The Whitsun Weddings

by Philip Larkin

, 46 pages, with Poetry Book Society Bulletin No.40 February 1964 issue about this book inserted at front

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, Literature, School, 20th Century, British Literature

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL, was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent his working life as a university librarian and was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post. Larkin is commonly regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. He first came to prominence with the release of his third collection The Less Deceived in 1955. The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows followed in 1964 and 1974. In 2003 Larkin was chosen as "the nation's best-loved poet" in a survey by the Poetry Book Society, and in 2008 The Times named Larkin as the greatest post-war writer.

Larkin was born in city of Coventry, England, the only son and younger child of Sydney Larkin (1884–1948), city treasurer of Coventry, who came from Lichfield, and his wife, Eva Emily Day (1886–1977), of Epping. From 1930 to 1940 he was educated at King Henry VIII School in Coventry, and in October 1940, in the midst of the Second World War, went up to St John's College, Oxford, to read English language and literature. Having been rejected for military service because of his poor eyesight, Larkin was able, unlike many of his contemporaries, to follow the traditional full-length degree course, taking a first-class degree in 1943. Whilst at Oxford he met Kingsley Amis, who would become a lifelong friend and frequent correspondent. Shortly after graduating he was appointed municipal librarian at Wellington, Shropshire. In 1946, he became assistant librarian at University College, Leicester and in 1955 sub-librarian at Queen's University, Belfast. In March 1955, Larkin was appointed librarian at The University of Hull, a position he retained until his death.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read poetry, I avoid the “doorstoppers,” those formidable weighty volumes of “collected” poems, preferring instead slim volumes of verse which distill the quintessence of a poet’s development over a few years’ time. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that I should love Whitsun Weddings (1964): 46 pages, the product of nine years of inspiration and revision. The result? Almost three dozen poems, each perfect in its own way, a dozen of which will probably be remembered as long as English verse is read aloud.

All this is in spite of the fact that Philip Larkin is not a very attractive personality. Passionate about women, devoted to old England, and intoxicated by the sound of early jazz, he was nevertheless too private, too cranky, and too ungenerous to love others or appreciate a society and a culture in the process of transformation. (For example, in spite of his love for jazz, he loathed be-bop and the “corpse-walking” sound of Miles Davis, and hated it when black people started moving on to his mother’s street.) Yet he was merciless in his own self-assessment: his love poems, like “Broadcast”, are often romantic epiphanies experienced in isolation, and in his lonely portraits and ironic monologues, like “Mr. Bleaney,” and “Self’s the Man,” or in the occasional meditation like “Dockery and Son,” Larkin is able to look squarely at the disconsolate man he would one day become.

It is perhaps in the poems that depict England herself—menaced by selfish elites, reduced by vulgarity and cheap goods, yet alive even in the vanishing of her customs and traditions—that Larkin is most impressive. He is very good at presenting the vulgarity of advertising (“Sunny Prestatyn,” “Essential Beauties”) and the irreverence of elites (“Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses"), but even better in the reverent, elegaic evocation of English culture and ritual in “Whitsun Weddings,” “MCMXIV,” and “An Arundel Tomb.”

The title poem, “The Whitsun Weddings”—which Christopher Hitchens asked to be read to him aloud in the days before his death—is an excellent example of Larkin at his most magnificent and comprehensive best. This subtle, accumulative depiction of a London-bound train journey on Whitsunday—a day when many provincial English couples once married and headed for the metropolis for a “bank holiday” honeymoon—is an unsentimental, yet triumphant, celebration of English love and marriage. Not an easy achievement for a crabby old bachelor like Larkin.

I am equally moved, however, by many of the shorter, bleaker poems. They pack quite a punch. Here are a few of my favorites:

HOME IS SO SAD

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.


TALKING IN BED

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.


DAYS

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

[Praveen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Larkin himself said somewhere that deprivation for him was “what daffodils were for Wordsworth”. I don’t know about the deprivation, but he turned me into a new “moneyed class in verse.”

After reading Stephan Dunn, a few days back, I was just thinking that why I can’t get a poem book by a poet who is modern and who writes in rhymes, like those classic poets. Then I rummaged in my list, which is unorganized as far as poetry books are concerned, I am still learning to make them orderly. Today I made a folder, which looks businesslike. And I have given it an archaic name, “The Poesy Folder”. Anything related to poiein, poiema, poeme or poem , whatever is that, will go into this folder now.

This book I got, was the only Philip Larkin poetry book in my library. It’s small. I had added the complete collection of poems of Larkin years back, but could not read them anytime. I have no idea where that is. I am on a poetry spree nowadays. I am fully utilizing my free time. I am posting lots of reviews too. I am happy. I am not a critic, I am a reader. I blow my own trumpet in my own melody after reading books. Sometimes I rodomontade!

So I found Philip Larkin amazing. In this collection, I found 32 sublime poems. There is beauty and rhyme. I found everything: assonance, consonance, alliteration, euphony, or whatever you define in poetry. I may be incorrect in observation, but I am correct in sentiments.

“Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of safe and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes it is strange,”

You will find in his poems; Mr. Bleaney’s room, electric mixers, toasters, driers, Bombay to Berkley, balconies, flower baskets, quadrilles, and so many things in and around. He binds the ordinary things in such a beauteous manner that your soul gets filled. The aroma of his metrical and sensitive craft with a good sense of humor made me feel nice. Really nice! I will recommend this book to all who have not yet witnessed the beautiful poetic art of the poet. It’s short and very good in taste.

In the end, I will share one poem which is very interesting, a contrast between the life of a married and bachelor man. The title is “Self’s the man.”

Enjoy it!

“Oh, no one can deny
That Arnold is less selfish than I.
He married a woman to stop her getting away
Now she’s there all day,

And the money he gets for wasting his life on work
She takes as her perk
To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier
And the electric fire,

And when he finishes supper
Planning to have a read at the evening paper
It’s Put a screw in this wall –
He has no time at all,

With the nippers to wheel round the houses
And the hall to paint in his old trousers
And that letter to her mother
Saying Won’t you come for the summer.

To compare his life and mine
Makes me feel a swine:
Oh, no one can deny
That Arnold is less selfish than I.

But wait, not do fast:
Is there such a contrast?
He was out for his own ends
Not just pleasing his friends;

And if it was such a mistake,
He still did it for his own sake,
Playing his own game.
So he and I are the same,
Only I’m a better hand
At knowing what I can stand! ” – Philip Larkin

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're going to sample Philip Larkin, this is probably the collection to sample. This or The High Window, which is also held in high esteem.

Larkin, a lifelong bachelor Brit who served as a librarian and looked the role (bald pate, thick glasses) is mostly known for darker themes, bittersweet and somewhat satirical twists. But for me he stands out as a technician. All of his poems are careful constructs of meter and rhyme. As a free-verse kind of guy, I think a dose of Larkin now and then is good for me. Maybe you, too?

One impressive poem about work, "Toads Revisited," echoed an earlier poem, "Toads," from the collection The Less Deceived. I dedicated this write-up to them, including both poems in full, so you can jump down that toad hole if you'd like to see how your job is like a toad squatting on you (or so Larkin put it).

Two poems from this collection that give you a sense of Larkin's themes and style are provided here as a wrap:


"Ignorance"

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.

Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes, it is strange,

Even to wear such knowledge - for our flesh
Surrounds us with its own decisions -
And yet spend all our life on imprecisions,
That when we start to die
Have no idea why.



And here is the title poem, a bit longer:



"The Whitsun Weddings


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.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first impression upon beginning to delve into Larkin's oeuvre was, "This seems like the kind of poetry Charles Bukowski would have written if Bukowski had been (a) British and (b) more talented." Strange as the comparison might seem, I believe the 20th-century American poet whose public persona most closely resembles Larkin's is Bukowski: both Larkin and Bukowski self-deprecatingly portrayed themselves as rather boorish, caddish, peevish, cynical, frequently bored, unattractive, graying white men who liked to toss back a few drinks and ogle "bosomy" young female bodies. There seems to be a lot of "pissing" and "fucking" going on in both men's poems. When Larkin ends one of his poems with the slangy anti-academic pronouncement "Books are a load of crap," the superficial resemblance between the two poets is particularly striking.

The best of Larkin's poems, I believe, are those that prove that Larkin is actually more broad-minded and more large-hearted than the lesser artists to whom one is tempted to compare him. Larkin has certain poems that confront the bleak topic of mortality with a balanced mixture of cynicism and compassion, and yet the compassion ends up winning out, allowing Larkin to empathically apprehend such penetrating truths as: "In everyone,/there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love./To some, it means the difference they could make/by loving others, but across most it sweeps/as all they might have done had they been loved" ("Faith Healing"). Poems like these succeed because they allow a thin beam of light from some ethereal place to percolate into the tight spaces of the mundane. (This is a feat that requires especial skill to pull off in a decidedly post-theistic world like Larkin's.)

Many of Larkin's poems are written within tight formal structures and follow straightforward-seeming, linear patterns of thought. On the occasions when he transcends these self-imposed limitations, the results are luminous.

[Cymru Roberts · Rating 3 out of 5]

Titch Thomas sent me here.


Reading Larkin side-by-side with Blake doesn't benefit the man from Coventry, but that can be forgiven. It is useful for me to read the two concurrently however; as I can see two distinct forms of "poetry". In Blake every word has a weight that is both symbol and meaning (ambiguous for sure, and I wouldn't say I know the entirety of the meaning) but in essence there are no wasted lines. No line is there simply to set the stage. Setting the stage is what prose is for. Thus Larkin is more like poetry-prose––he has impressions and atmospheres that pop into his head that he's shoehorned into verse. While Blake's verse is incantatory–and thus adds a further layer of depth to the poems–Larkin is descriptive. It's a fine line, and sometimes he can merge into the "higher form", that is his words can at times reach the point of becoming lyrics. There are a few bangers, esp the wonderful Sunny Prestatyn (described by Larkin as meant to be both "beautiful and terrifying" which it is) but elsewhere the meter is arbitrary and distracting. Fair enough; Larkin said himself that there were only a few strong poems in the bunch. But when Faber and Faber asks for another book to publish, you don't say no.

The character of Larkin–which seems dubious at best–does serve some interest. A librarian who wrote poetry.... reminds me of a character in a Bolaño novel; and I bet RB woulda liked this cat. I'll prolly check out some other collections of his in time, should I find myself on the beach, with a pint.....

[Wayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This cost me a mere 50 cents!!!!
And I know it will contain an absolute wealth
of plain-speaking insight on the daily grind,
done with irony, wit and empathy.
Larkin' with Larkin!!!!

POST-READ:
Like ALL poetry books one knows one has never done with it, as the text and thought is usually so tightly packed with allusions, resonances and plain info as well as skills of style that it is a Continual Feast on so many levels.And so many returns (one just hopes one will have life and time!!) will hopefully be in store.
I didn't find these poems as easily decipherable as I had thought I would.So have already read each poem a few times,silently , out loud trying to discover, translate etc.etc.
No Regrets though!!!!

[Lily · Rating 1 out of 5]

i hate philip larkin.

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 5 out of 5]

This week I read Philip Larkin's fifth collection of poems, 'The Whitsun Weddings' (1964).

Usually when I say 'read' I mean read once, from cover to cover (apart from the books I abandon). And when I say 'read' a book of poems, usually I mean read each poem once (well- let's be honest, in an anthology, I might skim some the long ones from the 1800s) - maybe twice, maybe lingered over a few lines a few times.

Since 'reading' The Whitsun Weddings on Monday night, I've re-read it every day this week. Each poem I must have read at least four times, some of them more. Some of them I've even looked up online while I've been at work, so I can read them again.

This is the first time I've really felt I've come to grips with a book of poetry. I have read these poems for meaning, and I have read them for structure. I have read them for the themes that connect one poem to three others. I have read them aloud, to feel how they make my lips move. I may not have read them like an academic would, but I have read these poems in a more thorough, more meaningful way than I have ever read poetry before.

I now find myself trying to analyse why. One factor is Larkin himself - while I've only read a few articles about him, and studiously avoided wikipediaing him this week, I do know the outlines of his life and in particular his relationships with women. This can't help but colour the way you read his work, and this adds to my habit of reading all poets autobiographically (for some reason, I find it easier to remember that books are 'made up', and tend to assume that if a poet writes about cows in a field or the moon in the sky or falling out of love, that these are lived rather than purely imaginative experiences). But the themes of the poems - of the narrator's combined curiosity and distaste for married life, of the urban landscape and its encroachment into the countryside, of the futility (and occasional beauty) of our silly short little lives, of the gaps between how we think things should be and how they actually are - feel like Larkin's thoughts and opinions.

A second factor is the style of the poems. I found myself reading and rereading, trying to tease out and understand the rhythms and rhymes. The very first stanza in the collection grabbed my mind in this way - from 'Here':

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river s slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud

Feel that? 'Too thin and thistled', 'harsh-named halt', 'skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants'? Elsewhere I got a little shiver of pleasure when he rhymed 'decisions' and 'imprecisions' because 'imprecisions' is not a poemy word.

I found the kitchen-sink nature of the poems appealing: no high-falutingness for Mr Larkin. But then an observation of an apple core falling short of the bin can become a brief meditation on how failure seeps through our lives, and trace back (perhaps?) to original sin. And he can write about grubby kids losing interest in a pet and only regaining it when they get to stage a funeral but he can also write this, which I find achingly beautiful: - 'Water'

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

The two poems that will stay with me though, I think, are Larkin's very famous 'Arundel Tomb'

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd —
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

and this, 'Talking in Bed'

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

It's probably a bit facile to link these two poems, on the basis that the central imagery, of two people lying in bed together, symbolising their linkedness, is the same. But it feels to me that both poems exemplify what I think of as Larkin's harsh honesty, that sense of looking at the lives we try to lead in the darkest possible light. And yet, wrapped round that, the sheer beauty of the way he puts words together.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential Beauty and Sunny Prestatyn are my favourites. They are of similar subject, advertising posters/billboards.

Sunny Prestatyn is a marvel. Twenty four lines that describe what happens to a holiday poster over a period of time, probably over a few weeks or a month. The poem paints a brilliant description of the real world. The line 'She was too good for this life' is droll, and tragic, but the dry humour gets me every time. That poem is a novel and a movie. Genius.

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

ones i liked:
love songs in age
home is so sad
days
ambulances
sunny prestatyn
wild oats
essential beauty
afternoons

favourites:
water
talking in bed
ignorance
reference back
an arundel tomb

[Eve ✧ · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's been 6 months and I still can't decide if Take One Home for the Kiddies is hilarious or horribly sad

[Mared Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's really quite funny how cynical he is. I can relate. Also, I really don't think "tenderly observant" are the appropriate words to describe Larkin...? [Studying for AS English Lit]

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

From BBC radio 4 Extra:
A verse drama by Kathleen Jamie, based on the poem by Philip Larkin.

On a Whit weekend at the end of the 1950s, Philip Larkin caught a train from Hull to London which was boarded by a number of newly-wed couples.

He turned his observations about them into one of his best-known poems.

40 years later, three of the couples and the daughter of the fourth look back on the day to consider if its promises have been fulfilled.

Audrey ...... Dame Eileen Atkins
Paula ...... Saskia Reeves
Peter ...... David Haig
George ...... Jack Shepherd

Producer Rob Ketteridge

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra in 1999.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000...

[lisa.]

talking in bed and mr bleaney!

[Andreea Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Ignorance", my favourite poem.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Horrible man who wrote some decent poems

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hadn't read poetry for a very long time, so at first it felt strange to be reading this. Then slowly it started to penetrate my brain and awaken an old dusty unused segment in there, which slowly came back to life...
It cast a spell over me (cliché but true) - I would read this on the bus and be transported to a certain time and place, or a certain atmosphere would engulf me.
After I had finished, I read a few reviews about this book and about Larkin in general (I never do so beforehand). I was puzzled by it being described as 'dark' by quite a few people. What I personally got from my reading was that it was truthful, honest and real. Is stating how things really are 'dark'?
Well, everyone has a different opinion, and I won't deny the melancholic mood of some of them - but for me the honesty & reality of these poems made them beautiful and thought provoking.

[Darren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Verse from the shining crabass of 20th Century British lit

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Another exquisite Larkin he was really on something here.
Our almost instinct almost true...

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unsentimental, honest, something like cynical (but not as much as advertised, or at least not in the glib, selfish way of many), vividly alive to the world but resistant to being beguiled by it, almost believing his almost beliefs, loving jazz and women, but the latter more in theory than in practice, Larkin is frequently at his best in this collection, and it contains a half dozen or so of the best poems in the language.

[Julian Worker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do you ever finish a book of poems? No.

Will I go back and read these poems in a year's time and re-read this review? Yes.

Lines that are particularly memorable right now.

From Toads Revisited:

Nowhere to go but indoors
No friends but empty chairs

From Ignorance:

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.

What will the choices be next year? They'll be different that's all I know.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

SKrrrrrrrrrt poems abt being a cynical git & hull???? Sign me the f*** up my guy
(reread recently)

[Lilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely

[Amber Sparks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Faves: Dockery and Son; Self’s the Man; MCMXIV

[Alma · Rating 3 out of 5]

He’s so good that it genuinely ignites rage within me at the knowledge of what a horrible, miserable man he was. Anyway, ‘Ambulances’ is good.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (Faber, 1964)

Philip Larkin's fifth collection of poetry, The Whitsun Weddings, was the one that firmly established him as one of Britain's major poets. He remains today one of the best-known and most popular British neoformalists. A devotee of Yeats, Hardy, and Dylan Thomas, Larkin never wears his influences too far away from his sleeve, but don't begrudge him that; marvel, instead, that in the turbulent anything-goes sixties lived a poet, misanthrope, and mild-mannered librarian (all in the same body, no less!) who swam against a stream of free verse and wrote, arguably, better formal verse than anyone since Swinburne.

Larkin is a master of enjambment; if you encountered a random Larkin poem isolated from a collection, you might well not realize it's a formal poem until you're well into it, a hallmark of the best formal work. It reads easily and well, and Larkin never allows the meter and rhyme to get in the way of image; in short, Larkin combines the best traits of both lyric and narrative poetry, and packages them up neatly for the reader in small verse of purest pleasure.

Okay, I've just spent two paragraphs describing the best of Larkin's work. Thankfully, this collection is more "best" than "worst." But one of the tragedies of the formal poet, and one no formal poet (save, perhaps, Dante Alighieri) has ever been able to avoid, is that when you're not on top of your game, slipping a notch or two down the ladder of quality leads to the steepest of descents. The sublime can become the ridiculous far faster in formal verse than in free verse, leading to a judgment of "when he screws up, man, does he REALLY screw up." Such is the case with Larkin. The dulcet tones and free-flowing nature of his best work curdle in the mouth when he's off form, leaving trite rhymes, dull rhythms, and some of the most godawful thumping lines one is likely to see outside Helen Steiner Rice.

Still, as I said, there is far less bad than good in The Whitsun Weddings, and it does deserve its place in the annals of British literature. For those who wonder where all the formal verse has gone, Philip Larkin is one of the four or five modern poets to whom anyone can point to say "verse may be out of favor, but believe me, it is still alive and well." ***

[Hanna Fawcett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the books I studied for A level. Initally I found it slightly depressing and a little too pessimistic...until we began reading Slyvia Plath.

It took an essay entitled 'Making the mundane magnificent' for me to truly appreciate Larkin's wonderfully refreshing honesty. Great writers can change the way you see the world in a few hundred pages. Great poets can do this in a few hundred words. Larkin in a great poet.

'Essential Beauty' manages to transport me to the cosy winter warmth of the advertisment, regardless of the season in which I'm reading. The strive for perfection contrasting with the harshness of reality are wonderfully true to life.

'Talking in Bed' expresses the common regret of complacency between two people who were once close, but now have nothing to say. Honesty, without excessive emotion is one of Larkin's greatest skills.

For me, 'Home is so Sad' is his greatest poem. The personification of the house is such that the reader feels injustice at its solitude. Warm, accomodating and always trying to please, the house knows the lonliness of waiting for someone to come home.

I love all of these poems - Larkin is a master of creating beauty from everyday occurances. If you find him too depressing, read some Plath and try again.

[[ J o ] · Rating 2 out of 5]

Philip Larkin, a 20th Century poet, was primarily a Librarian at Hull University, but also wrote Jazz reviews and novels. He died of throat cancer and refused the Poet Laureate position as he was a very drawn-in and private man; and not a fan of any kind of fame.

The Whitsun Weddings is a collection of 32 poems that focus of the mundanity of everyday life and the small things that people barely notice. A lot of his best known poems are in this collection.

I prefer to read poetry out loud, but Larkin's poetry doesn't really lend itself to that, which may be because Larkin was a quiet, unassuming man with a stutter. As is, though their rhythm and tone can lead to some great movements of the tongue and mouth, my enjoyment was lessened and I barely felt anything as I did so. He had a way with words, but it is a different way to what I usually enjoy.


Blog | Instagram | Twitter | Pinterest | Shop | Etsy

[minnie]

Toads Revisited


Walking around in the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on,

Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses -
Not a bad place to be.
Yet it doesn't suit me.

Being one of the men
You meet of an afternoon:
Palsied old step-takers,
Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters,

Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-baskets -

All dodging the toad work
By being stupid or weak.
Think of being them!
Hearing the hours chime,

Watching the bread delivered,
The sun by clouds covered,
The children going home;
Think of being them,

Turning over their failures
By some bed of lobelias,
Nowhere to go but indoors,
Nor friends but empty chairs -

No, give me my in-tray,
My loaf-haired secretary,
My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir:
What else can I answer,

When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.