"The Whitsun Weddings" is one of the best known poems by British poet Philip Larkin. It was written and rewritten and finally published in the 1964 collection of poems, also called The Whitsun Weddings.
It is one of three poems that Larkin wrote about train journeys.
The poem comprises eight stanzas of ten lines, making it one of his longest poems. The rhyming scheme is a,b,a,b,c,d,e,c,d,e - (a rhyme scheme used in various of Keats' odes).
Larkin describes a stopping-train journey southwards from Paragon Station, Kingston upon Hull, where Larkin was a librarian at the university, on a hot Whitsun Saturday afternoon. This was based on an actual train journey he made in 1955 on Whitsun Saturday, a day which was popular for weddings at that time.
The poem's narrator describes the scenery and smells of the countryside and towns through which the largely empty train passes. The train's windows are open because of the heat, and he gradually becomes aware of bustle on the platforms at each station, eventually realising that this is the noise and actions of wedding parties that are seeing off couples who are boarding the train.
He notes the different classes of people involved, each with their own responses to the occasion - the fathers, the uncles, the children, the unmarried female relatives. He imagines the venues where the wedding receptions have been held.
As the train continues into London, with the afternoon shadows lengthening, his reflections turn to the permanence of what the newly-weds have done, yet its significance, though huge for them, seems to give him an ultimately disappointing message, suggested by the poem's final phrase
- ...there swelled
- A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
- Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
