The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin

Beneath the code of ‘nothing to be said’ is still a ‘there’ – a desired place of solutions and satisfactions , frequently evoked – of which many of Larkin’s characters are deeply aware. Their pain is essentially their awareness of the world as a place without beauty and love, in which hopes and dreams inevitably wither. For such as these, there can be no ‘bosomy English rose,’ no ‘Bri-Nylon Baby-Dolls and Shorties,’ no ‘Sunny Prestatyn.’ For them, the world is simply the ‘vast unwelcome’ of First Sight .

What penetrates Larkin’s satire and apparent snobbishness is precisely this sense of real tragedy among those who are poignantly described as ‘losing thoughts’ and his poetry is actually deeply sympathetic of people who are easily discarded by society, like the women in Faith Healing . All-to-often, as in Toads Revisited , these seem to have an answer avoided by the voices, heard frequently in this collection, of the people who condemn them. This is another aspect of Larkin’s unerring truthfulness and honesty. His minimalism sometimes allows him to ‘say more’ than a maximalist like Yeats. His rare, but somehow inescapable, sense of transcendence and of the potency of love in the lives of failing human beings, make his poetry a varied and rich experience for the reader.

Here

Larkin’s opening poem serves to establish something of a hierarchy of values for the rest of his collection. All too often, people want to be there : to achieve what hasn’t yet been achieved, to get what they haven’t got. And at the end of the poem, the speaker has apparently reached his ‘there,’ so that, for him, it is ‘here,’ and he has reached his destination at last.

The repetition of the word in the final stanza is part of an intensification of the poet’s experiences: first he is aware of silence; then of the creativity of the natural world; then, in an almost mystical image, that ‘Luminously-peopled air ascends,’ and then, finally, of ‘unfenced existence.’ This is something that is ‘out of reach’ of the human world, but which also places Larkin himself free and ‘out of reach’ of the society he flees from; something that is ‘untalkative,’ but which, nevertheless, seems to communicate on a deeper level than words. Larkin’s language is generally material and physical – but often only so that the occasional exception, such as ‘Luminously-peopled air’ is especially numinous. There is an unmistakeable mysticism ‘here,’ ‘where removed lives//Loneliness clarifies.’