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A critical analysis of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ Philip Larkin was the leader of group of poets in the 1950s who called themselves ‘The movement’. They were concerned with conveying the traditional forms of everyday life into their work through straight forward language. Making ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ very similar to other poems who wrote around this time, namely ‘Here’ and ‘Mr. Bleaney’ among others. Many couples chose to marry on the Saturday preceding Whitsunday. This was due to there being a tax advantage if one happens to get married in the month of May. So in this poem Larkin is describing couples joining him on the train from Hull, where he was working as a librarian, to London. Each having had their wedding ceremony in the morning and were now beginning their honeymoons. Throughout the poem the train moves from the town to the countryside and then into an industrial city. Through each scene he vividly describes this with his simple but evocative language. To begin with he is in Hull with the smell of the ‘fish docks’ and as the train moves the sight of the ‘backs of houses’ and ‘blinding windscreens’. We picture him here looking out of the window of the train and on this ‘sunlit’ day sitting on his hot cushion. We sense the slow relaxed pace of the train with no cares in the world merely the sun reflecting off parked car windscreens. This for me emphasise a sluggish, still pace of the day linked with the pace of the train which is to stop many times through the course of the afternoon on the way to London.
Approximate Word count = 1032
Approximate Pages = 4.1
(250 words per page double spaced)
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