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Whitsun Wedding (PF)
Whitsun Wedding (PF)
BY J O S H UA W E I N E R
Although Philip Larkin turned down the office of Britain’s poet laureate following the
death of John Betjeman in 1984 (it ended up going to Ted Hughes), Larkin had already
inherited Betjeman’s cultural place in Britain and was one of the country’s most popular
poets. Three of his poems, including “The Whitsun Weddings,” appear in The Nation’s
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 Britain’s 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, there’s as much emphasis on the word “seem” as “afresh.”) But Larkin was
more famous for his satiric stanzas. It’s a good bet that those who know anything of
poetry in Britain—as well as many who don’t—know by heart the opening stanza of
“This Be the Verse”:
Larkin’s 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
Larkin’s work as “tenderly observant”; that he could also be bracing and acerbic implies
his complexity. (Robert Pinsky’s description of the poems as “sour, majestic refusals”
captures it well.) In its harmony of change and loss played against the melody of the
poem’s wedding narrative, “The Whitsun Weddings” (1958) shows this contradiction to
great effect. The poem may be Larkin’s best.
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.
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:
I find “what’s happening in the shade” a little strange, I have to say. Larkin’s initial
confusion that the girls are actually men —that is, “porters larking with the mails”—
becomes 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, Larkin’s pun on his own name appears like a signature
hidden in a painted shrub. But I marvel at Larkin’s 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 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.)
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:
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):
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 poet’s 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.
It’s 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). It’s 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 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.
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.
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.
Originally Published: October 26th, 2007
Joshua Weiner was born in Boston and grew up in central New Jersey. He is the author of three books of poems, The
World’s Room (2001), From the Book of Giants (2006), and The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (2013). He
has also written a book of prose about the refugee crisis...
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