The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin

The poem, therefore, is a journey, headed towards ‘Loneliness,’ clarification and a mystical awareness of what is ‘out of reach.’ The metaphorical nature of the journey is perhaps the reason Larkin leaves the reader to guess his means of transport (a train) and the places he travels through. A little local knowledge of where Larkin lived, however, suggests that he leaves the northbound traffic (headed for Newcastle and Edinburgh) and swerves east as he enters the industrial belt of Humberside; then he travels north into Hull itself, and then out towards Spurn Head and the North Sea. The ‘harsh-named halt[s]’ on the way, incidentally, include Thome, Goole, Brough and Hessle.

It is interesting that Larkin repeats the word ‘Swerving’ that opens the poem. He loves the twists and turns of old railway lines or country lanes and hates the ‘dead straight miles’ of motorways, high-speed train links and the modern suburban development associated with the ‘planners’ nightmare’ of the sixties. He is also ‘swerving’ – as in dodging – the world of the ‘cut-price crowd,’ whose desires he snobbishly satirises.

Hull itself is described more positively, though, as ‘a terminate and fishy-smelling/Pastoral of ships up streets’ with its ‘grim head-scarfed wives,’ something harsh, perhaps, but much more vivid and remarkable than its ‘mortgaged half-built edges.’ Larkin’s controlled tone of the ordinary and everyday allows him to sneak some most surprising language under the reader’s guard: ‘terminate,’ meaning ‘bound, fenced in’ (by the sea) is a very unusual adjective, last used in 1750 according to the OED. ‘Pastoral’ (presumably in the sense of a ‘strange, unreal entertainment’) is without precedent, though looking down streets and seeing ships is a real enough experience in Hull. The reader appreciates the undefined mysticism of ‘Luminously-peopled air,’ but it is difficult to imagine what air can be ‘peopled’ with. Angels, spirits perhaps? As far as Larkin was concerned, the answer was rather more mundane. Dining at the home of the Hull University mathematician, Ron Shaw, he was once asked what the line referred to, and, in the words of his host: ‘His reply was “gnats” – and he seemed surprised that I needed to ask!’ Such lines as ‘Luminously-peopled air’ are among the most satisfying of Larkin’s poetry: out of a world of ‘grim head-scarfed wives’ and a cloud of gnats in the Holderness air, he sometimes invents a language as transcendent as any line by William Blake or W.B. Yeats.

Mr Bleaney

This is a much more straightforward poem. The speaker gradually reconstructs – line by line, item by item - Bleaney’s uninspiring lifestyle, symbolised by his ‘hired box’ of a bedsit, ‘no room for books,’ and wonders whether he was content with his lot, or whether he, like the speaker, also looked out of his windows and felt that his life amounted to very little.