The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin

The speaker sounds vaguely contemptuous of Bleaney, but, ironically, that contempt – ‘how we live measures our own nature’ – is dealt back equally by the poem’s logic upon the speaker himself. Indeed the situation of the latter is worse. At least Bleaney left some mark: this ‘was’ his ‘room,’ whereas the speaker seems a more transient and ineffective occupant. The landlady would obviously like him to be a successor (‘Mr Bleaney took my bit of garden/Properly in hand’) and there is a rather touching sense in which she – no doubt as lonely as he was – recalls every detail of his life, even down to his ‘preference for sauce to gravy.’

The meaning of ‘Bodies’ is usually glossed as a car body workshop, but it suggests ‘being a body’ in the dialect sense – a person, who may not amount to much but who fitted in . He had a job, did the pools, went on his hols. The fact that they ‘moved him’ implies some value accorded to Mr Bleaney, though not much autonomy.

The real point of the poem then, is not to satirise Mr Bleaney, but, as often in The Whitsun Weddings collection to sense a difference in perception . For Bleaney and the landlady, it’s a ‘bit of garden;’ for the speaker ‘a strip of building land/Tussocky, littered.’ Bleaney enjoyed his TV, and got the landlady to buy a set, so he was probably quite happy with his residence. He will probably never have seen the details of its symbolic inadequacy: that the curtains are ‘thin and frayed,’ that they ‘Fall to within five inches of the sill,’ or the ‘sixty-watt bulb.’ He will probably never have assessed his own life in terms of these indications of inadequacy. The reader cannot know for sure, but what is certain is that the speaker is fully aware of the implications of all this. Really the poem is about how he warrants ‘no better’ – and how he knows it.

Nothing To Be Said

The phrase ‘nations vague as weed’ is a reminder that, while the names of flowers are generally well known, nobody bothers with the names of weeds, which also tend to be endlessly prolific. There is, nevertheless, a strength and intransigence about weeds, and that seems to be picked up by the line about ‘nomads among stones’ (as weeds grow among ‘stones’), which in turn suggests the ‘cobble-close families/In mill-towns.’ These last, could equally be the ‘Small-statured cross-faced tribes’ or some race of pygmies wearing war-paint, depending on how ‘cross-faced’ is read. Larkin subsumes the whole of ignorant humanity into his vignette quite cleverly, and seems to prefer the few who live with the reality ‘Life is slow dying’ to the many for whom it ‘Means nothing.’