Philip Larkin 'the Whitsun Weddings' Commentaries
Larkin Poem Commentaries
Here
My feelings for ‘Here’ have much to do with the recent video prepared for the Larkin25 anniversary, which should be seen in conjunction with what I have to say here. Sir Tom Courtenay’s reading together with the images of Hull and its surrounding areas, leave me with the sense that while this is not just a hymn to Hull, although it is certainly that – and written when Larkin had first come the city – it is a place which is constantly surprising the poet by the interplay of the factual and the numinous. The countryside ‘gives way’ to a large town, Larkin does not call it a city. Hull seems to emerge from the river from a limited pastoral with ‘harsh-sounding’ halts and ‘piled gold clouds’. Courtenay’s diction and intonation seem to call into question the domes and statues and spires and cranes and even the inhabitants and their simple needs and desires. The video images of the football/ rugby crowd and the view into the shopping mall from the elevator make the people involved appear both down to earth and beyond the ordinary.
The lists of articles that the ‘cut-price’ crowd might want seem to be more like our own needs in straightened times, simple but necessary; as well as ‘out of reach’, ‘Unfenced existence’ brings to mind Ian Almond’s characterisation of Larkin as a mystic without a mystery — the sense of the mundane is enough to keep him wondering about the everyday without anything further intruding. Silence then prevails after the peopled city is left behind and the elements like ‘heat’, ‘thickening leaves’ and ‘neglected waters’ are allowed to be themselves.
Joseph Bailey
Afternoons
'Afternoons' in some ways is a time capsule since in the poem Larkin observes such things as mothers "setting free" their children at swing and sandpit, a scene that is now perhaps dying out since in today's world young mothers tend to go into the workplace rather than spend time with their children.
[The] poem reminds me about a cinema in my
Here
My feelings for ‘Here’ have much to do with the recent video prepared for the Larkin25 anniversary, which should be seen in conjunction with what I have to say here. Sir Tom Courtenay’s reading together with the images of Hull and its surrounding areas, leave me with the sense that while this is not just a hymn to Hull, although it is certainly that – and written when Larkin had first come the city – it is a place which is constantly surprising the poet by the interplay of the factual and the numinous. The countryside ‘gives way’ to a large town, Larkin does not call it a city. Hull seems to emerge from the river from a limited pastoral with ‘harsh-sounding’ halts and ‘piled gold clouds’. Courtenay’s diction and intonation seem to call into question the domes and statues and spires and cranes and even the inhabitants and their simple needs and desires. The video images of the football/ rugby crowd and the view into the shopping mall from the elevator make the people involved appear both down to earth and beyond the ordinary.
The lists of articles that the ‘cut-price’ crowd might want seem to be more like our own needs in straightened times, simple but necessary; as well as ‘out of reach’, ‘Unfenced existence’ brings to mind Ian Almond’s characterisation of Larkin as a mystic without a mystery — the sense of the mundane is enough to keep him wondering about the everyday without anything further intruding. Silence then prevails after the peopled city is left behind and the elements like ‘heat’, ‘thickening leaves’ and ‘neglected waters’ are allowed to be themselves.
Joseph Bailey
Afternoons
'Afternoons' in some ways is a time capsule since in the poem Larkin observes such things as mothers "setting free" their children at swing and sandpit, a scene that is now perhaps dying out since in today's world young mothers tend to go into the workplace rather than spend time with their children.
[The] poem reminds me about a cinema in my