddings' was published in a collection of the same title in 1964. The collection and especially its title poem received public and critical acclaim after its publication. One year after Larkin published his collection, he was awarded the prestigious Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. It was also named 'one of the best poems of our time' by the Times Literary Supplement. 1 As Foucault wrote, Larkin’s writing “functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection” where he turns the individual into something he can describe and analyze, whilst trying to maintain individuality. In Larkin’s poems, however, whole sections of people blend together. 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. The notion of the Romantic countryside, according to Larkin, has been sullied by the presence of modernization: the canals ‘with floating of industrial froth’ with towns ‘new and nondescript, / approached with acres of dismantled cars’. Ironically, although Larkin abhorred the Romantic ideal of nature and the countryside, Robert Rehder believed that Larkin had more in common with the Romantics than he wanted there to be. His focus on the individual consciousness – as seen in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’– and on isolation is a very Romantic notion.

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 poem is only made up of three sentences in total with the first two being much longer and spanning multiple stanzas. The last, however, only goes over four lines. This is perhaps a reflection of the powerful build-up filled with positive, loving imagery being halted by a short, disappointing realisation present within the poem. The train, now “aimed” at its London destination, becomes an arrow; and whose arrow could it be, on a day of so many weddings, but Cupid’s? Cupid’s arrow, which changes indifference to desire, carries a valence greater than even the god can know: for what begins as indifference and turns to love also turns to new forms of neglect, of difficulty, of disappointment (“And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled / A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.”). Keats’ apprehension of the swelling autumn fruits turns, in Larkin’s poem, to an experience of vertigo. Yet the power of this final image lies not in the Romantic allusion, but in how Larkin uses a cliché, a shower of arrows. 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. 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?)It contains many of Larkin's best known poems, such as " The Whitsun Weddings", " Days", " Mr Bleaney", " MCMXIV", and " An Arundel Tomb". English countryside was considered – both in poetry and beyond – to be some of the most beautiful that the world has seen. England poetry, in particular nature poetry, had been built on this idea of the English countryside. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in The Herefordshire Landscape:

On this particular Whitsun Sunday there was a rail strike so it cannot have been based on an actual journey, and instead is an amalgamation of multiple journeys that Larkin took. Whitsun is a traditional time for weddings. Fig. 1 - Philip Larkin is the author of 'The Whitsun Weddings', which was published in 1964. The Whitsun Weddings poems The Whitsun Weddings Collection: Summary and Analysis In classical mythology, Cupid never fires a shower of arrows; he takes aim and shoots one at a time. In this poem, the arrows of Eros become the arrows of Mars—the arrows of war, shot by a body of archers. (Larkin claims he discovered the idea in Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V.) Larkin takes the dead image of the arrow-shower and revivifies it by turning it into an image of real rain. While the poem implies the inevitable disappointment of love, the arrows of rain is a visionary image of expansion and release; and it’s an irony to say so, because the transformation takes place “out of sight.” Somewhere, the poem says, an arrow-shower is becoming rain; if love is turning somewhere to disappointment, the arrows of war are changing somewhere into a source of life. Where the fact of the rain is mundane, even all too routine, the transformation is startling, even magical. 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’.Whitsun, or Whit Sunday, is the seventh Sunday after Easter (Pentecost), deep into spring, when people often marry. This may explain why Larkin saw so many wedding parties during an actual train ride in 1955, which gave him the germ of the poem. That Whitsun, I was late getting away: This image is troubling, and resists any easy or glib analysis. The poem begins with reference to ‘sunlit Saturday’; it ends, right on its last word, with ‘rain’. ‘Sun’ is present, by chance, in the poem’s very title, ‘The Whit sun Weddings’.

The first thing that strikes him is the loudness that these weddings produce. The second thing he notices is how the brides and their maids try to copy the latest fashions, but succeed only in becoming parodies of style. His next thought is how all the mothers of the brides share the common physical trait of being overweight; how yellow, purple and green are the hot colors of the moment; and how every single wedding party seems to include a dirty-minded uncle somewhere. Cafes, banquet halls and yards all serve well for stringing the bunting and hosting the party. And then, amid a hail of confetti and last minute advice, the bride and groom were waved goodbye on the train platform. 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.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 third stanza (lines 11–20), the speaker describes how they slowly began to notice the weddings at each station. Blinded by the bright sunlight, the speaker had mistaken loud noises for the luggage porters playing around. However, they soon became aware of the brides on the platform, posing in cheap imitations of fashion as they watched the train pass them by. 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