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‘at grass’ by philip larkin. at grass the eye can hardly pick them out from the cold shade they shelter in till wind distresses mane and tail

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'At Grass' By Philip Larkin. AT GRASS The eye can hardly pick them out From the cold shade they shelter in Till wind distresses mane and tail, Then one. - ppt download

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Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps Two dozen distances sufficed To fable them: faint afternoons Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps, Whereby their names were artificed To inlay faded classic Junes - Difference in time - present  past Suggests their old age and also the length of time since their

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"My Lovely Horse" - Fr. Ted - enjoy!

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Some notes

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Please feel free to leave questions or messages

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Please feel free to leave questions or messages

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I would love to hear from you!

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A dramatic reading

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"Ambulances" by Philip Larkin (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

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The pictures came from this site about women and heart disease: http://myheartsisters.org/

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This poem is also on the Ordinary level - this is an extra poem if you need it

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Analysis

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Introduction

Ambulances is, in its totality, a celebration of the values of consciousness. It modestly and devoutly collects evidence of ordinary life to create a truth which can be universally acknowledged. The poem is a depressing one. The very title suggests something saddening. Ambulances drive through a city street, and stop to pick up a critically sick man and take him to a hospital.
Everybody looks at an ambulance when it is driving through the streets, though an ambulance does not look back at anybody. The sick man has been taken away to a hospital and the sense of loss which the spectators might have experienced would then abruptly come to an end. The man, who has been carried to the hospital by the ambulance, had led a meaningful life which was a mixture of family relationships and an observance of the fashions of the time. But that life has now come to an end and has, in fact, lost all its meaning.

The main idea in this poem is that an ambulance signifies illness, and that it fills the spectators with the thought of death. The first two stanzas of the poem contain vivid and realistic imagery of the ambulances threading their way through the streets of a city possibly at noon-time when there are many loud noises coming from the traffic and from the crowds of people. When an ambulance comes to a stop, women coming from the shops look at the wild white face of the sick man who is being taken away to a hospital. The remaining three stanzas of this poem contain the poet's reflections and meditations on the sad fate which awaits all of us. The entire life of an individual loses its meaning in the face of his approaching death. What gives to the poem Ambulances its impressive authority is its relentless insistence that "all streets in time are visited," and its closing assertion that to be taken away by an ambulance "brings closer what is left to come, /And dulls to distance all we are."

A Pessimistic Poem About Illness and Death

The main idea in this poem is that an ambulance signifies illness, and that it fills the spectators with the thought of death. The spectators perceive their own lives coming to an end when they see a seriously ailing man being taken to a hospital by an ambulance. The approach of death, says the poet, would mean an end to a life of activity which includes family relationships and fashions. But, when death comes, this "unique random blend of families and fashions" would come to an end, thus depriving life of all its meaning. Here then is another poem about death by Larkin who had felt obsessed with the fact and the reality of death throughout his life. This, again, is a pessimistic poem with an atmosphere of pathos and melancholy hovering over it.

Vivid and Realistic Imagery

The first two stanzas of this poem contain vivid and realistic imagery of the ambulances threading their way through the streets of a city possibly at noon-time when there are many loud noises coming from the traffic and from the crowds of people. When an ambulance comes to a stop, women coming from the shops look at the wild white face of the sick man who is being taken away to a hospital. There is a realistic detail about the women coming from the shops, "past smells of different dinners," meaning that these women have passed several food-shops which were emitting odours of different kinds. The remaining three stanzas of this poem contain the poet's reflections and meditations on the sad fate which awaits all of us. The entire life of an individual loses its meaning in the face of his approaching death. There is a vivid picture also in the line: "The traffic parts to let go by". When an ambulance is driving through a street, the people move quickly to one side or the other in order to make way for the ambulance.

A Depressing Poem

This poem is a really depressing one. The very title suggests something saddening. The sight of an ambulance has an immediate effect on the spectators who would at once think of somebody dying. An ambulance may remove a sick man, who has been injured seriously in a road accident, to a hospital. But an ambulance always symbolizes illness, disease, a road accident, and possibly death. The sight of an ambulance is by no means a cheering one.

Critics' Comments

One of the critics says that the poem Ambulances conveys the idea that every imaginable pain in life is as nothing compared to the permanent and true fact of death. This poem is, in its totality, a celebration of the values of consciousness. Even the greatest drama of life-"the unique random blend of families and fashions"-cannot continue for ever. All streets in time are visited by ambulances, and all people are eventually carried and stowed inside those ambulances. The same critic says that Ambulances, like all Larkin's best poems, modestly and devoutly collects evidence of ordinary life to create a truth which can be universally acknowledged.

Another critic points out that Larkin wrote a group of poems which insist harshly on fear in the face of death, and which are therefore bleak and sinister. In some of these poems, Larkin's view of death is chilling and effective because of the very ordinariness and everyday settings he writes about. For instance, in the poem Ambulances, he emphasizes the omnipresence of death in the line: "All streets in time are visited." His poem Aubade proves that nothing can defeat or mitigate the horror and permanence of death.

According to another critic , what gives to the poem Ambulances its impressive authority is its relentless insistence that "all streets in time are visited," and its closing assertion that to be taken away by an ambulance "brings closer what is left to come,/And dulls to distance all we are." This poem is able to arrive at that comprehensive realism only by concentrating simultaneously on the particularity of the lives in question, namely the lives of the children on steps or on the road, and of the women "coming from the shops, past smells of different dinners." The reference to smells of different dinners leads unexpectedly to a moment of heightened intensity, while its seemingly mundane quality strengthens the sense of common destiny which follows in the line: "so permanent and blank and true." The phrase "solving emptiness" a little before this line functions enigmatically and ambiguously since the word "solving" can be interpreted as both resolving and dissolving. The poem seems to speak with timeless and universal wisdom, and yet its ideas are those of a very distinctive agnostic consciousness. Larkin's support to late twentieth-century agnosticism is evident not just in the poem's residual religious vocabulary ("Closed like confessions" or "Poor soul, they whisper....") but also in the conviction that individual lives are both "random" and "unique". What gives that individual life a claim upon the reader's attention is "what cohered in it across/The years." In the absence of a more sustaining and unifying belief, the speakers in Larkin's poems resort to the secular principle of coherence. This notion of coherence, however, is not only a pseudo-religious principle; it is also an idea which is central to English political liberalism and to the underlying aspirations of post-war consensus. (It is this search for coherence that gives scope and momentum to what many commentators regard as Larkin's finest poem. The Whitsun Weddings).

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IntroductionAmbulances is, in its totality, a celebration of the values of consciousness. It modestly and devoutly collects evidence of ordinary life to create a truth which can be universally acknowledged. The poem is a depressing one. The very title suggests something saddening. Ambulances drive through a city street, and stop to pick up a critically...

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Analysis

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Philip Larkin's "Ambulances" exemplifies the hollowness of life in the face of death.The poet's ease and conversational tone is juxtaposed with the eeriness of reality. Calvin Bedient asserts:"Larkin is unillusioned with a metaphysical zero in his bones. "Ambulances" highlights the pragmatics of life and contrasts it with the inevitability of death.

The symbol of the ambulance at once emblematizes death. They are like 'closed confessionals'. Sitting in the ambulance, one is like an open book outpouring all the woes of life mentally and is ultimately resigned to fate. In both the ambulance and the confessional, the last resort is submitting oneself to God. When apprehended as a symbol of death, it is indeed 'closed' as Death possesses no openings. The 'silence' of death is juxtaposed against the 'loud noons of the cities.' The noon is glaring and so are the glances that the ambulance receives. However, it does not return any of these stares as it is totally apathetic to the practicalities of life. The phrase "Light glossy grey" though it refers to the colours of the ambulance, they may also allude to the various stages in life. The Light, the infant stage; the Glossy, the prime of youth; and the grey, the aged individual. It reiterates how individuals in all walks of life are vulnerable to the universal phenomenon, and :"All streets in time are visited." The ambulance may come to rest on any kerb, any person may be the victim regardless of criteria. It may be children strewn on steps or road, or ladies coming from shops amongst the smells of dinner. People consume 'dinner' or food as a basic prerequisite to life; here the smell of it lingers as Death holds the centre stage. Bodies are carried away only to be 'stowed' away like the blankets. The colour 'red' signifying blood and the 'white' face add to the gloomy atmosphere of the poem.

The 'solving emptiness' stresses the existential dilemma of man. His doings and achievements are reduced to nihilism in the confrontation with death. People reaffirm the truth for a second as it dawns on them with its omnipotent force.

"So permanent and blank and true."It is a persistent reality,as much as it is blank and hollowly secretive. As the doors of the ambulance unfasten, people exclaim in sympathy. However, this sympathy is more than empathy; it is directed at themselves, who may perhaps be the next victims.

In the fourth stanza, the poet shifts the scene to the interior of the ambulance. The patient senses the sudden "shut of loss," the fear that death is around the corner. One wonders when Death is portrayed as a universal phenomenon; he projects the victims of death in this poem predominantly as women. Perhaps his misogynistic views attribute to this aspect. The last defining moment of the poem, also has the woman apprehending the unavoidable fear. Perhaps, is the poet suggesting that fear is essentially feminine? She is cut off from familial ties that are the dearest to her, and all ideas of fashion pale into insignificance here. Individual tastes and differences no longer matter. The poet is slightly satiric here. In his &

#8220;Whitsun Weddings" also, he projects women as "parodies of fashion." The victim is far from the 'exchange of love', distanced from the give and take of love. The 'traffic parts' are side-stepped: all the directions and guidances received in life are of no consequence on the threshold of Death.

"And dulls to distance all we are."

On an encounter with Ambulances, we are left with a sense of desolation and are isolated as Death is. All sense of materialism is reduced to naught.
©Rukhaya MK 2010 The content is the copyright of Rukhaya MK. Any line reproduced from the article has to be appropriately documented by the reader. ©Rukhaya MK. All rights reserved.

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Philip Larkin's "Ambulances" exemplifies the hollowness of life in the face of death.The poet's ease and conversational tone is juxtaposed with the eeriness of reality. Calvin Bedient asserts:"Larkin is unillusioned with a metaphysical zero in his bones. "Ambulances" highlights the pragmatics of life and contrasts it with the inevitability of death.

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Interesting analysis

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In general, most of Larkin's poems leaned towards the myopic and the miserable, and it is no wonder to discover that, as Larkin grew older, his focus in writing turned from an exploration of the minutae of living towards a rumination on death; although he'd covered the topic in one way or another throughout previous works, later poems of his, such as 'Ambulance' gave it a far more nuanced look. Larkin was fascinated by the idea of the human condition - death is a part of that condition, and its randomness, closeness, and inevitability are all themes that Larkin found especially interesting to analyze. 'Ambulances' is one such poem, written for the collection 'The Whitsun Weddings'.

'Ambulances' is an exploration of the pervading sense of death that occurs in constrained societies; in cities, especially, death is ever-present due to the differing ages of the population, the inherent risk of city life, and other factors. Although nowadays, death is far less common than it was in, say, the Medieval era, there is still a stigma and a fear surrounding the question of death, and it is perhaps this reason that led Larkin to exploring it in poetry.

'Ambulances' follows the route of an ambulance through rush hour in the city, chartering its course and its meaning.

Stanza 1

From the opening stanza of the poem, which can be read in full here, Larkin makes a point of showing how elite, almost, ambulances are - they are 'closed like confessionals', implying a privacy and a divinity to an ambulance, and indeed, to death itself; as vehicles, they are hardly considered sacred, but for Larkin, in this moment, they are. There is something mysterious and pervasive about an ambulance, and the way Larkin writes about it puts it apart from everything else - it 'threads / loud noons of cities, giving back / none of the glances they absorb', and seems to be almost floating along the road, never quite touching the living population. It brings to mind a kelpie or a siren, a wailing woman who is only seen upon the moment of death.

However, Larkin points out that 'all streets in time are visited', thereby proving that there is no real triumph over death. Everyone is going the same way, regardless of whether or not they want to go there.

Stanza 2

The moment of death is captured outside of the viewer; it is transformed through the eyes of 'children strewn on steps or road, / Or women coming from the shops', and because it has suddenly become a sideshow, it contrasts and conflicts with the previous stanza, where the ambulance was written about as a 'confessional'. Although death is, itself, a very private moment, there are always those on the fringe edges that catch sight of it, and stand, and gawk.

Notice the dehumanization of the word 'it', and how Larkin focuses not on the actual corpse, but on the stretcher, always skirting around the issue of death, never quite approaching it head on.

Stanza 3

The 'solving emptiness / That lies just under all we do', writes Larkin. For Larkin, at least in this stanza, he questions why we bother doing the things we do; there is no point to life, as we will all wind up dead and in the ground at the end of it, sooner or later. However, Larkin's point is that this is not something known to people, and it is only when we are witness or around death that it occurs to us that there is an end to life, an end to existence, there is a blank nothingness to follow (something that Larkin was particularly afraid of) our lives.

Stanza 4

However, Larkin does not merely write that life ends, and there is nothing after; he first points out what the end of life means - 'the unique random blend / of families and fashions'. At the end of life, that is all that is left of a person: their family, and their habits, their memories strewn across a generation or two. It could be argued that there is not, in fact, any sort of emptiness, however this is not a point that Larkin explores - it is not something that the dead person understands, or knows, after they are gone, and this is specifically about death in all its self-centered application; death as an experience only for the deceased, and not for the people who struggle on afterwards.

Stanza 5

In the final stanza, Larkin finally explains what death is: 'the exchange of love to lie / unreachable inside a room'; even the power of love, and life, and family, cannot push death aside, and it is the ultimate fate of man to die. Here, the ambulance is referenced again , in 'the traffic parks to let go by'; it is the room that puts the people who have died 'unreachable' to all the things that they lived for; however, this is not the only point that the ambulance makes. Larkin references it as a kind of omen, stating that it 'brings closer what is left to come, / And dulls to distance all we are.' As a reminder of death, the ambulance reminds us all that we are not immortal, and we will not survive forever.

The final stanza also points out that every brush with death we experience - however indistinct - further isolates us, makes us introspective, and forces us to ruminate on our own experiences, our own lives, our own fragile existence.

Part of Larkin's fear of death stems from the disease that Monica Jones, his friend, and eventual girlfriend, suffered from in 1983. Her symptoms were so severe, effecting so much of her life, that regular care became a necessary evil for her, and she moved into Larkin's home so that he could tend to her. Two years later, Philip Larkin himself began to suffer from symptoms of oesophageal cancer, and he died on 2 December 1985, at the age of 63, after having collapsed just the previous month.

He is buried at Cottingham municipal cemetery, near Hull, close to the entrance.

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In general, most of Larkin's poems leaned towards the myopic and the miserable, and it is no wonder to discover that, as Larkin grew older, his focus in writing turned from an exploration of the minutae of living towards a rumination on death; although he'd covered the topic in one way or another throughout previous works, later poems of his, such as 'Ambulance' gave it a far more nuanced look.

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The poem (online)

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Comments & analysis: Closed like confessionals, they thread / Loud noons of cities, giving back / None of the g

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2014

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2012

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2014

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"The cultural context can have a significant influence on the behaviour of the central character/characters in a text. Compare the way in which the behaviour of the central characters in at least two of your texts is influenced by the cultural context of those texts. Great essay on gender, religion and money. Plain and clear - and thus en route to a H1. Some polish required though: make sure you figure out the apostrophes. The Kinsellas are John and Edna Kinsella. The Kinsella's house is John or Edna Kinsella's house. The Kinsellas' house is John and Edna Kinsella's house. I would also throw in a few simple quotes for good measure.
#625Lab You may also like: General Vision and Viewpoint in "Foster", "The Plough and The Stars" and "I'm Not Scared" A review of "Foster" in the Telegraph Complete Guide to Leaving Cert English (€)
The cultural context refers to the world in which a text is set, where the action occurs. However, it i...

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Philip Larkin: Realities of Ordinary Life and Lyrical Beauty

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"The cultural context can have a significant influence on the behaviour of the central character/characters in a text. Compare the way in which the behaviour of the central characters in at least two of your texts is influenced by the cultural context of those texts. Great essay on gender, religion and money.

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Interesting analysis of the poem

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'The Trees' was written by Philip Larkin in June 1967, and published seven years later in his final collection, High Windows. One of Larkin's most popular lyrics about nature, 'The Trees' is at once a celebration of nature and a poem about death. You can read 'The Trees' here; read on for our analysis of it.

In summary, first, then: the first stanza observes that the trees are growing their leaves again, yet goes on to remark that the trees' 'greenness' is 'a kind of grief'. The second stanza then explains why this is so: although the trees appear to be 'born again' each year with the flowering of their new leaves, the trees do in fact age just as we do, and, eventually, they die, too. Their age is 'written down' in the rings in the trunk of the tree. In the third stanza, Larkin reflects that, despite this fact, the trees - described grandly as 'unresting castles' - go on, their leaves growing back full each year. There is a suggestion in this final stanza of starting over 'afresh' and not dwelling on the past - assuming we take Larkin's poem to be about more than just the trees' cycle of flowering and shedding, and extend his metaphor to encompass our own attitudes to living.

And indeed, we are encouraged to see our lives and the lives of the trees as related. Note the way Larkin uses human activities throughout this poem, to personify the trees: they come into leaf like something 'almost being said'; their age is 'written down' in their rings of grain; the trees 'seem to say' that last year is in the past, so begin 'afresh, afresh, afresh'. The repetition of this word in the poem's final line suggests the swaying of the trees' leaves in the wind, a soft sibilant sound. It is as if the very words of this last line are almost like 'something being said' - as if Larkin's poem is emulating the sound the trees make.

The abba stanza structure also echoes the cyclical nature of the trees, coming into leaf every spring only to lose their leaves in the autumn. Yet the elegiac tone that haunts the poem - the trees, like us, are destined to die - is also arguably reflected by this choice of rhyme scheme and metre, both of which echo the abba quatrains of the greatest elegy of the nineteenth century, Tennyson's In Memoriam. So, through this inspired choice of stanza form, Larkin uses rhyme and metre to reflect both the cyclical world of nature and the awareness that death still exists in this world of renewal and rebirth.

'The Trees' is a brief lyric that examines our own mortality, and running counter to that, our determination to carry on despite (or perhaps because of) this knowledge that our time is limited. It is one of Larkin's finest poems about the natural world, but it is also about us, too.

'The Trees' is one of many, many gems to be discovered in Philip Larkin: Collected Poems . We thoroughly recommending getting hold of this volume.
Image: Trees coming into leaf (picture credit: Malcolm Etherington), via Wikimedia Commons.

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A Short Analysis of Philip Larkin's 'The Trees'

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A summary of a classic Larkin poem 'The Trees' was written by Philip Larkin in June 1967, and published seven years later in his final collection, High Windows. One of Larkin's most popular lyrics about nature, 'The Trees' is at once a celebration of nature and a poem about death.

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Lovely animation based on the poem

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The Trees is one of Larkin's most famous and best-loved poems. In it, the poet equates the renewal of the seasons with death and pain: "Their greenness is a kind of grief", he writes. But while it is regularly called one of the greatest poems about Spring, Larkin's own feelings about The Trees were more ambivalent.

As his colleague James Booth explains in his article on England's miserable genius, Larkin was aware that the emotional uplift of The Trees would make it popular. But he himself dismissed it as "very corny", and even "bloody awful tripe".

Watch this beautiful animation created by Lucy Izzard for BBC Culture and see what you think.
The Trees, by Philip Larkin
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

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A beautiful animation of Philip Larkin's The Trees

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The Trees is one of Larkin's most famous and best-loved poems. In it, the poet equates the renewal of the seasons with death and pain: "Their greenness is a kind of grief", he writes. But while it is regularly called one of the greatest poems about Spring, Larkin's own feelings about The Trees were more ambivalent.

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The poem (online)

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Comments & analysis: The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said;

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Poem read by the poet

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Philip Larkin "The Trees" READ BY THE POET HIMSELF

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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too, Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain.

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Notes on the poem

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Poet reading the poem

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The poem (online)

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- Philip Larkin. This is the last poem in his 1964 book The Whitsun Weddings, which I imagine is still available somewhere.

I only recently discovered Philip Larkin; I came across a mention of him in a story or novel I was reading, I don't remember which, googled him (coming across the incredible Aubade: do yourself a favour and read this poem aloud. It is the most incredible linguistic experience I've had for awhile) and proceeded to shake down my mother's bookshelves for stuff with him in it. I eventually hit upon The Whitsun Weddings and rushed through it, reading bits aloud, stopping and stepping back the way you have to with poetry (never just read something once, no point at all).

This is the final poem in The Whitsun Weddings and apparently it's rather jaded (Wikipedia has a few wonderful quotes describing Larkin as "the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket" with "a very English, glum accuracy"). I suppose so, I suppose you could say that about "Aubade" as well (whereas I find "Aubade" completely devastating and wholly restoring: it has that quality of the best of poetry that precisely captures your own feelings and describes them so well that you no longer feel alone). But I find "An Arundel Tomb" quite lovely, although Larkin's cynicism certainly comes across. "The stone finality/They hardly meant", he insists.

But he can't help himself with that lovely last four lines.I think that's what really charms me: you have such a good idea of what Larkin wants you to think ("Oh, those cynical folks who made that tomb and wanted their names to be remembered, but really this is all that remains of them: their hands clasped, a last romantic gesture by rich people to make themselves look good dead"), or what, perhaps, the poem wants to think; but you equally can't help being moved by the image it presents, feeling the "sharp tender shock" of their attitude. The tomb, he says, in spite of itself, presents us with this idyllic, almost soppily romantic notion of love lasting; yet because the poem reflects the tomb (or Larkin's experience) so well, it does the same, against its better (or more curmudgeonly) judgment.

Tags: tuesday poem

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Tuesday Poem: "An Arundel Tomb", by Philip Larkin

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An Arundel Tomb Side by side, their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone, Their proper habits vaguely shown As jointed armour, stiffened pleat, And that faint hint of the absurd-- The little dogs under their feet. Such plainess of the pre-baroque Hardly involves the eye, until It meets his left hand...

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The Earl of Arundel & his second wife Eleanor

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Poem ppt

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Some notes

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Some analysis

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Philip Larkin was what was known as a poet of the Movement. His poetry and poems, such as The Whitsun Weddings, was written in such a way that it reflected the lack of importance of Britain in a post-war world, and also echoed the changes that Britain was going through. The shift from a mostly-rural to a mostly-urban economy was also something that Larkin touched upon, as well as the idea of Britain being a little bit outdated in terms of technology and innovation. Larkinian poems are never about a bright future, but always hinting at an unhappiness that is just below the surface.

Postwar ennui in Britain reached an all-time high in the years following 1945. Britain was an economic mess - suffering from the loss of their colonies, austerity measures, and a staggering debt that the war had pressed it under. This was echoed, partly, in the poetry of the time. Poetry written then was all about looking back to better days, getting back to the idea of the brave and noble Great Britain of kingdoms and Queen Victoria. It was all about nostalgia; a sense of belonging that had been stamped out of England by this point. Here is a summary and analysis of Larkin's poem The Whitsun Weddings, where you can read the poem in full here.

Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings was the title of one of his books of poetry, published in 1964. It is one of his longest poems, at eight stanzas of ten lines each, and it describes a train journey from Kingston upon Hull through the countryside. As the train churns through the heatwave that the narrator describes, he gradually expands his view to take in the people that are around him, including a wedding party that is seeing couples boarding the train. The Narrator thinks, for a little bit, about the people and their response to the wedding, cynically breaking them down into their appearances. As the train moves southward, he turns instead to the newlywed, and considers the hugeness of what they have done, and how ultimately, it is only a big deal to the couple getting married.

Like with all Larkin poems, The Whitsun Weddings is melancholy and bitter, with a vague sense that nothing will ever be right.

Stanza 1

Larkinian poems focus on microcosm worlds, full of the daily hustle and bustle of people getting about their business. In the opening, the narrator's life is measured in numbers: one-twenty, for time, three-quarters-empty for the train; he creates, in the space of a few lines, this world that, at once, seems both important and hurried, as well as empty and slightly sad.

Larkin also had a tendency to write on trains for quite a few of his poems, as he found that this gave him the opportunity to observe life without participating in it. Larkin has always been, first and foremost, an observer and a note-taker of life; a librarian of the moments, but not really taking part in it.

Stanza 2

English countryside was considered - both in poetry, and beyond - to be some of the most beautiful that the world has seen. England poetry, in particular nature poetry, had been built on this idea of the English countryside. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in The Herefordshire Landscape:

A ripple of land; such little hills, the sky
Can stoop to tenderly and the wheatfields climb;
Such nooks of valleys, lined with orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams;
And open pastures, where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew, - at intervals
The mythic oaks and elm-trees standing out
Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade, -

The notion of the Romantic countryside, according to Larkin, has been sullied by the presence of modernization: the canals 'with floating of industrial froth' with towns 'new and nondescript, / approached with acres of dismantled cars'. Ironically, although Larkin abhorred the Romantic ideal of the nature and the countryside, Robert Rehder believed that Larkin had more in common with the Romantics than he wanted there to be. His focus on the individual consciousness - as it seen in The Whitsun Weddings - and on isolation is a very Romantic notion.

Note also the misery in those lines, the despair of a defaced countryside. At the time, England's landscape was gently changing from mostly-rural to mostly-urban: a huge influx of people had moved out of London during World War II, afraid of being bombed, but after the war, they moved back in droves. The increasing joblessness made further droves of people move after them, thus leaving England in a patchwork state of being, one that Larkin echoes in his poem. There is something miserable and scrabbled about the English countryside that Larkin is writing about now.

Stanza 3

Larkin believed that he needed to be aloof in order to write poetry, which was chiefly concerned with man - however, Larkin had a general distaste for the people he saw, labelling, for example, people as 'sullen flesh inarticulate' and 'ageing and bitter'. He is too aloof from the audience he wants to communicate with. Note the way that he refers to the girls 'in parodies of fashion, heels and veils / all posed irresolutely', making them into waxwork people, making them frozen in place, and more like mannequins than human beings.

Stanza 4

Here again, Larkin attempts to individualize them, however the use of plurals - 'fathers', 'mothers' - suggests sameness. The speaker seems to be describing them from an omniscient standpoint, however the attempt to describe them in broad terms, and the use of the plural form, is reductive in its capacity. Andrew Crozier wrote, about this poem, "the people are generalized through grotesque detail which is away on the verge of registering distaste."

Larkin once famously wrote that he wanted to write poetry that "offered something nothing else could, something more than reading, watching television or going out with some girl ... compulsive contact between reader and writer." However, this very distance that he laboured under leads the people he writes about to become parodies. By leaning on stereotype, he reduces them to nothing more than cardboard place settings.

As Foucault wrote, Larkin's writing "functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection" where he turns the individual into something he can describe and analyse, whilst trying to maintain individuality. In Larkin's poems, however, whole sections of people blend together.

Stanza 5

Larkin's description of the wedding and the chaos surrounding the event is as minimizing as his description of people. By painting the wedding party with a broad brush, he makes the event itself seem ordinary. Although there is chaos and movement in this stanza, Larkin's writing makes it seem as though it is playing in stop-motion, moving so slowly and so painfully that it has no hope of changing. Despite the fact that Larkin is writing about life, his poems have a distinct lack of living creatures in it.

Furthermore, the wedding is placed as something ordinary. Colin Falck, a Larkinian critic, called this the "ever-deepening acceptance of the ordinariness of things as they are", and it is the most apt description for the way that Larkin writes. His poetry takes things and makes them ordinary and commonplace, and it is partially due to the fact that Larkin strove to write simple poetry. By writing his simple poetry, he makes everything as ordinary as possible.

Stanza 6

The movement from detachment to involvement is documented particularly in this stanza. Larkin goes into more detail here, though again reducing the people that he's describing by painting them with a broad brush. The train finally starts to move again, pulling Larkin away from his introspection about the ladies and the wedding party, but for a brief few stanzas, Larkin's involvement in their lives led the reader to also become involved in their lives, thus opening up the poem on a secondary level. It is also worth pointing out the innate misery of the words - notice, for example, the way the landscape is described here:

'Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast / Long shadows over major roads, and for / some fifty minutes, that in time would seem'

The countryside is dying, pockmarked by modernity.

Stanza 7

It is worth noting that more personality is given to the inanimate British countryside - of which we get only description - than is giving to the people that Larkin strove to describe. This is a particularly Larkinian trait - objects have a far more involving personality than people, for Larkin. In The Whitsun Weddings, almost every line goes on about the British countryside, its ruination, and the buildings that are causing said ruination, whereas the people are painted with one big brush, marking them out as materialistic, wedding-mad, and loud, with a distinctly classist way of writing about them that makes them seem as though they're lower-class. The countryside, on the other hand, is lovingly described, and its presence in the poem can be felt far more acutely than the people whom Larkin tried to describe earlier.

Stanza 8

For Larkin, the poet depended on his readers, and when a poet is abandoned, it is not entirely the readers' fault. Modernism gets the blame for making poetry too obscure for the average reader, thus lessening the poet's range. Larkin attempts to reach what he calls the 'cut-price crowd' in his poems, i.e. those who might not have an interest in poetry as such but lean towards materiality. His reader is the reader who has 'no room for books' an who prefers the 'jabbering set'. He asserted that 'the public for poetry is larger than we think, and waiting to be found if we look in the right places'.

His poems are like dialogues - there is someone talking and the assumption of someone listening and understanding. For Larkin, poetry was business, and rock and roll and sex moved the younger generation, not poetry, which he could not compete with. He also believed that his readers refused to meet him halfway and wouldn't give the poem a chance.

In all his poems, therefore, there is this attempt to reach out to people. It is usually in the final stanza, such as in The Whitsun Weddings, that this attempt to reach out dwindles down to nothing: to a hopeless, melancholy, fleeting presence of emotion.

As was quoted in the Paris Review of 1982, "my life is as simple as I can make it."

Larkin was a bachelor who worked as a university librarian in Hull. He never attended paraliterary/cultural activities (such as poetry readings, lectures and talks) and ignored and disliked foreign literature. He never went abroad, though he loved jazz and frequently reviewed it in the 60s. He preferred his own company, but he was popular with people because of his insistence on communicating with his readers - and writing in layman's terms. His poems are ambiguous, but never obscure, and the world we find in Larkin is the world we live in, after all, and hint at a happiness that is far beyond our scope.
Larkin was born in 1922, Coventry and went to Oxford. He graduated with a first in English language and literature and started to work as a librarian. For the first eight years of his life, he was educated at home, with little contact to the outside world, and thus developed a stammer.

Larkin saw himself as an artist, and therefore believed that the audience he was trying to reach could not understand him, even with his best attempts at communicating with them.

He published two novels, multiple books of poetry, and won accolades including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He also edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, and turned down the position of Poet Laureate for England in 1984, following the death of John Betjeman. Larkin died on the 2nd December, 1985, in Hull, from oesophageal cancer. He was buried at Cottingham municipal cemetery, and there is a bronze statue dedicated to him at Hull Station.

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Analysis of The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin

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Philip Larkin was what was known as a poet of the Movement. His poetry and poems, such as The Whitsun Weddings, was written in such a way that it reflected the lack of importance of Britain in a post-war world, and also echoed the changes that Britain was going through.

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The poem (online)

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Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.

Taken from The Complete Poems © Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber

Cut grass quietly expires as June bursts with vitality. Death is a leaking away of life. The absence of a full stop at the end of the first verse carries that dying over two verses to the end. Indeed the whole poem is only two sentences, a colon-hinged, staccato first one and an expansive second that opens its sounds and...

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Cut grass lies frail: Brief is the breath Mown stalks exhale. Long, long the death It dies in the white hours Of young-leafed June With chestnut flowers, With hedges snowlike strewn, White lilac bowed, Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace, And that high-builded cloud Moving at summer's pace.

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Poem ppt

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Notes on Poem

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Poem read by poet himself

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"Cut Grass" poem by Philip Larkin READ BY THE POET HIMSELF

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Cut Grass Cut grass lies frail: Brief is the breath Mown stalks exhale. Long, long the death It dies in the white hours Of young-leafed June With chestnut flowers, With hedges snowlike strewn, White lilac bowed, Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace, And that high-builded cloud Moving at summer's pace.

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Notes on poem

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Notes on poem

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The poem (online)

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Comments & analysis: The eye can hardly pick them out / From the cold shade they shelter in, / Till wind distre

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Dramatic Reading

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At Grass by Philip Larkin (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

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Philip Larkin was photographed by Godfrey Argent, 19 June 1968 Pictures from Living Legends The International Home of Rest for Champion Horses http://www.livinglegends.org.au/ The eye can hardly pick them out From the cold shade they shelter in, Till wind distresses tail and main; Then one crops grass, and moves about

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Some notes

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The poem (online)

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Comments & analysis: The wind blew all my wedding-day, / And my wedding-night was the night of the high wind;

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The poem (online)

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The Whitsun Weddings | poetryarchive.org

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The Whitsun Weddings That Whitsun, I was late getting away: Not till about One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out, All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense Of being in a hurry gone.

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Larkin reads the poem

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Philip Larkin - 'The Whitsun Weddings' (1964)

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Philip Larkin reads his beautiful title poem from 'The Whitsun Weddings', a collection published in 1964, not '65 as stated in the video. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy it, and please feel free to leave a comment. I do not own any rights to the recording.

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Interesting analysis of poem

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'The Whitsun Weddings' is the title poem in Philip Larkin's 1964 volume of poems. The poem, describing a journey from Hull to London on the Whitsun weekend and the wedding parties that Larkin sees climbing aboard the train at each station, is one of Larkin's longest great poems and one of his most popular. You can read 'The Whitsun Weddings' here; what follows are some words of analysis of the poem's language and meaning.

Although 'The Whitsun Weddings' describes a train journey from Hull to London during the Whitsun weekend (the seventh Sunday after the Easter weekend is Whit Sunday), the inspiration for the poem was a train journey Philip Larkin undertook on the August Bank Holiday weekend between Hull and Loughborough, the midlands town where his mother lived, in 1956. Larkin fictionalises this actual journey, and relocates the terminus for his journey to London rather than Loughborough, so that he - and we - end up in the nation's capital. Larkin began the poem in 1956, but it wasn't until October 1958 that he would finally complete it.

In summary, Larkin outlines his departure from Hull and his subsequent train journey on a sunny Saturday on the Whitsun weekend. The first two stanzas describe the early stages of this journey, with Larkin itemising the details glimpsed from his train window. It's not until the third stanza that Larkin realises that, when the train stops at each station, newlywed couples are boarding the train, with friends and relations cheering the newly married brides and grooms. These were the days when many newlyweds would, after their wedding, get the train down to London, so they could then begin their honeymoons (whether by getting a connecting train in the capital to a south coast resort, or, less likely in the days before cheap package holidays, catching a plane at Heathrow to their honeymoon destination abroad). Larkin admits that he had actually mistaken the sounds of merriment from the wedding guests for whoops and other noises from the station porters, and it is only gradually that he comes to realise the pattern of wedding parties at each railway station.

The itemising then continues in the ensuing stanzas, but this time it is the members of these wedding parties that draw Larkin's observant attention: the fathers with their 'broad belts', the 'loud and fat' mothers, the rather uncouth uncle who is 'shouting smut'. This may be high poetry, but it's not far removed from a Peter Kay stand-up comedy routine about the types of people we all recognise from weddings. (The reference to the colours of the women's dresses which mark them off 'unreally from the rest' is close to Larkin's critique of women's clothes and our attitudes to beauty in 'The Large Cool Store', which we've analysed here.) The poem concludes with the train arriving at its destination in London.

Is 'The Whitsun Weddings' a celebration of marriage? The poem seems ambivalent. An analysis of the terms Larkin uses in reference to marriage reveals some scepticism on Larkin's part: the guests wave goodbye to the departing train as if bidding farewell to 'something that survived' the wedding service itself ('survived' suggesting perhaps another of Larkin's great meditations on love, 'An Arundel Tomb'). The wedding is referred to as 'a happy funeral', as if weddings and funerals share more than simply their status as religious ceremonies: the wedding, too, is a farewell ceremony. Bidding farewell to what? To single life, to the youthful phase of their lives, perhaps even to the bride's virginity. After all, the marriage, or perhaps more specifically the consummation of the marriage on the wedding night, is 'a religious wounding'. But the poem is a little more cagey than this. The first two of these three 'negative' descriptions of marriage are offered in the form of subjunctive phrases (' As if out on the end...'; ' like a happy funeral'). I'm not saying that marriage is a sort of inverted funeral, Larkin's speaker seems to say, but that it might be viewed like this.

As with many of Larkin's poems, it's the little local details that make 'The Whitsun Weddings' such a memorable evocation of England in the post-war era. James Wood, in his excellent book How Fiction Works, recalls a teacher friend of his who would give his students Larkin's poem with key words blacked out. The students would have to guess what the missing word is. In the phrase 'A hothouse flashed uniquely', the teacher blacked out that final word. None of his students ever opted for that particular adverb: 'uniquely', as Wood puts it, is unique. This detail underscores the sense that, for all of these people getting married on this Saturday, this Whitsun weekend is a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience. By virtue of sharing the train journey with them, Larkin catches a residual sense of this feeling of uniqueness, of something special happening. An analysis of the 'unique' features in 'The Whitsun Weddings' reveal just how much care and thought went into the selection of such details.

Similarly, the reference to 'someone running up to bowl', viewed from the window of the passing train, captures something which many of us have witnessed but haven't necessarily taken much notice of. As James Booth puts it in his biography of Larkin, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love, 'Everyone who has travelled on a train in England in summer has seen this bowler, snatched from sight before his run-up is complete.' Yet, Booth goes on to argue, it is only the poet who sees the significance in such moments. It is, we might suggest, another variation on the poem's general theme: that of sharing in other people's lives but catching only a partial glimpse of them, a few frames from the whole film of their lives. We never see what happens to that cricket ball, and we never learn what happens to all of those marriages after the wedding day. In the original drafts of the poem, as Larkin revealed on The South Bank Show in 1982, he began to imagine what the various couples would go on to do after their wedding-day, but he abandoned this line. Yet this idea of different lives intersecting thanks to the coincidence of sharing a train one Saturday is preserved in the journey to London described towards the end of the poem.

It might also be significant that the poem focuses on saying goodbye, on leaving things behind: Larkin is leaving Hull behind at the start of the poem (he had moved to Hull in 1955, and would live and work in the city for the rest of his life); the newlyweds are leaving behind their loved ones and climbing aboard the train, taking their first steps on their new life together; their families are waving them off from the platform. The wedding ceremony itself is over, and these newlyweds' lives will soon reassert their ordinariness, and this special day will be over ('the wedding-days / Were coming to an end'). And then we have that final image of the whole poem, which sees Larkin likening the brakes of the train as it pulls into its London terminus to an 'arrow-shower' that is already 'somewhere becoming rain'.

This image is troubling, and resists any easy or glib analysis. The poem begins with reference to 'sunlit Saturday'; it ends, right on its last word, with 'rain'. 'Sun' is present, by chance, in the poem's very title, 'The Whit sun Weddings'. But Cupid's arrow, that symbol of love, is already morphing into rain, with all its connotations of the everyday drab world we inhabit most of the time. Or should this rain be understood in the context of the other life-giving images of abundance and fertility we see towards the close of the poem, such as Larkin's reference to the postal districts of London being like 'squares of wheat'? (Are those arrows, and that falling rain, even a veiled allusion to what will happen on the wedding night?) Given Larkin's own views on marriage - he himself never married, and was sceptical of the institution to say the least - it's tempting to see the rain in terms of loss and tragedy, as if Larkin is already aware of the truth that those wedding guests, and the couples themselves, are striving to keep at bay, namely that the rest of their married life will not live up to the promise of this day. But this overlooks Larkin's ability to capture, explore, and analyse a range of different attitudes in his poetry: he is capable of writing poems in praise of marriage (albeit for other people rather than as a reflection of his own views) as well as poems that are sceptical of people's reasons for marrying (see 'Self's the Man', the poem he wrote a couple of weeks after he completed 'The Whitsun Weddings').

We can analyse 'The Whitsun Weddings' as a celebration of marriage, albeit one that is tempered by Larkin's own scepticism towards marriage, love, and relationships. It is partly the enigmatic and ambiguous nature of the images and tone of the poem which make the poem so richly complex, however we prefer to interpret its 'message'.

Continue to explore Larkin's work with our discussion of his poem about the English countryside, and our compendium of Larkin facts; alternatively, discover more classic wedding poems here.
Image: Larkin with Gin & Tonic, 1961; photographer unknown. First published in Selected Letters, edited by Anthony Thwaite. ViaSimon K on Flickr (share-alike licence).

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A Short Analysis of Philip Larkin's 'The Whitsun Weddings'

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A summary of a classic Larkin poem 'The Whitsun Weddings' is the title poem in Philip Larkin's 1964 volume of poems. The poem, describing a journey from Hull to London on the Whitsun weekend and the wedding parties that Larkin sees climbing aboard the train at each station, is one of Larkin's longest great poems...

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"Wedding Wind"

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"Wedding Wind"

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Annotated poems from the board

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The man himself...

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“I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.” ― Philip Larkin

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“I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.” ― Philip Larkin

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What does this tell us about the poet?