We know from, later in the poem, that the narrator’s destination is London. But given that Whitsun Weddings was first published in 1964, it is perhaps useful to look at a different government report, The Beaching Report, on the future of the railways — first published in 1963, under the title Reshaping British Railways: “sun destroys….The interest of what’s happening in the shade” is surely an apt description for these wedding parties, given that they, like the 30 Foot Trailer of Ewan McColl’s song- first broadcast in April 1964, as part of the radio ballad The Traveling People — were soon to be a thing of the past. In the “river’s level drifting breadth,” Larkin creates an image of continuity between sky and city and water that the train itself mimics; it is the central image of the poem, the form of an unfolding movement that connects distinct locations and points of time. Such pungent realism goes a long way in setting the stage for the plausible yet fantastic coincidence of coming upon a sequence of wedding parties: I find “what’s happening in the shade” a little strange, I have to say. It is surely no accident that Larkin includes the lines, “Until the next town, new and nondescript,…Approached with acres of dismantled cars.” This could be a reference to motor cars. Similarly, weddings have never been more free from cultural norms and official control – so why do these supposedly unique and deeply personal events usually replay the same assumed traditions? 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. In this poem, the arrows of Eros become the arrows of Mars—the arrows of war, shot by a body of archers. The technique is classical: clarity, concision, and balance of image, action, and statement. While the poem implies the inevitable disappointment of love, the arrows of rain is a visionary image of expansion and release; and it’s an irony to say so, because the transformation takes place “out of sight.” Somewhere, the poem says, an arrow-shower is becoming rain; if love is turning somewhere to disappointment, the arrows of war are changing somewhere into a source of life. In the poem they appear to be on a steam train, “shuffling gouts of steam” and the ambiguous line, “An uncle shouting smut”. I also found myself wondering if this expression of ‘class solidarity’ was not rather an expression of pretense. To what degree one can read the “larking” as the Larkin only a Freudian would dare imply, yet to anyone listening to the sounds the poem makes, Larkin’s pun on his own name appears like a signature hidden in a painted shrub. These specific traditions and continuities also form a part of a larger web of meaning in this poem. (Larkin claims he discovered the idea in Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V.) Larkin takes the dead image of the arrow-shower and revivifies it by turning it into an image of real rain. More promptly out next time,” “I thought of London” — and we — “We ran…Behind the backs of houses”, “A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept”, “Each station that we stopped at”, ” Once we started, though,…. That Larkin acknowledges the past, without praising the present, is perhaps his original sin. Particularly when Larkin so often breaks George Carlin’s rules of the seven things that cannot be said on television. Just as Keats never loses sense, in the summer odes, that abundance comes from the process of mutation, of organic breakdown, in Larkin there is never any sweetness without much sour. But the style is all his own. It was wonderful, a marvellous afternoon.’”. Or to meet Maeve Brennan in Brighton to secure the required evidence to obtain a divorce from Monica Jones. That being changed can give…. By Nasrullah Mambrol on July 15, 2020 • ( 1). Whatever the case, when one sees these people as more than pawns in a game of literary exclusion they become more real and Larkin’s observation of them more sharp. A metaphor that perhaps can be expanded by the assertion of the transport minister of the time Ernest Marples, that railways were, “a relic of the Victorian past”. One of my favorities is his longest, yet unfinished poem, "The Dance.". Although Philip Larkin turned down the office of Britain’s poet laureate following the death of John Betjeman in 1984 (it ended up going to Ted Hughes), Larkin had already inherited Betjeman’s cultural place in Britain and was one of the country’s most popular poets. Betjeman describes Larkin’s work as “tenderly observant”; that he could also be bracing and acerbic implies his complexity. This may seem far fetched, until one considers the last verse of the poem. Here is a recording of the Larkin reading the poem in 1964… The poem takes the form of eight verses, of ten lines each. Especially in an age when precisely these type of women are regularly held up to ridicule on various lifestyle television programs, in health campaigns and newspaper stories about the benefits of dieting. (Robert Pinsky’s description of the poems as “sour, majestic refusals” captures it well.) And that in order to gain a divorce one of the partners had to be the ‘guilty party’, which led to the popular notion of ‘the dirty weekend in Brighton.’ In order to get to Brighton from Hull, where the journey begins — “smelt the fish-dock; thence…. Whitsun is the seventh Sunday of Easter (a bank holiday) and a time during which it is traditional to get married so as to take advantage of the early summer bank holiday. This may explain why Larkin saw so many wedding parties during an actual train ride in 1955, which gave him the germ of the poem. Keats’ apprehension of the swelling autumn fruits turns, in Larkin’s poem, to an experience of vertigo. He is the single consciousness of the poem; just as sky and Lincolnshire and water meet along the visual line of the river, so all the Whitsun weddings meet along the train-line and the line of consciousness that belongs to the poet, a paradoxical still point moving through time and space. Or perhaps Larkin is picking up on the themes explored in his poem, The Large Cool Store. But let us for a moment consider the opening line, “That Whitsun, I was late getting away” and ask the question why? This poem invites the reader to learn along with the speaker about the depth and value of what may appear to be trivial and even outmoded ways of doing things. He may just as well have visited football stadiums after the match and would perhaps have written a similar poem. This fine poem makes one sense that humanism, albeit in a lower key, is still in order. The question he asks in this, and so much of his work, is ‘if this changes what replaces it?’, and ‘what will happen to these people?’. With both keen to be discreet and avoid further fueling office gossip at the university library where they both work, perhaps?. And there is something curious about the use of I and we in the poem. Unfortunately, we will never know if Larkin was hoping for a lesbian or gay relationship with Monica. In classical mythology, Cupid never fires a shower of arrows; he takes aim and shoots one at a time. This interpretation, also offers a different perspective on “Struck, I leant… More promptly out next time,”. If Rudyard Kipling’s (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) is the poetry of empire, then Philip Larkin’s is the poetry of the aftermath of empire. An entire land and culture—“sky and Lincolnshire and water”—is the setting of the poem, and the title, by placing the poem in the cycle of the year without specifying a particular year, gives the poem a sense of timelessness. “I was late getting away” “I didn’t notice what a noise”, “I took for porters”, “I leant…. (Larkin, an enthusiast for New Orleans and swing-era jazz, has a hot feel for rhythm; all his poems swing, and swing hardest at the ends of lines.) The stated purpose of the Philoctetes Centre is, or rather was, the study of imagination. Ironically, the speaker of the poem is changed along with the newlyweds as he gradually modifies his initial satirical condescension and recognizes the importance of tradition. Bright knots of rail…. Here is a recording of the Larkin reading the poem in 1964… The poem takes the form of eight verses, of ten lines each. smelling of factories.”. and what it held…. (The rhyme of “train” and “rain” charges the correspondence at a subconscious acoustic level.) Where previously the syntax of the poem stopped or paused at the end of each stanza, here it runs over the stanza boundary quite violently, in the middle of a phrase, in order to complete the syntax in the first line of the next one (the fifth). As each line unfolds, Larkin also controls the release of information: one line adds to the image of another without becoming overloaded by too much detail.
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