The Whitson Weddings

The Whitsun Wedding is a poem Larkin going on a train journey. On the train journey he describes the scenery and the smells of the country side 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 thwe noise and actions of wedding parties that are seeing off couples who are boarding the train. When he sees the wedding parties and spots the different class of people who are there who are the girl’s fathers, mothers, Uncle, Couples and children. He also spots what there are actions and makes judgements on them.

One of the themes in the Whitson Wedding is Marriage and relationships. When Larkin first introduces he weddings in the third stanza he describes them in a bad way, first he uses the word “destroys”, which shows he does not really like marriage that much. Also when we first notice them in the third stanza he “went on reading” which shows that he is not bothered about him. As well as this, he describes marriages shows that there life is near the end in the early hours of marriage.  “Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days were coming to an end”.

Larkin also writes about the newly married couple’s relatives in the poem and writes about them in an aggressive tone.  These newly married couples are accompanied by their relatives and they certainly belong to lower economic class. The description of their physical experiences with the words and phrases like “pomaded girls”, parodies of fashion” suggest that they are from the lower economic class. In each station and platform the poet witnesses the flow of such newly married couples. The poet virtually being an unmarried man is full of disgust for marriage with the arrival of those people and the poet undergoes mystifying experiences of suffocation. He is put in an uneasy situation and starts mocking the appearances of those married couples and their relatives. However at the end of the poem Larkin changes his tone towards marriage and the relatives. “A sense of falling, like an arrow shower sent out of sight, somewhere becomes rain”. In these lines the poet expresses his realization of importance of marriage. The poem suddenly becomes ironic because his realization contradicts his previous attitude towards marriage. In these lines “arrow, showers” and “rain” relate marriage to fertility and to the continuity of life.

Throughout he poem Larkin describes what he is seeing from the train window. Throughout the poem he see’s industry as well as countryside on his journey with the description of nature at the end of the poem.  In the first stanza he describes the town his train set of from. He describes it by saying he swore “the back of houses” and “smelt the fish dock to show that he was by the sea side”. At the end of the stanza he starts to describe the country side by saying “the river’s level drifting beneath began”. This shows it’s the start of the countryside and his journey on the train. In the second stanza he continues to describe the countryside by mentioning “Wide farms” and “short shadowed cattle”. However he then describes the industry in the poem. The canal's 'industrial froth' and the 'new and nondescript' towns with 'acres of dismantled cars' suggest that Larkin doesn't find modern scenery entirely sympathetic.  The final word in the poem is rain.  Larkin describes the nature (rain) to show the good in marriages and to show the greatness in the world is the nature that surrounds us and the industry things in this world.

The poem has eight rhymed stanzas, of ten lines each. The rhyme scheme is ABABCDECDE. The lines in each stanza have five stresses except the second line, which has only two. The shorter line introduces a visual contrast and may suggest to you the alternating but regular rhythm of a train. This rhythm is also created by run-on lines which pause briefly in the middle of sentences: 'all sense of being in a hurry gone'; 'we ran behind the backs of houses'.