Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings
Examine a close reading of the poem “Whitsun Weddings” with critical analysis and textual references.
(Image of Philip Larkin, a black and white photo of a skinny middle-aged white man sitting on a couch in a room, wearing reading glasses).
Whitsun Weddings is a brandishing testamentary swashbuckler locomotive wedding party of ceremonial festivities and ritualistic observance of postcolonial and post industrial England. The impending wedding coach has been metaphorically epitomized by Philip Larkin as a means of celebratory cavalcade. “We headed towards London, shuffling gouts of steam. Now fields were building plots and poplars cast”
Whitsun Weddings occasion symbolically manifest old maidish Postcolonial British folks entrenched and rooted by a connubial affair in accord to the fiscal reformation aftermath of the beginning of a new financial year instead of that ending from a previous year. Philip Larkin’s vaticination and sortilege of the porters and mails bears to metaphorical connotations of pregnant women and their spouses respectively through avant garde impressionism. Poet laureate’s setting and locale of Whitsun Weddings is a treasure trove of observation, reflection and contemplation amidst “Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.”
“The secret like a happy funeral” encapsulates the oxymoronic ambivalence that is at the heart of this fascinating reading of Larkin’s litany poems. “While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared. At a religious wounding” might implicate references to saturnine temperaments and stony faced solemnity being exposed to sepulchral sombre melancholia. The affair of espousal is overall sultry dismay, gloomy despair, desultory grim and grave depression in accord with Larkin’s point of view. Expanses and vistas of England with drifting of Britannic legacy and British isles have been subjected to dismantlement and shrinkages afterwards of the Great World Wars.
Whitsun Weddings is that seventh Sunday after Easter, Pentecost Christian holiday, commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles and disciples of Jesus Christ while they were in Jerusalem and 1950s Britain’s progressive levy reform position legitimizes financially beneficiary matrimonial alliance. The signature litany of verbal photographic memorabilia from the memorialization of a train travelling outside the carriage windows rattling through the British landscapes. Englishness and Britishness of the 1960s era symbolize cultural hallmarks of the charismatic poem as indicated by the parodies of fashion lurking beneath veils and heels of soon to be wedded maidens and already betrothed ladies. Language, speech, prosody and rhetoric has been alchemically metamorphosed from the bedrock of ordinariness to that extraordinary visual and auditory impact and emphases. For exemplary evidences point to uncles with smutty mouth, fathers with broad belts under suits and mothers with seamy foreheads, nylon gloves and jewellery substitutes and lemons, mauves and olive ochres.
“A sense of falling, like an arrow shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain” herein the epilogue revealing epiphanic heavenly downpour onto earth as metaphorical connotations of anarchy being poured. Larkin, haunted and obsessed with marriage, conspicuously extrapolates the unforeseen on edge and fidgety ending. 
BBC has a radio show where Simon Armitage explores Philip Larkin’s poem The Whitsun Weddings.