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Philip Larkin: The Whitsun Weddings

A Springtime train ride with brides and grooms.
BY JOSHUA WEINER
Although Philip Larkin turned down the office of Britains poet laureate
following the death of John Betjeman in 1984 (it ended up going to Ted
Hughes), Larkin had already inherited Betjemans cultural place in Britain
and was one of the countrys most popular poets. Three of his poems,
including The Whitsun Weddings, appear in The Nations Favourite
Poems (BBC, 1996), an anthology of the 100 most popular poems in the
UK; only T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats have more.

Larkin was Britains poet laureate of disappointment. His cynicism was
softened only by his skepticism, which only rarely admitted any expression
of new possibility, as in his late poem The Trees: Last year is dead, they
seem to say, / Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. (For Larkin, theres as much
emphasis on the word seem as afresh.) But Larkin was more famous for
his satiric stanzas. Its a good bet that those who know anything of poetry in
Britainas well as many who dontknow by heart the opening stanza of
This Be the Verse:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra just for you.

Larkins popularity seemed to grow from this disabused temperament,
which captures the feelings of those who think they do not like poetry, as
well as those who think they do. It was Larkin, after all, who ended his
poem A Study of Reading Habits with the lines Get stewed: / Books are a
load of crap.

Yet for all his meanness, there is also irreverent wit and a melancholy
mitigated by his resolve to look at life as it is. Readers came to trust him;
his poems have a sense of psychological scale, candor, and a thorough ease
with metrical forms that place Larkin firmly in a British poetic tradition. If
his vision is elegiac, one of gradual diminishment, it is also one of rich and
nuanced emotional response. Larkin is a great poet of middle age, whose
instinct for social satire amplifies his sense of poignancy. Betjeman
describes Larkins work as tenderly observant; that he could also be
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bracing and acerbic implies his complexity. (Robert Pinskys description of
the poems as sour, majestic refusals captures it well.) In its harmony of
change and loss played against the melody of the poems wedding narrative,
The Whitsun Weddings (1958) shows this contradiction to great effect.
The poem may be Larkins best.

Whitsun, or Whit Sunday, is the seventh Sunday after Easter (Pentecost),
deep into spring, when people often marry. During the 50s, it was also an
opportune weekend to wed because of financial advantages afforded by the
British tax code and, as a long weekend, a good one for holiday traveling.
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:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river's level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

The opening, so characteristic of Larkin, is conversational yet rhythmically
firm, announcing the anecdotal mode and quickly establishing the
sensation of the citys hurrying bustle dropping away with the trains
departure. In the rivers level drifting breadth, Larkin creates an image of
continuity between sky and city and water that the train itself mimics; it is
the central image of the poem, the form of an unfolding movement that
connects distinct locations and points of time.
All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
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Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

Larkin manages the easy naturalness of his voice so flawlessly that one
hardly notices the poems 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 Larkins
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
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what's happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go

I find whats happening in the shade a little strange, I have to say.
Larkins initial confusion that the girls are actually men that is, porters
larking with the mailsbecomes somewhat charged in the crossed wires of
homonym. To what degree one can read the larking as the Larkin only a
Freudian would dare imply, yet to anyone listening to the sounds the poem
makes, Larkins pun on his own name appears like a signature hidden in a
painted shrub. But I marvel at Larkins suave mastery with the modulations
of verse movement, the way the run and pause driving each line generates
rhythmic tension.

Verse movement is like the muscular contraction in the athletic body of the
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poem; one place to pay attention to it is at the ends of lines. Larkins
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.)

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
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewelry-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochers that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.

This fourth stanza introduces a new formal event to the poem. Where
previously the syntax of the poem stopped or paused at the end of each
stanza, here it runs over the stanza boundary quite violently, in the middle
of a phrase, in order to complete the syntax in the first line of the next one
(the fifth). No accident, the poem repeats the move twice, in the same
position, in subsequent stanzas; the effect establishes an expectation of
overrunning (the speaker is in a moving train, after all):
Yes, from cafes
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
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Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say
I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.

Larkins genius for abstracting from experience is heightened in this poem,
in which his talents so brilliantly serve the narrative of a simple discovery:
that each unique wedding party is in truth like all the other wedding parties
gathering that day, a perception only the poet realizes, because he is in the
privileged position of witnessing each one. He is the single consciousness of
the poem; just as sky and Lincolnshire and water meet along the visual line
of the river, so all the Whitsun weddings meet along the train-line and the
line of consciousness that belongs to the poet, a paradoxical still point
moving through time and space.

To even a casual reader of the social satire at which Larkin excels, the
frowning children, the proud fathers, the sentimental girls are all genuinely
funny, but their depiction also displays their humanity, common with the
poets own: Free at last, / And loaded with the sum of all they saw, / We
hurried towards London. What they have seen, the poet too has seen; and
as they become we in the collective hurrying, they join him, and so are
joined to him.
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The poem refuses any sentimentality suggested by such a formulation,
however, by insisting on each individuals separateness, not unlike the way
each passenger arrives at his or her own destination, alongside the others
on the train:

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowland none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

Its here that Larkin creates a kind of heightened platform for the drama of
his statement There we were aimed (the opening sentence of the final
stanza). Its a dramatic moment in the speech-act of the poem:
There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Traveling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

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 Cupids?
Cupids 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 Larkins 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 clich, a
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shower of arrows.

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 Marsthe arrows of war, shot by a body of archers. (Larkin
claims he discovered the idea in Laurence Oliviers 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 its 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.

In Larkin, the heroic gesture never stands; it is always re-scaled to the
domestic. Here the technology of war is re-naturalized, just as each human
life on the train (itself an arrow) leaves the bow only to dissolve midair into
falling rain. (The rhyme of train and rain charges the correspondence at
a subconscious acoustic level.) All things return to the conditions of nature;
if the process entails loss, it is paradoxically a redeeming loss, for the
process of losing has in it the wonder of mutation, which is a source of
poetry itself.