{"id":1381,"date":"2009-05-31T10:30:43","date_gmt":"2009-05-31T10:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1381"},"modified":"2009-06-03T10:46:54","modified_gmt":"2009-06-03T10:46:54","slug":"philip-larkin-the-whitsun-weddings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/05\/31\/philip-larkin-the-whitsun-weddings\/","title":{"rendered":"PHILIP LARKIN, THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is Whitsun<\/a> so what better way to celebrate than Philip Larkin’s beautiful poem, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’.<\/p>\n

In the poem Philip Larkin<\/a> describes his stopping-train journey through East Yorkshire from Paragon Station, Kingston upon Hull to Kings Cross, London on a hot and humid Whitsun Saturday afternoon in 1955. Larkin through his simple, yet elegant style divulges the details of a commonplace journey into a wonderful poem.<\/p>\n

The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin, 1958<\/strong><\/p>\n

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:\r\n  Not till about\r\nOne-twenty on the sunlit Saturday\r\nDid my three-quarters-empty train pull out,\r\nAll windows down, all cushions hot, all sense\r\nOf being in a hurry gone. We ran\r\nBehind the backs of houses, crossed a street\r\nOf blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence\r\nThe river's level drifting breadth began,\r\nWhere sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.\r\n\r\nAll afternoon, through the tall heat that slept\r\n  For miles inland,\r\nA slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.\r\nWide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and\r\nCanals with floatings of industrial froth;\r\nA hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped\r\nAnd rose: and now and then a smell of grass\r\nDisplaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth\r\nUntil the next town, new and nondescript,\r\nApproached with acres of dismantled cars.\r\n\r\nAt first, I didn't notice what a noise\r\n  The weddings made\r\nEach station that we stopped at: sun destroys\r\nThe interest of what's happening in the shade,\r\nAnd down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls\r\nI took for porters larking with the mails,\r\nAnd went on reading. Once we started, though,\r\nWe passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls\r\nIn parodies of fashion, heels and veils,\r\nAll posed irresolutely, watching us go,\r\n\r\nAs if out on the end of an event\r\n  Waving goodbye\r\nTo something that survived it. Struck, I leant\r\nMore promptly out next time, more curiously,\r\nAnd saw it all again in different terms:\r\nThe fathers with broad belts under their suits\r\nAnd seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;\r\nAn uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,\r\nThe nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,\r\nThe lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that\r\n\r\nMarked off the girls unreally from the rest.\r\n  Yes, from caf\u00c3\u00a9s\r\nAnd banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed\r\nCoach-party annexes, the wedding-days\r\nWere coming to an end. All down the line\r\nFresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;\r\nThe last confetti and advice were thrown,\r\nAnd, as we moved, each face seemed to define\r\nJust what it saw departing: children frowned\r\nAt something dull; fathers had never known\r\n\r\nSuccess so huge and wholly farcical;\r\n The women shared\r\nThe secret like a happy funeral;\r\nWhile girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared\r\nAt a religious wounding. Free at last,\r\nAnd loaded with the sum of all they saw,\r\nWe hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.\r\nNow fields were building-plots, and poplars cast\r\nLong shadows over major roads, and for\r\nSome fifty minutes, that in time would seem\r\n\r\nJust long enough to settle hats and say\r\n  I nearly died<\/em>,\r\nA dozen marriages got under way.\r\nThey watched the landscape, sitting side by side\r\n- An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, And\r\nsomeone running up to bowl - and none\r\nThought of the others they would never meet\r\nOr how their lives would all contain this hour.\r\nI thought of London spread out in the sun,\r\nIts postal districts packed like squares of wheat:\r\n\r\nThere we were aimed. And as we raced across\r\n  Bright knots of rail\r\nPast standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss\r\nCame close, and it was nearly done, this frail\r\nTravelling coincidence; and what it held\r\nstood ready to be loosed with all the power\r\nThat being changed can give. We slowed again,\r\nAnd as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled\r\nA sense of falling, like an arrow-shower\r\nSent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.<\/pre>\n
\u00c2\u00a9 from The Collected Poems<\/a> (Faber, 1993), by permission of the publisher, Faber & Faber Ltd<\/a>.<\/p>\n
You can hear an audio clip of him reading the poem here<\/a>.<\/p>\n
In 1981, more than a quarter of a century after writing ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, Larkin recalls the genius of his poem-<\/p>\n
“I caught a very slow train that stopped at every station and I hadn’t realised that, of course, this was the train that all the wedding couples would get on and go to London for their honeymoon: it was an eye-opener to me. Every part was different but the same somehow. They all looked different but they were all doing the same things and sort of feeling the same things. I suppose the train stopped at about four, five, six stations between Hull and London and there was a sense of gathering emotional momentum. Every time you stopped fresh emotion climbed aboard. And finally between Peterborough and London when you hurtle on, you felt the whole thing was being aimed like a bullet – at the heart of things, you know. All this fresh, open life. Incredible experience. I’ve never forgotten it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today is Whitsun so what better way to celebrate than Philip Larkin’s beautiful poem, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. In the poem Philip Larkin describes his stopping-train journey through East Yorkshire from Paragon Station, Kingston upon Hull to Kings Cross, London on a hot and humid Whitsun Saturday afternoon in 1955. Larkin through his simple, yet elegant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1381"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1381"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1385,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1381\/revisions\/1385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}