UG CBCS || Semester-V || DSE-T-2 || “The Whitsun Weddings” by Philip Larkin || D.G.

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“THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS” : MASTER NOTE:

Philip Larkin‟s “The Whitsun Weddings” is one of the most widely anthologized and best known
poems written in England since 1945. According to Stephen Regan, the genesis of “The Whitsun
Weddings” was a railway journey which Larkin made in July 1955. Draft of the poem was
prepared in the summer of 1957, but it was not completed until October 1958. The journey was
from Hull to London and clearly bears the autobiographical flavour.

Like the poem “Here”, this poem too offers a sweeping, panoramic view of the contemporary
landscape and uses the journey as a way of structuring its multiple and disparate perceptions. The
breadth and energy of the poem was derived partly from its search for coherence and unity, not
only among the changing landscape of post-war England but among the lives of those who dwell
there

Along with the journey, the subject of the poem also goes to the poet's observation which is of
the various wedding parties boarding the train at different stations on the way. We begin with the
remarkable recreation of the sensations of travelling by train on a summer's day: the heat, the
relief after the rush to catch the train, the snapshot details viewed through the carriage window or
the town gives way to the countryside. Larkin‟s description accurately captures the speaker‟s
mechanical registration of fleeting details: the backs of houses, the street of „blinding
windscreens‟, „the smell of fish docks‟, all flash by too quickly to engage anything more than a
vague interest, until we see the river‟s estuary when the poem‟s rhythm slows to catch the
sensation of amplitude and tranquility

“Where Sky and Lincolnshire and water meet”.

The second stanza continues the journey inland “through the tall heat that slept/ For miles…”
The poet‟s senses are engaged but not wholly absorbed in his observation. Because he is isolated
in the train from the world outside it and the world is presented to him in a fleeting sequence of
images framed by a window. Nevertheless, the poet presents us a familiar and recognisable
English landscape that varies from „wide farms‟ to “canals with floatings of industrial froth” and
the featureless appearance of new towns “approached with acres of dismantled cars”.

A growing alertness and responsiveness to the scene around the speaker is introduced in the
third stanza of the poem, where he is roused from his reading and the drowsiness of heat and
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sunshine by the noise and colour of a wedding-party on a shaded platform. He is struck for the
first time by something that seems to have significance. The girls “posed irresolutely” waving
their farewells to the married couple on the train, are signalling both a conclusion and a
beginning,

“ As if out on the end of an event

Waving goodbye to
Something that survived it.”
Now the poet's interest is caught; he is more curious and sees the next wedding party “in
different terms”, not vaguely and with a growing scepticism. His description of perspiring
fathers with “seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat/ An uncle shouting smut” indicates his
distaste for the jaunty vulgarity of the occasion. He observes the scene more closely but still
with a detached aloofness - the children's boredom, the father‟s swaggering self-importance, the
women's sharing “the secret like a happy funeral” and the young girls‟ uneasy somberness
staring “at a religious wounding”.

Here, Larkin treats a marriage through the eyes of a pessimist. The coinage of these two
oxymoronic phrases beautifully brings up the conflict of the poet's mind. Marriage is a happy
event; to the poet, it carries within it the seeds of the death of happiness which is bound to occur
in course of time. Similarly, the ceremony will turn to be a painful affair. Thus, Larkin takes a
cynical view of marriage the happiness of whose cannot last forever to him.

The poet is now aware of how these newlywed couples are sharing this journey and is struck by
the thought that for a brief moment each of these couples will be united in a common
experience. It is an experience which now partly includes the speaker; no longer a spectator, he
has become closer to a participant, and this is shown in his use of first person plural, “we hurried
towards London”. The landscape they watch is one he watches too, and although “none/
Thought of the others they would never meet”, the poet himself becomes their representative in
recognising and memorializing this moment for them.

The poet describes the train journey in terms of his unique perception of events and feels
satisfaction in apprehending the „frail travelling coincidence‟ which only he notices and no one
thinks of others - because every man's life is a journey from one old place to a new
destination. Thus one hardly bothers about other‟s feelings - they remain isolated in their own
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self. Through this striking truth the poet further made a balance between participation and
separation, between ideas and actions, between desire and fulfillment, between commoners and
aliens. This is an important omission because it keeps the focus of the poem entirely on the
moment of present vision. In this poem we find a recognition of weddings as moments of
painful loss and separation as well as celebration; separation from their home land - a past life
and the celebration of a new life ahead. Larkin also says that the occasion of the poem was
Whitsun or the day of Pentecost when the apostles were „all with one accord‟ and „in one
place‟. Larkin's poem adheres to this ideal of unity and coherence while endowing it with a
secular rather than Christian significance.

It is noteworthy that “The Whitsun Weddings” is a poem of social and cultural attitudes, and not
just a poem of direct and realistic description. The speaker in the poem defines his role in
contemporary society in terms of “reading”, and his position as an „intellectual‟ largely
determines his presentation of events. The poem highlights differences in taste and value, as we
see in the speaker's comic but rather grim response to “girls in parodies of fashion”. The fourth
stanza offers a characteristically middle-class perspective of common life. The details of dress
and behaviour in the stanza immediately show that its perspective belongs to someone of a
different class and culture, someone who is unimpressed by what he perceives as the gaudy
second-rate products of the time: the gloves are nylon, not silk; and the jewellery is a cheap
imitation of the real thing. The poem accordingly leaves itself open to a charge of snobbery and
class-consciousness. The interest of “The Whitsun Weddings” lies thus not only just in what is
seen but in how it is seen.

a poem that began with the poet's sense of isolation, then amused detachment shifting to
distaste and now a closer involvement, ends with moving compassion. As the train rushes into
London and this “frail travelling coincidence” is „nearly done‟, the poet is suddenly aware of the
future‟s potential contained in this moment “ready to be loosed with all the power/ that being
changed can give”. These dozen couples have undergone a ritual which marks a change in their
lives, a new beginning. As the train slows, the sensation of falling suggests to Larkin an image
of launching, as if this shared journey is the impetus which will project these new lives into their
separate futures:

“... We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
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A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.”

Larkin said that the arrows fired by the English bowman in Lawrence Olivier‟s film Henry V
gave him the idea for the last two lines. Dipped in the blood of patriotic fervour, the arrows in
Larkin's verse here serve Cupid's purpose, not the purpose of Mars (the god of war). But, while
Larkin admires the train load of newly married couples, he knows that he cannot join
them. Alone in his carriage, sealed behind his window, he is conscious of loss but appreciative
of his singleness. As he prepares to watch the couples disappear, he reminds himself that the
arrow-shower of love wounds as well as inspires a man.

Again, an „arrow-shower‟ suggests a fight of arrows which falls out of Sight somewhere in the
future, as rain. This metaphor of arrows extends the image of life being projected from the
present into the future. It is an image of procreation, and growth is made clear by the „shower -
rain‟ metaphor of fertility. This is the power that “being changed can give” - the progress
towards happiness and fulfillment is undertaken even if its achievement is “out of sight”,
unforeseeable and uncertain. The „arrow‟ is something that snatches life where „shower‟
gives. This oxymoronic conflict clearly depicts Larkin‟s tension of mind and leaves a certain
optimistic flavour within the ocean of pessimism.

The couples are „free at last‟. This journey is for them a moment of transition between past and
future; the „end of an event‟ has given way to the „something that survived it‟. Their journey is
incomplete, for although the train may stop in London, their lives all containing this hour take off
from there. This sense of incompleteness is caught even in the description of what they see: the
cricketer „running up to bowl‟, an incomplete action. Moreover, when the poet thinks of London
lying ahead of them “spread out in the Sun,/ Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat”, the
image again suggests fertility, abundance, sustenance.

But the poem is not so sentimental as to suggest that these couples will find
contentment. Rather, the journey itself is used as a metaphor for time and change. The marriage
ceremonies are symbolic expressions of change, a change which has the power to create a future
for itself, just as the train's journey is a succession of different images from one moment to the
next. The action of the train slowing towards a stop is a metaphor expressing how the future is
unpredictably launched from the present.