The Whitsun Weddings

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In all his poems, therefore, there is this attempt to reach out to people. It is usually in the final stanza, such as in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, that this attempt to reach out dwindles down to nothing: to a hopeless, melancholy, fleeting presence of emotion.

In the third stanza (lines 11–20), the speaker describes how they slowly began to notice the weddings at each station. Blinded by the bright sunlight, the speaker had mistaken loud noises for the luggage porters playing around. However, they soon became aware of the brides on the platform, posing in cheap imitations of fashion as they watched the train pass them by.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.

The poem comprises eight stanzas of ten lines, making it one of his longest poems. The rhyming scheme is a,b,a,b,c,d,e,c,d,e (a rhyme scheme similar to that used in various of Keats' odes).In the fifth stanza (lines 31–40), the colours of these clothes and accessories marked the girls in the wedding parties from the others. The speaker noticed that the weddings were coming to an end, and newlyweds were entering the train. As the train begins to move, the speaker watched the facial expressions of children and fathers on the platform. Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings was the title of one of his books of poetry, published in 1964. It is one of his longest poems, at eight stanzas of ten lines each, and it describes a train journey from Kingston upon Hull through the countryside. As the train churns through the heatwave that the narrator describes, he gradually expands his view to take in the people that are around him, including a wedding party that sees couples boarding the train. The Narrator thinks, for a little bit, about the people and their response to the wedding, cynically breaking them down into their appearances. As the train moves southward, he turns instead to the newlywed and considers the hugeness of what they have done, and how ultimately, it is only a big deal to the couple getting married. This will be one of those events that will forever stay in the minds of those that join us on board," said Andrew Pearson of the Hull theatre production company Ensemble 52, which is putting on the performance in conjunction with the Philip Larkin Society and Larkin 25, a group dedicated to commemorating the poet's life and works. "It will be a very special journey and a chance to celebrate the anniversary of a truly great collection and a poet whose life and work is intertwined with Hull, the UK City of Culture 2017," Pearson said. "This will be a unique event – a rare opportunity to experience theatre on board a train. We're delighted that Bill Nighy has got involved as this will be the only opportunity to hear Bill reading these poems. They will not be commercially available at a later date."

In the fourth stanza (lines 21–30), the brides waving the train goodbye arrested the speaker's attention. The next time the speaker saw the brides, they paid more attention to the wedding parties and noticed rough-looking fathers, overweight mothers, rude uncles, and superficial accessories.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. Larkin’s speaker spends the first half of the poem observing what’s outside his window; as the train begins to pull through stations, those landscapes become people-scapes, though the speaker claims he “didn’t notice” the weddings at first. What are the tensions at work between observation and distraction in the poem? Where does the speaker look, and what kinds of value does he assign the things he looks at? Can you imagine these scenes differently? Like with all Larkin poems, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is melancholy and bitter, with a vague sense that nothing will ever be right. Continue to explore Larkin’s work with our discussion of his poem about the English countryside, and our compendium of Larkin facts; alternatively, discover more classic wedding poems here. If you’d like to read more of Larkin’s work, we recommend The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin . This image is troubling, and resists any easy or glib analysis. The poem begins with reference to ‘sunlit Saturday’; it ends, right on its last word, with ‘rain’. ‘Sun’ is present, by chance, in the poem’s very title, ‘The Whit sun Weddings’.