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"The Whitsun Weddings": Larkin's Reinterpretation of Time and Form in Keats

Author(s): John Reibetanz
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 529-540
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207623
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"THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS": LARKIN'S
REINTERPRETATIONOF TIME AND FORM IN KEATS

John Reibetanz

Philip Larkin's most irreverent revision of John Keats rejects the

famous dichotomy of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." "I have always
believed," Larkin writes, "that beauty is beauty, truth truth, that is
not all ye know on earth nor all ye need to know."' He briskly
separates the realms that Keats held in ambiguous balance and
denies any paramount significance to his new formulation. Such
large-scale devaluation of romantic currency might be expected
from Larkin, who has always made more modest claims for art. His
position might with matching irreverence be summarized by revis-
ing one of his own less earnest equations: books aren't a load of
truth. Yet Larkin's achievement as a poet demonstrates a more
profound reappraisal of romantic values than is evident in any of
his wryly dogmatic critical pronouncements. In particular, "The
Whitsun Weddings" may be viewed as a searching revaluation of
Keats's art in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
Larkin himself discourages such comparative treatment of his
work. He has stated that one of the pleasures of writing poetry is
the release it bestows "from reading poems by other people," and
that "experience makes literature look insignificant beside life."2
Indeed, in his Marvell Press recording of The Whitsun Weddingshe
even goes so far as to apologize for the fact that he derived the
basic situation of "Faith Healing" from a movie rather than from
personal experience; but in partial excuse for this terrible lapse, he
1Let the Poet Choose, ed. James Gibson (London: Harrap, 1973), p. 102.
2"Context: Philip Larkin," London Magazine, NS 1, No. 11, Feb. 1962, p.
31.

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE I XVII, 4

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reassures us that the movie was documentary rather than fictional.
Life would seem to have wholly displaced art as a source for this
poet's inspiration.
Yet his persistent choice of traditional poetic forms creates an
undeniable link between his work and that of previous poets, even
as his comments disclaim any connection. It is not enough to say
that he writes in traditional form because "his mind [is] on the
truth alone," and "by virtue of its familiarity, traditional form,
skilfully used, is all but transparent."3 There are surely easier ways
of attaining transparency: one does not don jointed armor and
stiffened pleat if one's aim is to acquire a suntan. Especially in so
highly accomplished a poet as Larkin, traditional form actively
contributes to the poem's experience, enlarging its range of mean-
ing instead of acting merely as a "transparent" means of expres-
sion. Thus, when Philip Larkin chooses to write "The Whitsun
Weddings" in the stanzaic form that Keats evolved for his great
odes, his decision allows a wider frame of reference to enrich and
interact with the experiences that his poem conveys-whether or
not that frame of reference is uppermost in his reflections about
the process of composition.
This characteristic resonance of traditional form gives warrant
for an interpretation of "The Whitsun Weddings" that takes ac-
count of its distinctive formal context. I take further warrant from
a critical principle that is more appreciative than formalist, one
voiced most memorably by Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual
Talent": "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning
alone. His significance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his
relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone;

3Calvin Bedient, Eight Contemporary Poets (London: Oxford Univ. Press,

1974), p. 79. In the first full-length study of Larkin's work, David Timms
distinguishes Larkin's imaginative use of traditional form from the flat neat-
ness that typified a great deal of Movement verse, and he shows in several
detailed readings how skillfully Larkin realizes the resources of traditional
form: see Philip Larkin (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1973), esp. pp. 17-19,
73-75, 79-86, 100-01. Reviewing High Windows, Richard Murphy also writes
sensitively on the role of traditional meters and stanzas in Larkin's most
recent poetry: see "The Art of Debunkery," New York Review of Books, 15
May 1975, pp. 30-33. Bedient, Timms, and Murphy all respond to this aspect
of Larkin's art with greater understanding than M. L. Rosenthal, who charac-
teristically finds "Here" "hag-ridden" by a regular pattern of rhymes-The
New Poets (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 242. Would that even
more poems were ridden by such resourceful hags.

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you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead."
The approach may represent what Larkin derisively calls "poetry as
syllabus," but I believe that it allows us to achieve a fuller
valuation of at least one of his poems.
Keats's odes represent an utter contrast to the spirit of
Larkin's poetry. Although their moods and their methods of ex-
pression are varied, the odes written in April and May of 1819
share a common goal: the attainment of timelessness through art, a
romantic theme that they carry to its highest pitch. The odes on
melancholy and indolence lament the quest's nearly insuperable
difficulties, those on Psyche and the nightingale trace the poet's
attempts-joyous and painful-to surmount them, and the "Ode on
a Grecian Urn" celebrates at its core an elusive image of "happy,
happy" success. For Philip Larkin, however, "our element is time."
Instead of inhabiting some untrodden region of the poet's mind
and encouraging him to "leave the world unseen," poetry has the
task of recording and reflecting on the imperfect, transitory experi-
ences of the mundane reality that the poet shares with his readers.
Like his acknowledged master, Hardy, Larkin roots his poems
deeply in the world of time, and documents its effects on us. For
Keats's images of pastoral detachment and transcendent ecstasy, he
substitutes material sights and sounds: sixty-watt bulbs, jabbering
(TV) sets, tin advertisements, cheap suits, and man caught for good
or ill in the middle, laden with his "depreciating luggage." Given
this extreme difference in emphasis, it is remarkable that Larkin
should have chosen to adopt Keats's form for one of his poems;
but what is more remarkable is the extent to which he has both
subtly answered the form's romantic challenges and made it assume,
with great vitality and appropriateness, a shape that expresses his own
values.4 A detailed comparison of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and
"The Whitsun Weddings"reveals the complexity of Larkin'srevision.5

4Those values and their place in Larkin's poetic achievement are discussed
at length in Timms, pp. 97-104; in Philip Gardner's "The Wintry Drum: The
Poetry of Philip Larkin," Dalhousie Review, 48, No. 1 (Spring 1968), 88-99;
and in James Naremore's "Philip Larkin's 'Lost World,' " Contemporary Liter-
ature, 15, No. 3 (Summer 1974), 331-44. Naremore writes succinctly that,
"Taken as a whole, Philip Larkin's poetry has the effect of a sustained attack
upon the philosophical idealism of romantic literature" (p. 331).
5References to the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" are from John Keats:
Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1959), pp. 207-08. My text for "The Whitsun Weddings" is Larkin's The
Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), pp. 21-23.

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 The ode has traditionally been an atemporal form, tending to
remove its subjects from specific contexts of time and place, and
to celebrate them in structures whose organization is spatial or
musical rather than temporal. The organization of Keats's stanzas
reinforces this characteristic. Each one is autonomous, focusing in
turn on a different aspect of the urn. The highly invocatory
openings of all but the second stanza create a sense of beginning
afresh each time, rather than of falling into a sequence; and the
varied rhyme patterns of Keats's sestets (those of stanzas 1 and 5
match, as do those of 3 and 4; 2 is unique) suggest spatial
arrangement rather than consecutive progression. Such stanzas
accord perfectly with Keats's desire to present an ideal of beauty
beyond the reach of time, and they condition us to accept it
through their own playing of a kind of timeless "music," "For
ever piping songs for ever new."
The Keatsian stanzas of "The Whitsun Weddings" underline
that poem's thematic concerns in an equally masterful way, but
Larkin's structure is as different from Keats's as his themes are. A
succession of similarly rhymed stanzas (all ababcdecde) leads the
reader on an unbroken movement through time that mirrors the
narrator's progress on the train. The unfolding of this narrative
action links the stanzas into a tight sequence, and this effect is
furthered by Larkin's characteristic habit of running his stanzas
into each other. The outlook suggested by such a structure, and
the various poetic means by which Larkin defines it more closely,
will be explored below; but its nature is evident. As both narrator
and newly married couples are picked up and carried along on a
fixed, timetabled journey-over whose speed and direction they can
exercise no control-so the reader is drawn by these stanzas into a
steady temporal progression. We become predisposed towards view-
ing time as "our element," rather than as a frame that can be
transcended.
The presence of a foreshortened line in each stanza would
break this pattern if Larkin used it as Keats did in the "Ode to
Psyche" and "Ode to a Nightingale." But where Keats introduced
shorter lines towards the ends of his stanzas, which quicken
through this overturning of our expectations, Larkin shortens the
second line of every stanza. This burst of energy, offering the
possibility of other directions, loses itself in the seven pentameter
lines that follow; its life is absorbed into the regular flow of each
stanza, soft sift in an hourglass. "A slow and stopping curve
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southwards we kept": Larkin's stanzas direct us to the unrelenting
flow of time as surely as Keats's proclaim the remoteness of art
from its course.
The same contrast is perhaps more immediately noticeable in
the ways in which the two poems present and develop their central
symbols-Keats's urn and Larkin's train. From the beginning, Keats
fixes and keeps our attention on just those aspects of the urn that
free it from the limitations of a specific context. Its figures could
be men or gods; its scenes those of Tempe or Arcady. Wherever
the place is-and it could be by river or seashore, or in the
mountains-its music pipes "Not to the sensual ear," and its trees
never shed their leaves. Keats approaches the urn's supramundane
essence through a mode of description that, appropriately, abounds
in unanswerable questions (seven in the first stanza) and paradoxes;
and the word "ever" sounds a constant leitmotif to remind us that
the urn or, by implication, art itself, does not essentially belong to
our world of time.
"The Whitsun Weddings" roots us at once in time ("That
Whitsun") and manifests a concern with time ("I was late getting
away"). Larkin sets the train in a context of precise calculation
("One-twenty," "three-quarters-empty") appropriate to this central
symbol which is both poetically and literally a vehicle in motion
rather than a fixed mark. In opposition to the mysterious other-
worldliness of Keats's first stanza, Larkin's involves our senses in a
situation: "we" feel the hotness of the cushions, are blinded by the
glare of windscreens, and smell the fish-dock. Soon a noise of
"whoops and skirls" appeals to yet another sense, in contrast to
the silence of the urn's unheard melodies. The train proceeds on its
journey, advancing by means more solid than Keats's questions and
paradoxes: it picks up a cargo of sympathetically observed human
details-uncles shouting smut, children frowning, girls gripping their
handbags tighter. These details represent what John Wain has called
a "connoisseurship of the particular,"6 and they show how much
this poet has learned from the novelist he once was.
Larkin realizes, however, that we must pay a price for such
full involvement in the world of time: the urn exists in a perpetual
morning, but the train moves gradually from "short-shadowed
cattle," past the "Long shadows" of poplars later in the afternoon,

6"Engagement or Withdrawal? Some Notes on the Work of Philip

Larkin," Critical Quarterly, 6, No. 2 (Summer 1964), 175.

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until finally walls of blackened moss "Came close, and it was
nearly done." The wedding days are coming to an end, and the
train's progress realizes the full emotional ambiguity of a word-
prominent in the titles of two earlier Larkin poems-that captures
this mingling of happy beginnings and poignant endings: depar-
tures. This poem's leitmotif consists not of "ever," but of words
and phrases that recall us to the ticking of the clock: "late,"
"hurry," "At first," "next time," "at last," "in time," "long
enough," "this hour."
Keats instead suggests, through a series of references to the
supernatural, that the urn's proper sphere is more divine than
mortal. The ode's first stanza blurs the distinction between deities
and mortals, men and gods, enough to elevate its figures above the
mundane. The next stanza's distinction between sensual and spiri-
tual music intensifies this transcendent focus, while the third stanza
places the urn "far above" all breathing human passion. This
developing association with a divine realm culminates in the ritual-
ism of the fourth stanza where, on a pious morn, the mysterious
priest leads a heifer to sacrifice at a "green altar." The constant
renewal and transcendent permanence of religion suggest and sym-
bolize that of art.
Nothing like this overtly religious setting appears in Larkin's
poem, even though its title refers to both a holy day and a
sacrament. Faithful to his own vision and the values of his age,
Larkin places us "out on the end of an event": his brides and
grooms emerge from cafes and banquet halls rather than from
churches. The altar is a distant irrelevancy, implied only in the
imaginary "religious wounding" seen by young girls. "The Whitsun
Weddings" would seem to testify not only that art serves life, but
that life serves a time unquickened by transcendent impulses; and
the contrast between this view and that of the ode is so great that
Larkin's poem would seem to share only a rhyme scheme with
Keats's. Near the end of the poem, however, we witness an experi-
ence that transforms this impression.
In the last stanza of "The Whitsun Weddings," Larkin creates
his version of the vital moment of fulfillment at the center of the
ode, where Keats conveyed an ecstatic vision of ideal beauty:

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Springadieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,

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 For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm, and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young....

Larkin's denouement is as much descriptive as visionary, yet it

does not lack intensity. Instead of being animated by the thought
of permanence, it gathers strength from "the power / That being
changed can give." As the train journey comes to an end, the
poem fills with words that generate an image of consummation:
"loosed," "tightened," "took hold," "swelled," "sense of falling,"
"arrow-shower." But to pick out these words and list them is to
distort the poem's effect while trying to explain it: in its context,
the sexual symbolism moves us profoundly without calling atten-
tion to itself; it works as inconspicuously as Larkin's syntax in the
last sentence, which carries us effortlessly from literal brakes to
metaphorical rain:

We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewherebecoming rain.

The train's entrance to the tunnel and arrival at its destination

carries, ever so gently, overtones of the most personal and life-
giving of human "arrivals." This beautiful fulfillment resolves a
slight element of suspense created by the poised images of the
previous stanza's landscape, where "An Odeon went past, a cooling
tower, / And someone running up to bowl." More important, it
releases the "power" of the marriages that the train has steadily
taken on during the course of the afternoon and informs that
power with shape and purpose.7
7Larkin's own awareness of the final stanza's special relationship to the
rest of "The WhitsunWeddings"emerges from advice he gave about reading
the poem aloud, as recalled by Anthony Thwaite: "I rememberLarkinwriting
to tell me, when I was about to produce the first broadcast reading ... of
'The WhitsunWeddings,'that what I should aim to get from the actor was a
level, even a plodding, descriptive note, until the mysterious last lines, when
the poem should suddenly 'lift off the ground'"-"The Poetry of Philip
Larkin,"in The Survivalof Poetry, ed. MartinDodsworth (London: Faber and
Faber, 1970), p. 48. Of course, these instructions only corroboratean impres-
sion which the poem creates without any directorialcoaxing.

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 The connotations of this fulfillment are not only sexual. As
one responds to the swelling sense of falling that envelops the
"dozen" couples "sitting side by side," one recalls with a sharp
tender shock that these are Whitsun weddings; and the recollection
confirms one's feeling that another kind of consummation is also
being imaged here. Like Larkin's travellers, the apostles "were all
with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound
from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the
house where they were sitting" (Acts 2:1-2). The "power" that
Larkin depicts in the final stanza is a profoundly spiritual one, like
the "power" bestowed on the apostles at Pentecost, after Christ
had been taken "out of their sight" (Acts 1:8-9). That the poem
should turn towards a religious experience after portraying the
wedding parties in overwhelmingly secular terms, may be explained
in part by Larkin's own conclusion in "Church Going":

someone will foreverbe surprising

A hungerin himself to be more serious,
And gravitatingwith it to this ground....8

Even if the couples are as unreflective as Larkin describes them

("none / Thought of the others they would never meet / Or how
their lives would all contain this hour"), they can still be touched
by the powerful overtones of the changes in which they have
participated. Like gravity, these overtones draw in the passengers
and the poem and direct them with an elemental force: "There we
were aimed."
A further explanation of the poem's final turn involves a
recognition of the difference between Keats's moment of spiritual
fulfillment and Larkin's. Although both poets draw their meta-
phorical vocabulary from the language of religious ritual, only
Keats conceives an absolute separation between the visionary and
mundane experiences. Indeed, the ode's central stanza reveals this
division in its structure: the first seven lines celebrate the ideal
vision in a chant that repeatedly juxtaposes the words "happy"
and "ever," while the last three lines descend to the world of
"breathing human passion," where the heart is "high-sorrowful and
cloy'd." Larkin's vision is not one which fades, however, when we
step back into the world of time. Rather, it is a product of that

8"Church Going," The Less Deceived (Hull: Marvell Press, 1955), p. 29.

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world, and the structure of "The Whitsun Weddings" underlines its
nature by letting us experience it at the end of the poem-as a
destination, not a flight.
Probably no other aspect of "The Whitsun Weddings" reflects
more clearly the extent to which Larkin has revised the romantic
outlook of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." When Keats set stanzas 3
and 4 apart from the rest, even giving them a different rhyme
scheme, he emphasized the remoteness of the visionary moment
from the world around it. Larkin's final stanza moves through the
same rhyme scheme as all those before it; by making the stanzaic
pattern that of the poem's liberating vision he expresses a belief
that the moment of fulfillment comes about through time rather
than in spite of it. Even though the short second line of each
stanza has subsumed its freedom and energy into a steady temporal
progression, it turns out that the latter movement brings "all the
power" of the incomparably greater sense of release which con-
cludes the poem and informs its passengers. Time has transfigured
them.
This vision of sublimity also differs from Keats's in that it
qualifies its affirmation. "First Sight," another Whitsun Weddings
poem in which Larkin revises the outlook of a romantic poet,
points us to the direction of this qualification. In its rhythm and
imagery ("Lambs that learn to walk in snow / When their bleating
clouds the air"), the poem obviously recalls Blake; and accord-
ingly, when these lambs stray outside the fold, they find an
inhospitable, "wretched width of cold." The second and final
stanza, however, complicates this picture:

As they wait beside the ewe,

Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hiddenround them, waitingtoo,
Earth'simmeasurablesurprise.
They could not graspit if they knew,
Whatso soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.9

Instead of tracing a journey from bright innocence to clouded

experience, Larkin depicts the coming of spring as something
which actually wakes and grows out of a "wretched" world, as

9"First Sight," The Whitsun Weddings, p. 36.

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naturally as the lambs themselves. At "first sight," the process
seems to parallel the happy fruition of time in "The Whitsun
Weddings." But the poem also hints of darker developments: there
is something unsettling about this lurking "immeasurable surprise,"
as it "lies / Hidden," "waiting"; and its gradual emergence from
vagueness to a definition by negatives ("could not grasp," "Utterly
unlike") does not provide reassurance. Green is utterly unlike the
snow, but so is black. If, as the poem invites us to do, we follow
Blake's usage and view the lambs as figures for man, we realize
that perhaps our first sight (that spring is coming) is as limited
as theirs. To recognize these dark undertones, however, is not to
relinquish the prospect of spring that has been offered to us.
Rather, the poem holds both views in balance and makes it
impossible to conceive of either one apart from its necessary
qualification by the other. The ultimately ambiguous nature of
Larkin's "immeasurable surprise" demands a full response to the
complexity of the poem's interpretation of life.
The ending of "The Whitsun Weddings" encourages a similar
response. "Rain" may carry life-giving associations, but it can also
be an image of desolation, especially as it replaces "the sun" of the
previous stanza. The penultimate line's arrows have positive associa-
tions (as in Psalm 127), but an arrow-shower is after all a means of
destruction. Walls of blackened moss close ominously around the
train, and "falling" is an uncomfortable sensation that recalls
biblical events less auspicious than the descent of the dove. Indeed,
the whole experience depicted here, of arrival at a terminus, points
to the most irrevocable of "departures." All of these associations
both qualify and accompany the poem's vision of fulfillment. The
last stanza unfolds as a moving elaboration of an oxymoron
formed earlier: "happy funeral." The poem brings us to an aware-
ness of time as simultaneously both a destructive and a creative
force. The ecstasy of Keats's "happy, happy boughs" is achievable,
but such happiness is inseparable from the recognition that the
boughs do shed their leaves.
The magnitude of Larkin's revision of Keats may perhaps be
best appreciated by comparing it with one more widely celebrated.
In the last stanza of "Sunday Morning," Wallace Stevens echoes
the ending of Keats's ode "To Autumn." He parallels Keats's
twilight scene of whistling redbreast, gathering swallows, and lambs
bleating from the hills, with one of whistling quail, flocks of
pigeons, and deer walking upon mountains. Yet, as Donald Davie
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has observed, attention to details "counts for nothing, unless
moulded and if necessary subdued by a current of strong feeling
through them." 0o The great strength of Stevens' revision derives
from its use of a similar landscape to capture and convey a mood
of mixed ripeness and decay that masterfully approximates the
mood of Keats's poem, even as Stevens varies the tone to empha-
size not so much the poignancy as the voluptuousness of the scene.
Larkin sets himself a still more formidable task. While Stevens
chose to echo a poem that expressed ideas rather close to his own,
Larkin turns to one at variance with his outlook. "To Autumn"
replaces the more typical romantic urge towards transcendence
with an acceptance of mutability that strikingly anticipates
Stevens' more modern view; but the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
embodies in every respect the romantic viewpoint repudiated by
both Stevens and Larkin. "The Whitsun Weddings" is a revision in
the fullest sense of the word, a critical second look at the validity
of an earlier approach.
One might ask what Larkin gains from formally associating his
poem with Keats's ode. Besides acting as a contrasting ground
against which Larkin can define his own position, the ode offers an
ideal of ecstatic fulfillment for him to aim at-and to approach
from a different direction. By leaving "All breathing human pas-
sion" behind, the ode's central stanza arrived at one of the most
perfect romantic expressions of visionary joy; but "The Whitsun
Weddings" shows how an acceptance of the world abandoned by
Keats can bring a profound spiritual fulfillment that stands the test
of comparison with Keats's. In Larkin's poem, joy is found in the
consummation of love rather than in an infinite postponement
always "near the goal" but never reaching it. In keeping with its
leitmotif of temporal allusions mentioned above, "The Whitsun
Weddings" rejects both the ever ("For ever wilt thou love") and
the never ("never canst thou kiss") of Keats's poem; instead it
accepts without reservation the "changes" that time brings to its
fresh couples. These couples are living, breathing mortals ("I nearly
died"), not marble men and maidens.
A conception of poetry emerges from this perspective as
surely as from Keats's. For Larkin, art cannot be a "still unravish'd
bride." It must live in the same world as the changing lovers he

10Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1972), p. 24.

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depicts, just as his narrator rides the same train as they do.
Because he adheres so persistently to this view, Larkin has often
been accused of selling poetry short. 1 But to an age which feels
that more than "Birmingham magic" has been discredited, he
offers a poetry that responds deeply to the only world many of us
recognize. 12 His art incorporates far more of that world than did
Keats's exclusively "sylvan" historian; yet the movement and de-
tails of "The Whitsun Weddings" revitalize Keats's form-what
other modern poet has used it so successfully?-as they criticize its
purpose. Larkin has shone new light on a traditional form, and in
doing so, has illuminated and probed some of the most moving
experiences of contemporary life. Far from selling poetry short,
such an approach redefines and, for many readers, widens the
boundaries of the art.

Victoria College
University of Toronto

llColin Falck, for instance, deplores what he feels is Larkin's "basically

descriptive approach," and he finds Larkin's poems lacking "any overall
texture of metaphor"-"Philip Larkin," in The Modern Poet, ed. Ian Hamilton
(New York: Horizon Press, 1969), pp. 107, 106. Yet, surely only a dogmati-
cally Symbolist poetics would insist that an overall texture of metaphor is
incompatible with detailed description; and as my reading of "The Whitsun
Weddings" has tried to show, Larkin's poetry is notable for the skill with
which it achieves just such a fusion.
12 The phrase "Birmingham magic" comes from Larkin's "Dry-Point"
("How leaden the ring looks, / Birmingham magic all discredited") and refers
to the cheaply gilded wedding rings once made in that city.

540 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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