 “The Whitsun Weddings” Summary

o It was Whitsun Saturday and I left late. It was a sunny day and
my train departed around 1:20, almost empty. The windows
were open due to the stifling heat, even the seat cushions
were hot, and everything felt very slow. Out of the window, I
saw the backs of houses, the glare of windshields, and I could
smell the fish-dock. We rode beside the wide, flat, slow river,
zooming through the Lincolnshire countryside.

The train kept its steady course all through the hot afternoon,
as we traveled south and inland. We passed big farms with
cows whose shadows were small under the high sun, and
canals full of industrial waste. I saw a greenhouse, and hedges
rising and falling. The carriage had a pretty bad smell from the
cloth, but sometimes the smell of grass overpowered it. Towns
seemed to repeat themselves as we went past, each one
signaled by a scrapyard.

At the beginning of the journey, I didn't notice the weddings

whose noise could be heard from each station. The sun was
too bright for me to see what was happening in the shade of
the platform, and though I could hear a commotion I thought it
was porters mucking around with the mail. I kept reading, but
as the train pulled away I noticed a large group of young
female wedding guests. They were smiling, had elaborate
hair, and were dressed as if in a caricature of contemporary
styles, with heels and veils. They were poised uncertainly on
the platform watching us leave.

It was as though they were witnessing the end of something

that we on the train had survived. Now I was intrigued, so I
took greater notice at the next station and comprehended the
scene more clearly. I saw fat fathers with sweaty heads, loud
overweight mothers, and uncles being rude. Then I noticed
the girls again, with their perms, nylon gloves, and fake
jewelry, and the yellows, pinks, and brown-greens.

These fashion elements separated the girls visually from the

other guests, almost as if they were an illusion. These
numerous weddings—which took place in small halls and cafes
near the train yards, with rooms covered in streamers and full
of coach-loads of guests—were nearly over. At every station,
newlyweds boarded the train while the guests gave last bits of
advice and threw confetti. When we left each station, I read
the faces of those still on the platform, each of which seemed
to say something about the wedding. The children seemed
bored.

For the fathers, this was the biggest success of their lives,
though something about it felt like a joke. The older women
looked like they knew a terrible secret, while the girls seemed
perplexed, holding their purses tighter—perhaps even
intimated by what they saw, as though they'd witnessed
something of fearful religious importance. Pretty soon we left
the guests behind—though we had internalized all their
perspectives—and raced towards London, the train blowing
fits of steam. The environment grew more urbanized, fields
giving way to plots of land being developed, and I noticed
poplar trees casting shadows over the roads.

In that fifty minutes or so, which was just long enough to get
comfortable and reflect on the wedding, all of these new
marriages got started. The newlyweds gazed out of the
window, crammed into the carriage. A cinema, a cooling
 tower, and a cricket game were all visible from the window. I
don't think any of the different couples thought about the
people they would never meet now that they were married, or
how they all were sharing this first hour of their respective
marriages together. As we approached sunny London, our
final destination, I thought of the different areas packed
together like squares of wheat.

We were headed straight for the capital, racing past glinting

rail and stationary train carriages. The sooty, mossy walls of
the city started to surround us and the shared experience was
nearly over. The collective power of these newly-weds was
ready to be unleashed. We slowed and braked, feeling the
gravity as though we were falling like a shower of arrows sent
beyond view, raining down somewhere else.

 “The Whitsun Weddings” Themes

Time, Death, and Impermanence

“The Whitsun Weddings” describes the speaker’s train journey

into London on Whitsun Saturday (a date in summer that was
once a popular choice for weddings). As it does so, the poem
takes an unsentimental look at what it means to be human in
light of the unstoppable forward march of time. Even though
weddings might be thought of as new beginnings, the speaker
draws out the way that all this celebration is ultimately cast in
the light (or shadow) of its impermanence—that is, in the face
of inevitable death.

Before the wedding parties even show up in the poem, the

speaker builds an atmosphere of decay. Looking out upon the
shifting English landscape that passes by the train's windows,
the speaker sees “industrial froth” on the canals. This evokes
the vast shifts in the fabric of society due to modern
industrialization, which was happening at the time of Larkin's
writing. It also suggests the way that human activity wears
down and muddies the world around it. Likewise, the carriage-
cloth of the train, which was ostensibly once pristine and new,
now “reeks” with a bad odor, subtly suggesting rot and
overuse. Later, the speaker sees “acres of dismantled cars”—
objects made defunct by time.

All of these images suggest that the human world cannot stay
fresh for long—an idea that, in turn, comes to affect the later
description of the newlyweds themselves as “Fresh.” That is,
in creating this atmosphere of decay, the poem implies that
even these bright young faces will eventually become worn
out and stale.

At first, however, the wedding parties are vibrant. Marriage is

traditionally one of life’s major events, and the newlyweds and
their guests behave with all the pomp and ceremony of a
momentous occasion. Their enthusiasm reflects the idea of
marriage as a stamp of permanence—of pledging to be
together forever and so on. At the same time, however, the
way the train passes by the wedding parties seems to
highlight that this permanence is just a kind of trick played by
the magnitude of the occasion. That is, however momentous
these events may feel to the participants, they are little more
than fleeting visions that pass by almost as soon as they
appear.

This idea is supported by the description of the wedding

parties initially posed on the platforms “as if out on the end of
an event / Waving goodbye / To something that survived it.”
The young couples’ new beginnings, in their way, signify
their endings—another step away from their youth and
freedom. The poem sums this up in the phrase “happy
funeral”—this is a happy day for many, but this happiness all
too brief.

The speaker then focuses on the balding fathers, the “mothers

loud and fat,” and the “smut[ty]” uncles of the newly-weds—
hinting at the way that the “Fresh” young couples will age and
turn into similar figures. Likewise, the focus on the gaudiness
of the girls’ appearances (their “jewellery-substitutes” and so
on) shows that the pomp of the big day is a kind of temporary
illusion. Indeed, the supposed importance of the wedding day
is undermined by the way that this importance can never last.
That’s why the “success” of these wedding days is, though
“huge,” also “wholly farcical.” Time will continue to move
forward, and, the poem suggests, this happy moment will
soon end; death lurks behind every smile and under every
wedding hat.

Love and Marriage

Larkin’s poetry often takes an unsentimental look at love,

frequently presenting it as little more than a biological
mechanism to ensure the human race’s reproduction. “The
Whitsun Weddings” takes slightly satirical aim at the
artificiality, conformity, and farcical nature of weddings to
undermine the notion of love as some sort of grand, magical,
and everlasting endeavor. In reality, the poem implies,
marriage and love are commonplace and mundane. The poem
thus contrasts the supposed meaningfulness of getting
married (e.g., the big day) with a kind of hollowness at its
core.

The wedding parties don’t appear until the poem’s third

stanza. At first, the speaker doesn’t even realize that all the
commotion he can hear is caused by wedding guests, thinking
it to be something else entirely (showing that, to him at least,
these weddings are not especially important). When
he does take notice, he is taken aback by the sheer number of
weddings that seem to be taking place. This makes them feel
less special and unique, best summed up by the speaker’s
approximate counting of the weddings as adding up to a
“dozen” (a word usually associated, at least in England at the
time, with eggs—something decidedly less than romantic).

It’s also worth considering why the speaker encounters so

many wedding parties on his train journey to London. Whit
Monday, the day after the Whitsun weekend, was a public
bank holiday, making the long weekend a popular time to get
married for economic and practical reasons—but not really for
romantic ones. This gently undermines the romanticized
clichés about love as something special, magic, and eternal.

The speaker then observes the wedding parties more intently,

critiquing the guests’ appearances as gaudy and fake. The
girls are dressed not fashionably, but in “parodies of fashion”
adorned with “jewellery-substitutes”; the fathers have
“seamy” foreheads; the mothers are “loud and fat.” Perhaps
this is what leads the speaker to describe the “success” of the
weddings as both “huge” and “wholly farcical”—
these are momentous occasions, but they also seem vacuous
and pretentious.
It’s worth noting that critics are particularly divided about this
section of the poem. Some see it as an unfair and snobbish
takedown of the working classes, and others view it as a set of
honest observations that reflect the reality that, given this
particular wedding date was popular for
primarily practical reasons, it did tend to be the poorer in
society getting wed. “[J]ewellery-substitutes,” then, need not
necessarily carry negative connotations. It’s possible to read
the poem as primarily concerned with making fine-tuned
observations about the rituals and social practices of marriage
—and how those relate to the idealism that is usually
associated with love.

Indeed, this ambiguity about the speaker’s position towards

the weddings is important. On the one hand, the speaker's
observations certainly do highlight something fake and
throwaway. But the ending of the poem seems to take a view
that incorporates these weddings as both
meaningful and meaningless. When the train comes to its stop
at the end and the speaker remarks on “this frail / traveling
coincidence,” it at once seems both significant and kind of
hollow. The train is about to unleash a kind of “power” by
emptying out its newly-weds—who will in turn reproduce and
create the next generation of couples—but it’s not necessarily
a power with any real sense of wonder or magic.

Instead, it’s as common as rain in England—which is how the

poem ends, by subverting the mythology of Cupid’s arrows
(which usually make their targets fall in love) and imagining
them somewhere “out of sight” becoming rain. These arrows,
then, don't follow through with their special purpose (thus
undermining the idea of love as a kind of destiny).
That said, rain is also associated with fertility, and the fact
that all the couples are married also means that, in their way,
they are a community with a shared experience that they will
always have in common whether they know it or not—a
community that will in turn impact the world.

Where this theme appears in the poem:

Alienation and Community

The speaker is clearly alienated from the wedding parties he
encounters on the train, but there is also a sense running
throughout "The Whitsun Weddings" that, ultimately,
everyone else is alone too. The wedding parties create a
sense of community from which the speaker is excluded, yet
even this feeling of togetherness may only be temporary. In
the end, the guests and newlyweds all go their separate ways,
the "frail ... coincidence" of this shared train ride over as
quickly as it began.

A sense of isolation is present from the start of the poem. For

one thing, the speaker's train is initially empty as it heads
back to London. And though the countryside seen through the
train window is full of a certain kind of life, or at least
the evidence of life (through buildings and so on), there aren't
any other people in the first two stanzas of the poem. This
marks the speaker out as a somewhat lonely figure.

Indeed, when the speaker encounters the bustle and

commotion of the wedding parties, he feels very much like a
detached observer. At first, he doesn't even notice that these
weddings are the source of the "whoops and skirls" he can
hear from the platform. There is a total disconnect between
the speaker and the crowds—and between the importance
that the crowds place on the wedding day and the speaker's
indifference.

Each of the guests, in turn, seem to have their own private

thoughts about the wedding, which the speaker, as a kind of
spy in their midst, can interpret: the children are bored; the
fathers are overwhelmed; the women are sharing "the secret
like a happy funeral" (that marriage can be a disappointment,
perhaps); the girls are "gripping their handbags tighter" out of
some kind of instinctive fear. All of these different figures are
sectioned off from each other, held together only loosely and
precariously by the weddings themselves (which, of course,
are pretty much over at this point in the day).

And though these individual wedding parties are brought

together by a sense of celebration and occasion, the parties,
too, are isolated from one another. That is, each wedding is its
own distinct group, failing (or choosing not) to recognize that
there are numerous other parties doing exactly the same
thing. Their own sense of community somewhat ironically cuts
them off from other communities. The newlyweds never think,
for instance, "of the others they would never meet," nor about
the fact that "their lives would all contain this hour"—that is,
how all these newlyweds will have forever shared this train
ride.

That's why the speaker views this shared experience as a kind

of "coincidence," one which seems significant but perhaps in
reality actually isn't. That said, he can't really relate to the
newlyweds because he isn't one of them; he might simply be
projecting all this, in turn misreading the situation and
contributing to his own and social separation. Overall, though,
it's not as if the newlyweds even seem that happy. There is a
kind of disquiet in the carriages, allow the reader to wonder
whether the ultimate act of communion—marriage—really
does bring people closer together, or just cuts two people off
from the rest of the world.