THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS

Philip Arthur Larkin (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985) was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, articles gathered in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 (1985), and he edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973).^[1] His many honours include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.^[2] He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of Sir John Betjeman.

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ABOUT THE POEM

Whitsun Day is the one day of the year in which the marriage tax is declared null by the British government, thus affording 24 hours of relief to those couples unable to get hitched due to dire economic circumstances. It is on that day that the speaker of "The Whitsun Weddings" has been forced to take a later train than the usual one he rides. It is almost 1:30 on an unpleasantly hot Saturday afternoon when the quarter-full train pulls from the station. As the train takes off, a panorama of the backside of homes, a fishing dock and a river are can be seen through the open windows.

As the afternoon wears on and the train speeds through the countryside, these sites are replaced by stretches of farmland, industrial canals and another town that looks like the last one. What the speaker doesn’t take much notice of as the train is moving are the weddings that are taking place as a result of the holiday. The bright afternoon sun throws its light on certain scenes, while others remain hidden in the shade. Only when the movement comes to a stop at each station is the speaker given enough time to pay attention to the weddings.

The first thing that strikes him is the loudness that these weddings produce. The second thing he notices is how the brides and their maids try to copy the latest fashions, but succeed only in becoming parodies of style. His next thought is how all the mothers of the brides share the common physical trait of being overweight; how yellow, purple and green are the hot colours of the moment; and how every single wedding party seems to include a dirty-minded uncle somewhere. Cafes, banquet halls and yards all serve well for stringing the bunting and hosting the party. And then, amid a hail of confetti and last-minute advice, the bride and groom were waved goodbye on the train platform.

As the train makes its way closer to London, the landscape grows more urban in atmosphere and a dozen more marriages will take place before the speaker arrives. As the train begins to move well past being only a quarter full, the speaker ponders how none of the grooms and their brides ever stop to contemplate how they will share something with each of the other newly wedding couples for as long as their marriage lasts.

The light, but unavoidably apparent sense of scorn toward the bridal parties that the speaker has expressed in his thoughts undergoes an ironic shift as the train pulls into the station. London’s industrial dark suddenly takes on a sense of magic as he realizes that the collection of so many newly married couples has given a meaning to the coincidence that has brought them all together in the same. Amid imagery of arrows, showers and rain, the full significance of the massive potential for all the fertility to come together and change the world overwhelms his previous cynical attitude.

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.

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

Until the next town, new and nondescript,

Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

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,

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 jewellery-substitutes,

The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.

Yes, from cafés

And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed

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.

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side

—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,

And someone running up to bowl—and 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:

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

Travelling 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.

Summary

The poem begins on a mostly-empty train on Whitsun, more commonly known in the United States as Pentecost, a Christian festival that marks the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples, which in turn represents the beginning of the early Christian church. (Similarly, weddings, which appear soon, signify the beginning of a couple’s life together.) At the beginning of the poem, there is harmony between the natural and industrial world as the river, sky, and Lincolnshire itself “meet”. This harmony shifts as the poem progresses.

The image of heat sleeping that begins the second stanza emphasizes the slow, lazy pace of the train and the day. The poem’s rhyme scheme, ABABCDECDE, was pioneered by the poet John Keats, and the pastoral natural imagery of this stanza also appears frequently in Keats’s work. Yet the depiction of peaceful nature is interrupted by industry—the “nondescript” towns and “dismantled cars”, and gloomy, outmoded relics—just as the quiet train ride is soon interrupted by the lively wedding-goers.

The speaker presents quite a cynical view of the married couples in the third stanza. Though they are “grinning”, suggesting happiness, they’ve pomaded their hair, which indicates artifice, and the young women’s wedding dresses are “parodies of fashion” laughable and falling short of dignity rather than being beautiful. Furthermore, the couples are “pos[ing]”, again underscoring the artifice of the scene. In this stanza, Larkin begins extending the final line of the stanza into the beginning of the next stanza, adding to the easy, natural cadence of the poem.

Though the speaker separates the people into “fathers”, “mothers”, and other figures in the fourth stanza, he simultaneously homogenizes them, categorizing people from various families together. This technique emphasizes the sameness of the people he describes. Though they are meant to be the center of attention on their wedding day, the married couples are instead interchangeable, blending in with one another. The portrait the speaker creates of the families he observes is not flattering—the poorly dressed fathers, “fat” mothers, vulgar uncles, and artificially costumed brides are all lacking in dignity.

The omnipresence of married couples and their families in the fifth stanza adds to the speaker’s sense of isolation. The families are coming from all over the country (“cafes,” “banquet-halls,” “coach-party annexes”), making it seem that everyone else is involved in festivity the speaker is not a part of. They join with the speaker on the train as he refers to “we” rather than to them in the third person separately from himself.

In the sixth stanza, the speaker further underscores the ridiculousness of the scene before him. On a day when they are expected to be proud of their children, the fathers of the newlyweds are instead astonished by the “farcical” nature of the ceremony, and the speaker compares the wedding to a “happy funeral”. Weddings are an ending in a way, just as funerals are—since the couple is expected to spend the rest of their lives together, the ceremony marks the end of new romantic relationships. (Larkin himself never married, perhaps indicating cynicism towards the institution.) Furthermore, the once idyllic depictions of nature become more negative as fields transform into “building-plots” and the speaker notes the shadows—a classic dark image in poetry—of the poplars.

The landscape continues to become increasingly industrial in the seventh stanza as the train passes a movie theater (“an Odeon”) and a cooling tower. The speaker likens London to a field of wheat, however, blending a modern, urban scene with the poem’s earlier natural imagery. The speaker returns to separating himself from the others, using “they” rather than “we” as he describes his fellow passengers looking outside. Notably, the countryside is described with more depth and nuance than any of the speaker’s fellow passengers, underlining their homogeneity.

In the final stanza, the train stops meandering and takes a more definitive route, “aim[ing]” towards London and “rac[ing]”, in contrast to the beginning of the poem, when “all sense /Of being in a hurry” was “gone”. The industrialization of the landscape continues, and the little nature that remains, the moss, is “blackened” and dying. In the final lines of the poem, the speaker alludes to Cupid’s “arrow-shower”. Yet this symbol of passion, the arrows show by the Greek god of love, which turns indifference into infatuation, in Larkin's poem become mournful, turning to “rain”, and the poem ends on an ambiguous note.

STANZA WISE ANALYSIS

Stanza 1

In the first stanza, the speaker situates the poem on Whitsun, or Whit Sunday, the seventh Sunday after Easter and then a popular time for weddings in Britain. He describes a leisurely hot day on a lonely, “three-quarters-empty” train and begins to detail the sights the train passes by, such as a dock and a river. The “breadth” of the wide landscape with no people mentioned mirrors the mostly-empty train, and both create a sense of isolation for the lone traveller. Though the speaker mentions being “late” in the first line, concerns of time seem irrelevant on the train, where “all sense/Of being in a hurry [is] gone”.

Larkinian poems focus on microcosm worlds, full of the daily hustle and bustle of people getting about their business. In the opening, the narrator’s life is measured in numbers: one-twenty, for time, three-quarters-empty for the train; he creates, in the space of a few lines, this world that, at once, seems both important and hurried, as well as empty and slightly sad.

Larkin also had a tendency to write on trains for quite a few of his poems, as he found that this gave him the opportunity to observe life without participating in it. Larkin has always been, first and foremost, an observer and a note-taker of life; a librarian of the moments, but not really taking part in it.

Stanza 2

The second stanza continues the description of the peaceful landscape introduced in the first stanza. The train travels slowly on the hot day, passing farms, canals, and other natural sights. Again, no people appear, heightening the sense of isolation. The train passes through several towns, but they are “nondescript”, boring and monotonous.

English countryside was considered – both in poetry, and beyond – to be some of the most beautiful that the world has seen. England poetry, in particular nature poetry, had been built on this idea of the English countryside.

The notion of the Romantic countryside, according to Larkin, has been sullied by the presence of modernization: the canals “with floating of industrial froth”, with towns “new and nondescript, / approached with acres of dismantled cars”. Ironically, although Larkin abhorred the Romantic ideal of the nature and the countryside, Robert Rehder believed that Larkin had more in common with the Romantics than he wanted there to be. His focus on the individual consciousness – as it seen in The Whitsun Weddings – and on isolation is a very Romantic notion.

Note also the misery in those lines, the despair of a defaced countryside. At the time, England’s landscape was gently changing from mostly-rural to mostly-urban: a huge influx of people had moved out of London during World War II, afraid of being bombed, but after the war, they moved back in droves. The increasing joblessness made further droves of people move after them, thus leaving England in a patchwork state of being, one that Larkin echoes in his poem. There is something miserable and scrabbled about the English countryside that Larkin is writing about.

Stanza 3

At the beginning of the third stanza, the speaker mentions that he initially didn’t notice the ubiquitous weddings that appear at each station. Distracted by the heat, he pays little attention to the cool shade where the couples stand. The couples are “pomaded” for the special occasion, meaning that pomade, a scented ointment, has been applied to their scalps, and the women all wear similar dresses that the speaker criticizes, calling them “parodies of fashion”. In contrast to what one might expect of a deeply in love couple preparing to start their lives together, these couples are “irresolute”, or uncertain.

Larkin believed that he needed to be aloof in order to write poetry, which was chiefly concerned with man – however, Larkin had a general distaste for the people he saw, labelling, for example, people as “sullen flesh inarticulate” and “ageing and bitter”. He is too aloof from the audience he wants to communicate with. Note the way that he refers to the girls “in parodies of fashion, heels and veils / all posed irresolutely”, making them into waxwork people, making them frozen in place, and more like mannequins than human beings.

Stanza 4

The speaker continues to describe the wedded couples, who catch his curiosity, in the fourth stanza. Yet he views the scene critically and depicts the people involved in a grotesque manner, mocking the appearances of the fathers and mothers, the inappropriate speech of an uncle, and the myriad of accessories the brides wear, such as “nylon gloves” and costume jewellery.

Here again, Larkin attempts to individualize them, however the use of plurals – “fathers”, “mothers” – suggests sameness. The speaker seems to be describing them from an omniscient standpoint, however the attempt to describe them in broad terms, and the use of the plural form, is reductive in its capacity. Andrew Crozier wrote, about this poem, “the people are generalized through grotesque detail which is away on the verge of registering distaste”

Larkin once famously wrote that he wanted to write poetry that “offered something nothing else could, something more than reading, watching television or going out with some girl … compulsive contact between reader and writer” However, this very distance that he laboured under leads the people he writes about to become parodies. By leaning on stereotype, he reduces them to nothing more than cardboard place settings.

Stanza 5

In the fifth stanza, the speaker clarifies that these couples are returning from their weddings as the day is “coming to an end” and people return from various wedding venues, from cafes to banquet halls. He emphasizes the sheer number of newlyweds present—at every stop, new couples board the train. The speaker also notes that despite the festivity of the celebrations, the children present seem bored, just as he is.

Larkin’s description of the wedding and the chaos surrounding the event is as minimizing as his description of people. By painting the wedding party with a broad brush, he makes the event itself seem ordinary. Although there is chaos and movement in this stanza, Larkin’s writing makes it seem as though it is playing in stop-motion, moving so slowly and so painfully that it has no hope of changing. Despite the fact that Larkin is writing about life, his poems have a distinct lack of living creatures in it.

Furthermore, the wedding is placed as something ordinary. Colin Falck, a Larkinian critic, called this the “ever-deepening acceptance of the ordinariness of things as they are”, and it is the most apt description for the way that Larkin writes. His poetry takes things and makes them ordinary and commonplace, and it is partially due to the fact that Larkin strove to write simple poetry. By writing his simple poetry, he makes everything as ordinary as possible.

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