Authors: James Booth
It is characteristic of Larkin’s genius that the poem he actually completed on this theme, two months later, ‘Love Songs in Age’, replaces the bitterness of the letter with empathy and compassion.
The first ideas for the poem go back to 1953, the final version being reached after much workbook drafting in January 1957.
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In contrast to ‘Mother, Summer, I’ and ‘Reference Back’, the speaker is uncharacterized: a detached, genderless, ageless voice. This ensures that the widow’s consciousness dominates the poem. The opening is casual and demotic: ‘She kept her songs, they took so little space, / The covers pleased her [. . .]’ The songs have waited, disregarded, while her life passed by: one bleached by the sun, one marked by a vase, another mended in ‘a tidy fit’ when she was young, then ‘coloured, by her daughter’ when she was old. An anticipatory metrical anacrusis imitates the woman’s sudden intake of breath as she is overwhelmed by a rush of recollection:
and stood
Relearning how each frank submissive chord [. . .]
The songs once again perform their function, and ‘the unfailing sense of being young’ spreads out ‘like a spring-woken tree’, singing of freshness and ‘That certainty of time laid up in store’. But her store of time has been spent. The promise of the songs to ‘solve, and satisfy, / And set unchangeably in order’ has been tested and, inevitably, has failed, if only because her husband is now dead. Further anacruses across the ends of the lines imitate the aftershocks which follow her initial discovery:
ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word [. . .]
Each syncopated enjambment opens out another long perspective:
But, even more,
The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love [. . .]
The shock slowly subsides and the final anacrusis is merely a quiet monosyllabic sigh:
So
To pile them back, to cry
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.
This is a masterpiece in the new poetic manner which was to dominate
The Whitsun Weddings
. The poet’s own personality is excluded, the eloquent phrases build to a generous emotional climax, and the rhetorical form is bold and uniquely memorable.
The greatest masterpiece of his new style is the fourth of his great Odes, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, which he began later in 1957 and completed on 18 October 1958 after sustained drafting from March onwards. The idea had come to him during the summer bank holiday in 1955 (1 August), when he had travelled to his mother’s house in Loughborough, changing from the London train at Grantham. He wrote to Monica on 3 August 1955: ‘I went home on Saturday afternoon, 1.30 to Grantham – a lovely run, the scorched land misty with heat, like a kind of
bloom
of heat – and at every station, Goole, Doncaster, Retford, Newark, importunate wedding parties, gawky & vociferous, seeing off couples to London.’
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He alters the time of the poem to hint at the Christian festival of Pentecost, celebrating the descent of the Holy Ghost on the disciples. Secular though it is, the poem concerns a sacrament. Larkin described the experience in an interview in 1981, adding the final stage into London to his original journey. He was struck, he said, by the ‘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.’
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He was fond of claiming that ‘Happiness writes white.’
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In this case happiness wrote in full colour. ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ introduces a sequence of poems in which Larkin adopts the voice of a celebrant of social rituals, an affectionate observer of contemporary life, rather than an alienated, less deceived artist. As he passionately insisted: ‘I don’t want to transcend the commonplace, I love the commonplace, I lead a very commonplace life. Everyday things are lovely to me.’
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For many readers these poems constitute his greatest achievement.
Unlike ‘Maiden Name’ and ‘Long roots moor summer to our side of earth’, this wedding poem offers no personal challenge to the speaker, who remains an observer. As in ‘Church Going’ and ‘An Arundel Tomb’ the poet settles gradually into his narrative. He catches the exact ‘feel’ of settling down, exempt from obligation, in the secure travelling room of a train compartment: ‘All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense / Of being in a hurry gone’. The feeling of enclosure, the heat of the seats and the smell of ‘buttoned carriage-cloth’ will be unknown to the younger reader of today. But the feeling of release and escape at the beginning of the journey remains the same, as does the blurred rising and sinking of the passing embankments and hedges, precisely imitated in the poem by enjambment:
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose [. . .]
The weddings are described in terms of recognizable stereotypes, affectionately rendered. In instructions for a reading on radio, Larkin commented, ‘It is of course humorous, here and there, but any supercilious note should be rigorously excluded.’
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The girls become metonymic ‘heels and veils’, ‘unreally’ separated from the other celebrants by their ‘lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres’. The children frown, the fathers have ‘never known // Success so huge and wholly farcical’; the women share the secret ‘like a happy funeral’. The girls, anticipating the ‘religious wounding’ of consummation, stand ‘posed irresolutely’, watching the train depart:
As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it.
Abstract noun phrases (‘the end of an event’, ‘something that survived it’), transform the prose of the social stereotypes into something more evanescent and elusive: a ‘frail / Travelling coincidence’:
– An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl –
Everyone who has travelled on a train in England in summer has seen this bowler, snatched from sight before his run-up is complete. But only the poet understands that such glimpses distil the livelong minute of life. The couples are too involved in the event itself:
– and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
As in Hardy’s ‘The Self Unseeing’, they are ‘looking away’.
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The poem becomes an Ode to Incipience. What the poet or the wedding couples do when they reach their destination, what their different fates will be, are irrelevant questions. The poem is concerned only with the moment, the shared ‘hour’, in and for itself. In a bold metaphor, London yields a fertile human harvest: ‘spread out in the sun, / Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat’.
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The poet drowses as the train approaches the capital and in a complex image combining kinetic sensation with inner emotion he hears the rushing sound of the brakes as the falling of an arrow shower. There is a specific recollection of the memorable scene in Laurence Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s
Henry V
.
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However, this projectile is fruitful rather than threatening. He vaguely apprehends that the arrows sent ‘out of sight’ are ‘somewhere becoming rain’. There is an unmistakable sexual implication in the imagery here: ‘there swelled / A sense of falling’. The journey is consummated and the city is fertilized as the train decelerates in a kind of detumescence.
In an influential essay ‘Philip Larkin: The Metonymic Muse’, David Lodge placed this poem at the centre of his argument that Larkin is fundamentally unmetaphorical, with limited transcendences. The details of the weddings, he wrote, ‘are observed with the eye of a novelist or documentary writer and allowed to stand, untransformed by metaphor’.
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Metonym is, for Lodge, descriptive and half-hearted in contrast with the explicit rhetorical trope of metaphor or simile. Only at the end of the poem, Lodge asserts, does Larkin surprise us with a simile proper (‘like squares of wheat’), ‘with its mythical, magical and archaic resonances [. . .] so different from anything else in the poem’.
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But metaphors are not, as Lodge imagines, cherries studding the plain cake of the literal. Metaphor is the poetic element itself. Lodge fails to mention that a journey is the most ancient metaphor for life itself. T. S. Eliot comments: ‘you can hardly say where the metaphorical and the literal meet’.
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Many of Larkin’s poems, Lodge claims, ‘have no metaphors at all’.
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He cites ‘Afternoons’, ‘Myxomatosis’, ‘Poetry of Departures’, ‘Days’ and ‘As Bad as a Mile’. Does he imagine that Larkin ‘literally’ discussed mortality with rabbits, believed days to be geographically located or worried about his aim with an apple core? Moreover, metonym, in which figurative implications arise organically from the ‘literal’, is the most profound of metaphorical tropes: ‘That vase’, ‘The apple unbitten in the palm’, ‘someone running up to bowl’. Larkin is a great master of metaphor.
It is a sign of the constant volatility of Larkin’s mood that Motion finds it possible to summarize this period in the poet’s life, when he was writing his most exhilarating poetry, as ‘a low-key, low-spirited time – burrowing into his flat, digging into his job, feeling alternately bothered and lonely, actively frustrated, dozily feeble. More often than before, he turned to Judy Egerton for the comfort of complaining.’
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After ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, Larkin felt the need to administer an antidote. In a characteristic dialectical reversal, ‘Self’s the Man’, dated in the workbook 5 November 1958, three weeks later than ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, reverts to his ‘vernacular’, misogamist register. Here the poet once again characterizes himself as a less deceived bachelor. He may, he readily concedes, be more ‘selfish’ than his colleague Arnold, a kind of married version of Mr Bleaney. But, after all, he contends, Arnold was ‘out for his own ends’ just as much as he. He ‘married a woman to stop her getting away’ and his reward (in a vicious rhyme) is that ‘Now she’s there all day’. On this, now familiar, poetic ground, Larkin has great fun in elaborating a caricature of henpecked working-class domesticity, reminiscent of the radio monologues of the Northern comedian Al Read, a favourite of Philip and Monica: ‘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
.’ The original name in the typescript was ‘Arthur’, and Larkin admitted that a model for Arnold was the Deputy Librarian, Arthur Wood, ‘horrible cadging little varmint’.
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He concludes the poem by admitting that he and Arnold are the same; the only difference is that the poet knows better ‘what I can stand / Without them sending a van –’. Then with a familiar turn of self-doubt he adds: ‘Or I suppose I can.’ Perhaps, after all, it is he who has made the mistake, not Arnold. The poem is characteristically confident and at the same time radically self-doubting.
Larkin had by now achieved a significant public reputation. Late in 1957 he accepted an invitation from the PEN Committee to co-edit with Bonamy Dobree and Louis MacNeice the seventh annual anthology of PEN
New Poems
, a task which occupied him during 1958. In February 1958 he read a selection of his poems on the Third Programme. Then a few months later Anthony Thwaite invited him on behalf of the BBC to contribute to a programme for the European Service entitled
Younger British Poets of Today
.
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He read ‘Skin’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’ and ‘Church Going’. He met Thwaite for the first time on 2 July 1958 and they immediately became friends. Thwaite remembers Larkin testing out the parameters of their relationship on their first meeting. In a taxi between the BBC and a pub where they were to join Kingsley Amis, Philip took the opportunity to open the mail he had brought with him from Hull. One large envelope yielded a ‘girlie magazine’. ‘This is the sort of thing that Bob [Conquest] sends me,’ he remarked with an interrogative hint. Thwaite gave a decidedly neutral response, and the relationship developed along more literary lines.
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