The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin

First published: 1964

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings is his first collection of poems to fully embody his mature style. His early work, collected in The North Ship (1945, 1966), shows strongly the influence of Romanticism, especially that of William Butler Yeats and Dylan Thomas. In his second collection, The Less Deceived (1955), there is a move toward ironic, measured, occasionally bitter poetry. That shift in tone and in style reflects his involvement with the group of poets known as the Movement, whose practice generally adhered much more closely to Thomas Hardy than to Dylan Thomas. Indeed, much of the Movement’s program centered on a rejection of both the mytho-experimentalism of modernist poetry and the “sloppy excess” of late-phase Romanticism. Instead, these poets—Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, Donald Davie, John Wain, and Kingsley Amis—sought a more traditional versification and a more accessible message, and they exerted a tremendous influence over poetic practice in the 1950’s, 1960’s, and beyond. Their irony, skepticism, empiricism, and anti-modernism pushed British poetry in a radically different direction from the freewheeling American poetry of the same period. What the Movement poets shared was an experience of wartime and postwar privation and disappointment. Indeed, Larkin suggested that the severe limitations placed on wartime Oxford University, where he was an undergraduate, did much to shape both his worldview and his poetry.

That sense of limitation is at work from the first page of The Whitsun Weddings. In “Here,” the opening poem, the speaker describes his northern English city (presumably Hull, where Larkin was for many years head librarian at the University of Hull), in terms of its modern squalor and meanness. The image of contemporary wretchedness recurs throughout the book, notably in “Sunny Prestatyn” (the kind of oxymoron that delights Larkin), in which a travel poster of a bathing beauty is disfigured by obscene graffiti before finally being ripped down and replaced by a Cancer Society poster. In “Here,” he contrasts that urban blight first with isolated villages out in the countryside, where life is less demeaned, and finally with the “bluish neutral distance” of the ocean, where existence is “unfenced.” The openness contrasts with the hemmed-in quality of city life and the constant reminders of the lack of horizon, yet the openness is ultimately “out of reach.” The image anticipates the infinite nothingness of the title poem of High Windows (1974) in suggesting the impossibility of attaining freedom and limitless horizons in this life.

The horizon becomes even more delimited in “Mr. Bleaney,” where the speaker meditates on the previous occupant of his tiny boardinghouse room. The speaker knows many of the mundane details of Mr. Bleaney’s existence: where he summered, that he spent Christmas with his sister in Stoke-on-Trent, even his eating preferences. What he does not know and wonders about is whether Bleaney shared his own sense of loneliness and failure, whether having only this pathetically small room convinced him that it was all he deserved. The room is a kind of coffin, a place that reminds the speaker of his final end, and as such it becomes an instance of death encroaching on life. That sensation is reinforced in the next poem, “Nothing to be Said,” which notes that all human activities lead equally to death. It concludes that such information to some people “Means nothing; others it leaves/ nothing to be said.” Delineating a divide between people for whom an awareness of mortality is meaningless and those for whom it means everything is characteristic of Larkin, who sees himself as one whose eyes are wide open to harsh reality.

Characteristic, also, is the play on the word “nothing.” That such knowledge “means nothing” suggests that it lacks meaning but also that it hints at nothingness. For Larkin, nothing indicates not merely an absence but an entity in its own right. Larkin consistently embraces that paradoxical understanding, so that leaving “Nothing to be said” can be interpreted in the literal sense and also to mean that a knowledge of the void must be explored and articulated. Otherwise, there would be no point in writing poetry in the face of nullity.

Emptiness and disappointment are the hallmarks of the twentieth century for Larkin, who indicates the starting date in “MCMXIV.” The great shock to the English nervous system, he contends, was World War I, in which a summer idyll turned into four years of horror. The achievement of “MCMXIV,” however, is that the horrors are present without ever being mentioned; the reader is made to see that the Great War ripped out the country’s heart by focusing entirely on the idyllic illusion. As if looking at a photograph of the country, the speaker remarks on the long lines at recruiting offices, the men in their now-archaic attire, the outmoded currency, the country still trapped in the previous century, blissfully unaware of the modern warfare to come. Men waited patiently, Larkin recalls, to subdue what they were calling the Hun, and they expected to be home for Christmas, as if they were merely going off for a long weekend. In two mild images he captures the innocence and the lack of understanding that allowed them to leave so blithely. The first image is of the way the men left their gardens neat and orderly, as if they would shortly return to them. The very brevity of the statement points up the error of their thinking, and it recalls, if dimly, the lines in T. S. Eliot’s great postwar poem The Waste Land (1922) about the corpse planted in the garden. The second image is of “thousands of marriages/ Lasting a little while longer.” The couples in these marriages have no idea, of course, that their marriages will last only a little while more; in that naïveté, so soon to be exploded, and in the repeated phrase “Never such innocence,” he conjures up all the horrors for which those English men and women of 1914 were so manifestly ill-prepared.

The poem stands as a postlapsarian look at life before the Fall, in this case a very recent one. Stories of the Fall inevitably deal with being cast out, and the status of the outcast, the outsider, the person peripheral even to his or her own life, runs through the book. In “Afternoons,” Larkin looks at young women taking their children to the playground and sees that the demands of marriage and motherhood are “pushing them/ To the side of their own lives.” In “Ignorance,” he notes that it is “strange” to understand virtually nothing of how the world works, of how people live or why they die. “Ambulances” recognizes the isolating nature of that conveyance, a self-contained room making its way through parted traffic, toward the inevitable (and reminding the reader of the “emptiness” that underlies all human activity). In “The Importance of Elsewhere,” he argues that in Ireland his loneliness is reasonable, since the places and rituals are alien to him, while the same loneliness in England, where he is an outsider in his own place, is harder to understand. Throughout the volume, the sense of marginalized existence weighs oppressively on the speaker.

Occasionally, Larkin rises above the bleakness to achieve tenderness toward his fellow humans. The title poem recounts a train ride on Whitsun Saturday (the seventh weekend after Easter), on which he is accompanied by many honeymooning couples. His position remains marginal to their self-involved, unreflective scenes. When the speaker leaves the station, his train is only one quarter full. At first during the sleepy trip, he notices only the countryside, both in its pure and in its adulterated aspects that include farms, hedges, villages, junkyards, and canals filled with industrial waste. All the while, he creates the impression of passivity and displacement that the rail traveler experiences, of sitting in a stationary enclosure and watching through a frame while the world flashes past. The stance as marginalized voyeur leads him to his observation of the wedding parties, which at first do not even register on him but then become a repeating part of the landscape. Indeed, it is the repetition that he emphasizes. It is the generic quality of the experience rather than its uniqueness that catches his attention—the bridesmaids in their “parodies of fashion,” the ill-dressed fathers, the foul-mouthed uncles attempting to be clever, the cheap costume jewelry. By the time the train approaches London, newlyweds have filled the carriages and the speaker watches them as they settle into their own watching of the now-suburban landscape of movie houses, power plants, and cricket matches.

The poet himself is cut off from direct understanding of their moment, since he never married, and his speaker seems similarly isolated; he can envision the scene only from the outside. His alienation from the event of these new marriages shows in his glibly dismissive descriptions. At the same time, however, he recognizes something that eludes the young couples, wrapped up as they are in their private excitement: All their lives, his as well as theirs, will contain this shared experience. That wholly unintended sharing leads him to reflect on the communal necessity of marriage through the image of the cycle of fertility resuming. In an astonishing moment, he envisions the London postal zones resembling fields of wheat, and the sudden braking creating a falling sensation “like an arrow shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.” Although the results, as seen on the rail platforms, are not encouraging, these couples, bringing new life like rain on wheat fields, are the hope for the future, the promise of fertility.

He is brought to a similar consideration in “Dockery and Son” when he discovers that a schoolmate now has a son at university. He decides that “innate assumptions” lead Dockery to have a son, the speaker to have “nothing,” while all roads lead to the same end. His brooding on mortality leads him to the ironic notion that all efforts are ultimately futile but that people persist in them anyhow.

The negating quality of death is seen in the final poem, “An Arundel Tomb.” The earl and countess have long since ceased to be themselves, having become their effigies. Seasons have swept over them, and, with time, innumerable people have like a tide eroded their identity. The intended message of the tomb, in Latin, is lost on the modern observer, and what remains is the image of a couple joined by the carver’s art, nearly proving, the speaker says, what all hope to be true, “What will survive of us is love.” While he ironically undercuts that final statement, it nevertheless stands as the gem at the bottom of this Pandora’s box of a book: Through all the bleakness and irony, the hope remains that love might be able to provide meaning, to make life worth living, to save humankind.

Bibliography

Bradford, Richard. First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin. London: Peter Owen, 2005. Thoroughly researched, generally admiring biography that aims to redress the image of Larkin as a misogynist and a bigot as presented in Andrew Motion’s biography (below). Includes analysis of biographical elements in Larkin’s poetry.

Hassan, Salem K. Philip Larkin and His Contemporaries: An Air of Authenticity. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1988. A survey of Larkin’s poetry that focuses on the role of time and attempts to place the poet among his important contemporaries John Wain, Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn, and D. J. Enright. Contains a separate chapter on The Whitsun Weddings and helpful discussions of Larkin’s prosody.

Marsh, Nicholas. Philip Larkin: The Poems. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Critical analysis of Larkin’s poems, including a section discussing poems about “weddings and work.” Places the poems within a biographical, literary, and historical context and provides a selection of critical views about Larkin’s poetry.

Martin, Bruce K. Philip Larkin. Boston: Twayne, 1978. A significant early overview of Larkin’s poetry and fiction. Makes use of the then-limited biographical information and the social contexts of the poetry.

Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin. London: Methuen, 1982. Places Larkin initially within the tradition of Thomas Hardy and William Butler Yeats, then in that of his Movement contemporaries. Ably captures the poet’s wide range of subject matter and treatment and discusses his Symbolist tendencies. Anticipates, in many ways, the author’s subsequent biography of the poet.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. London: Faber & Faber, 1993. Generally derogatory portrait of Larkin, depicting him as a selfish man who was prejudiced against immigrants, students, unions, and socialists.

Osborne, John. Larkin, Ideology, and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Osborne maintains that both admirers and detractors have wrongly approached Larkin’s work from a biographical perspective. He seeks to “revolutionize” Larkin criticism by focusing on how the poet challenged conventional pieties about the church, Englishness, marriage, gender, and other subjects and helped create the transition to postmodern literature.

Petch, Simon. The Art of Philip Larkin. Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 1981. A helpful, brief introduction to Larkin’s verse, organized by volume. Emphasizes Larkin’s status as a humane poet who closely, if critically, examines important aspects of human experience.

Rossen, Janice. Philip Larkin: His Life’s Work. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. An accessible and intelligent discussion of Larkin’s poetry, organized thematically. Particularly useful on the subject of Larkin’s “Englishness” and the use of direct and even obscene language in his otherwise conservative and formal poetry.

Stojkovic, Tijana.“Unnoticed in the Casual Light of Day”: Philip Larkin and the Plain Style. New York: Routledge, 2006. A linguistic and historical study of the plain style in English poetry, including Larkin’s work, analyzing the rhetorical strategy and themes of The Whitsun Weddings and his other poems.