The Whitsun Weddings" is one of the best known poems by British poet Philip Larkin. It was written and rewritten and finally published in the 1964 collection of poems, also called The Whitsun Weddings. It is one of three poems that Larkin wrote about train journeys. [1]

Larkin manages the easy naturalness of his voice so flawlessly that one hardly notices the poem’s rhyming stanza structure (ABABCDECDE), a kind of shortened sonnet (the quatrain is Shakespearean, the sestet Petrarchan). Keats invented this stanza for his summer odes, and Larkin’s formal allusion evokes the summer season, its redolent promise and pastoral sweetness. 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. The fantasy of the pastoral landscape, its farms and hedges, gains grittier reality with the “floatings of industrial froth,” like the plumpness of Keats’ sensual imagery and musical phrasing in “To Autumn” turned rancid: the smell of grass competes with the stale smell of the cloth seats inside the train carriage. 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: At first, I didn't notice what a noise Larkin was a bachelor who worked as a university librarian in Hull. He never attended paraliterary/cultural activities (such as poetry readings, lectures, and talks) and ignored and disliked foreign literature. He never went abroad, though he loved jazz and frequently reviewed it in the 60s. He preferred his own company, but he was popular with people because of his insistence on communicating with his readers – and writing in layman’s terms. His poems are ambiguous, but never obscure, and the world we find in Larkin is the world we live in, after all, and hint at happiness that is far beyond our scope. The unveiling of the plaque will complete a sequence of installations that began in 2010 with Jennings's statue of Larkin and the associated poetry roundels and bench seat at Hull's Paragon Interchange train station. It might also be significant that the poem focuses on saying goodbye, on leaving things behind: Larkin is leaving Hull behind at the start of the poem (he had moved to Hull in 1955, and would live and work in the city for the rest of his life); the newlyweds are leaving behind their loved ones and climbing aboard the train, taking their first steps on their new life together; their families are waving them off from the platform.Larkin’s genius for abstracting from experience is heightened in this poem, in which his talents so brilliantly serve the narrative of a simple discovery: that each unique wedding party is in truth like all the other wedding parties gathering that day, a perception only the poet realizes, because he is in the privileged position of witnessing each one. 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. Whitsun, or Whit Sunday, is the seventh Sunday after Easter (Pentecost), deep into spring, when people often marry. 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. That Whitsun, I was late getting away: In August 2010, I took my family to visit my mum in Hull, and after finding as many of the toads that we could, we took the train to Brough (returning immediately) to show my children what Larkin meant. Alas, the sun was in! In the sixth stanza (lines 41–50), the speaker also noticed the facial expressions of the women and girls. Like those of the fathers, their expressions and body language are interpreted in ambiguous ways. When the train continued to London, the speaker describes the whole train as being finally free but heavy with the experiences of the day. The speaker then looked out at the increasingly industrial landscape of the city's outskirts for the rest of the 50-minute journey.

The poem refuses any sentimentality suggested by such a formulation, however, by insisting on each individual’s separateness, not unlike the way each passenger arrives at his or her own destination, alongside the others on the train: 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 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 seen in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’– and on isolation is a very Romantic notion. As Foucault wrote, Larkin’s writing “functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection” where he turns the individual into something he can describe and analyze, whilst trying to maintain individuality. In Larkin’s poems, however, whole sections of people blend together. The poem's narrator describes the scenery and smells of the countryside and towns through which the largely empty train passes. The train's windows are open because of the heat, and he gradually becomes aware of bustle on the platforms at each station, eventually realising that this is the noise and actions of wedding parties that are seeing off couples who are boarding the train. There is something alive about the records, as if through capturing the memories and experiences of the woman and her husband, they have been instilled with the life they representThe event will be followed the next day by the unveiling of a commemorative Larkin plaque at King's Cross station by Baroness Virginia Bottomley, the High Sheriff of Hull. The Whitsun Weddings is a collection of 32 poems by Philip Larkin. It was first published by Faber in the United Kingdom on 28 February 1964. It was a commercial success, by the standards of poetry publication, with the first 4,000 copies being sold within two months. A United States edition appeared some seven months later. Given Larkin’s own views on marriage – he himself never married, and was sceptical of the institution to say the least – it’s tempting to see the rain in terms of loss and tragedy, as if Larkin is already aware of the truth that those wedding guests, and the couples themselves, are striving to keep at bay, namely that the rest of their married life will not live up to the promise of this day. Larkin’s popularity seemed to grow from this disabused temperament, which captures the feelings of those who think they do not like poetry, as well as those who think they do. It was Larkin, after all, who ended his poem “A Study of Reading Habits” with the lines “Get stewed: / Books are a load of crap.”

Dave Waite - Thanks for reminding me of this again. I'm not sure if this counts as a national favourite (Kipling's 'If' won a vote a couple of years ago). Larkin does not feature in the English syllabus at school; he has always been a slightly controversial figure. He was chosen by The Times as Britain's greatest post-war poet, but hints of racism, porn and sexism have affected his reputation. The title poem describes a train journey taken by the speaker on Whit Saturday, during which he observes a series of weddings taking place in various towns along the way.

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).