Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings

Have you ever read your old notes or annnotations?

I was looking at this poem again in Larkin's famous collection The Whitsun Weddings on Saturday after a long gap I think of about 20 years! The notes were in biro and 'built to last' and I laughed at the irony of reimagining the 'who' who wrote these things, whilst reading a poem about stepping inside some elses's head and space.

I love the gestural opening of 'Mr Bleaney' in Larkin's Whitsun Weddings. . The potential for pathos ensnared in the use of the past tense. Perhaps I agree with my old self that there is something brisk, bosomy and capable about the voice of the landlady. Even perhaps a hint of the sexually voracious about her margins?

The hinted sense of repetition and quiet despair culminate in the attention paid to the ill fitting curtains and the bleak horizons glimpsed through the no doubt streaked window. Mr Bleaney's room is a version of Mr Bleaney. A mirror to the banality Larkin feels of this 'unsuccessful' figure. The poem is an object, an artefact offering little solace for the poet or his imagined lodger subject. Like Miss Havisam's infamous room of decay and stais, Mr Bleaney's room is a metaphorical representation of his life, his psychical source. Like Miss Havisham too, it is also a 'box' in which he is already metaphorically dead and which will outlive him as he succumbs to mortality with its rituals of burial and (to Larkin as an atheist ) personal oblivion and deletion. Of course the poet seems to be suggesting that he too is Mr Bleaney or 'a Mr Bleaney' with his singleton existence, economic poverty and lack fo choice. But then, just as we feel we have arrived with our cynical guide Larkin at a clear but devastating destination, Larkin reveals that he has listened to himself and his words and has a change of heart. Or at least a change of focus. A shift?

' I don't know' He concludes ambiguously. And perhaps he doesn't despite the weight of his irony and accumulative argument. He has almost argued himself into faith. Faith through doubt. The cynical 'faithlessness' of his poet event yields to a glimmer of light. Light through doubt like Hardy's Oxen; 'hoping it might be so' and Larkin at the end of his final poem in the Whitsun Wedding Collection:'What will survive of us is love.'

Leave it there. Footsteps going forward and another's shoes...

I love it! Larkin was a master of words.

The Whitsun Weddings is a collection of poems by Philip Larkin to do with death, depression and disappointment. This may make you think that the book will be dreary and something to avoid, but Larkin's poems actually seem to represent what we all feel sometimes but just can't accept.

The poems are well-observed and sometimes witty, spread throughout the book in such a way that no two poems of the same theme are next to each other. My personal 'favourites' of this collection are the title poem 'The Whitsun Weddings' and 'First Sight' the tale of a lamb's first moments in the world. Philip Larkin is a great talent and even though his poems may not be what we want to hear sometimes, he still should not be avoided.