85th Annual Conference of the English Literary Society of Japan
Tohoku University, Sendai
Sunday 26th May, 2013

LARKIN’S PENTECOSTAL EXPERIENCE – PRESENCE AND ABSENCE IN‘THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS’Daniel Gallimore
Kwansei Gakuin University
gallimore@kwansei.ac.jp

Philip Larkin – by his own account and that of his critics – was neither a religious man
nor a religious poet. Although baptized as an infant in the old Coventry Cathedral (and proudof it), his family were not churchgoers, and he apparently lost the vestiges of whateverchildhood faith he may have had as a teenager. Towards the end of his life, Larkin would
sometimes accompany his High Church lover Monica Jones to Sunday worship, and he had
an Anglican funeral, but as he told John Haffenden, “I didn’t lose faith. I never had it.” (Qtd.
Steinberg, 124) At the same time, it seems mistaken to characterise Philip Larkin as a virulent
atheist or agnostic in the manner of a Richard Dawkins: as someone who saw religion as
representing a real impediment to human progress.
The argument about Larkin’s religion has long ago been played out between the sceptics
and the idealists (Almond, 183), with James Booth’s comment that Larkin “is unreligious
rather than anti-religious” (Booth 1992, 136) being as good a conclusion as any. In this paper,
I do not propose to reformulate the case for Larkin the Christian, but simply to consider thepresence, or rather meaningful absence of religious experience in his best known and mostpopular poem, “The Whitsun Weddings” (1959). This long poem seems typical of the waythat Larkin responds to religion throughout his oeuvre: first, as a reminder of his own
mortality, and secondly, as a certain attitude to life, which although redundant, prods him into
adopting the various attitudes that he does take as both a man and a poet.
“The Whitsun Weddings” tells the true story of a railway journey that Larkin took fromhis home in Hull to London one “sunlit Saturday” (l. 3). As the train journeys south, the poet
gradually becomes aware of the newly-wed couples getting on at every station along the line,
moving him from disinterest to an experience that he later described to Melvyn Bragg inquite transcendental terms:
I suppose the train stopped at about four, five, six stations between Hull and London andthere was a sense of gathering emotional momentum. Every time you stopped fresh
emotion climbed aboard. And finally between Peterborough and London when you hurtle
on, you felt the whole thing was being aimed like a bullet – at the heart of things, you
know. All this fresh, open life. Incredible experience. I’ve never forgotten it. (Qtd.
Burnett, 411)
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“The Whitsun Weddings” is not an especially dark or agnostic poem, but it is a poem aboutchange and about how a series of images or “attitudes” culminate in its memorable
conclusion (ll. 77-80):
We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
The rain and the sense of anticlimax in these lines contain various possibilities: fertility andsexual release, the battles and sadness of married life, and the end that is mortality, and what
Larkin calls bleakly in his “Aubade” (1977) “the total emptiness for ever” (l. 16).
“The Whitsun Weddings” is a nonreligious poem, but, as I will argue, its Christian settingof the late spring festival of Pentecost, or Whitsun, cannot be easily ignored, but before
exploring this background I would like to consider in more depth Larkin’s religious views.
Larkin was agnostic, and in “Aubade”, his final meditation on mortality, he recognises that if
he is to be true to his agnosticism he must reject the consolations of orthodox faith and accept
the finality of death as an end to all sensual pleasures. He was a sensual personality after all,and we know that his diagnosis with cancer in 1985 left him deeply depressed, and that rightat the end he was only able to recover his sense of irony under heavy sedation as he enteredhospital for the last time. His final words “I am going to the unavoidable” were not, therefore,
the heroic fulfilment of a lifetime of denial but as ambiguous as his agnosticism. He wassimply telling the nurse that he knew that the time had come for him to die.
In “Aubade”, Larkin emphasises the point about death that there is nothing in humanexperience to allay the fear of complete extinction (ll. 27-30):
no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
The syncopated rhythm of these lines seems to echo the jazz that Larkin so loved, and which
would be most representative of the sensual pleasures of which death would deprive him. In
the same poem, Larkin dismisses religion as (ll. 23-24)
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die
Larkin’s derogatory tone conceals a serious point that he is no longer living in an age when
belief in the afterlife can be taken for granted, so adopts the persona of perhaps the majorityof his readers who have lost faith and stopped going to church.
The decline of Britain’s Christian culture is particularly associated with the secularisationof the 1960s, but is a trend that dates back at least as far as the early 20th century. Larkin’s
metaphor of the “moth-eaten musical brocade” is echoed in his much earlier “Church Going”(1955), in which he writes of human “compulsions” (l. 56) “robed as destinies”. Faith
becomes a robe that protects believers from the harsh realities of life, but the same could besaid for any attitude or “compulsion”; in “For Sidney Bechet” (1956), there are the scholars
manqués” who “nod around unnoticed / Wrapped up in personnels like old plaids.” (ll. 11-12)
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and therefore a robe for which there may be many slighter alternatives, including Larkin’s
agnosticism. In a letter to his friend Jim Sutton, Larkin wrote
religion – well, nobody gives a darn for that any longer, not in England, anyway.
Methodism caught on fine in the 18th century, but it’s worn thin now. (Qtd. Brennan, 81)
The use of the word “darn” is telling when one considers its alternative connotation of
mending socks. Religion for Larkin is a garment or attitude that lasts as long as it can last,and it is this reluctance to differentiate religious practice from any other set of attitudes,
including whatever it means “to be young”, that constitutes the second dimension of Larkin’s
reputation as an unreligious poet.
Larkin’s “attitudes” recall his debt to Yeatsian symbolism, his eye for detail and his senseof humour, and as a poetic philosophy and creed they mean to construct a life out of whatcomes up. Detached from any religious framework to stipulate the correct “way of life”,
Larkin seeks the most convincing attitude or posture, and sticks with that attitude for as longas it remains credible; that attitude may indeed be no more than an impersonation of
adulthood. Larkin wrote in a review of the Opies’ Lore and Language of Schoolchildren(1959) that
It was that verse about becoming again as a little child that caused the first sharp waningof my Christian sympathies. If the Kingdom of Heaven could be entered only by thosefulfilling such a condition I knew I should be unhappy there. (Larkin, 111)
Larkin wanted to be the bespectacled, serious adolescent listening to jazz in his bedroom withhis friends; he didn’t want the pram in the hall.
John Osborne argues that not only is “The Whitsun Weddings” but also that it responds
intertextually to one of the most religious poems of the 20th century, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land, written in 1922, the year of Larkin’s birth. Osborne notices several parallels, such asthat “Both poems begin with departures from the north, Eliot’s ‘I read, much of the night, andgo south in winter’ becoming Larkin’s ‘slow and stopping curve southwards’” (Osborne, 60),
and concludes that
By stripping the occasion of the religiosity the Whit connection affords, and in
the process mounting a critique of Eliot’s moral repression and body hatred,[“The Whitsun Weddings”] celebrates the act of consummation, as though sexual union
has a consecration of its own requiring no theological blessing. (Ibid., 63)
Eliot’s poem portrays a spiritually sterile culture for which sexual freedom is not the answer,
whereas for Larkin the sexual possibilities of marriage seem to represent a very real freedomaway from the impoverishment of early post-war British society, andThe narrator’s observation that ‘the girls’ wear ‘nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes’,so often cited as proof of Larkin’s middle-class condescension, is actually rather a delicate
statement of an economic reality, that the rush to meet the tax deadline was mostconspicuous in lower-income groups for whom every penny counts (and who go off onhoneymoon by public transport). (Ibid.)
It is well known that Larkin’s problem was not just with T.S. Eliot but with modernism as
a whole, and according to Osborne is manifest in Larkin’s instinctive tendency to deconstruct
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modernist binaries. Of course, contemporary theology has sought to accommodate itself topostmodernism, for example in the view of deconstruction as “an exercise in longing for Godor participating in God’s longing for us” (Ward, 91), and Derrida’s longing for “a forgivenesswithout power” (Derrida, 59) may for many seem “a consummation devoutly to be wished”.
The apparent irrelevance of “the Whit connection” may indicate some deferred spiritual
meaning, especially when we consider that in contemporary theology the spiritual life is often
compared to a journey: not to some medieval allegory leading to predictable rewards andpunishments but to a disconnected series of moments that acquire symbolic power andmeaning within the integrative but arbitrary structure of the journey. This is a journey ofnegation as well as affirmation in which every separation is a cause for relief as well as tears,
and thoughts and feelings acquire meaning in a complex and unstable network of
relationships. The poem’s Pentecostal background is certainly worth investigating.
Larkin’s reluctance to impose meaning is expressed in his view of the journey as no morethan a “frail / Travelling coincidence” (ll. 74-5). The frailty of that experience acquires
symbolic value through an accident of British tax law and the mechanics of a steam engine.
Nicholas Marsh identifies a tension at work within the poem “between guarded objectivity”
and “flights of metaphor” that “are left in exact and unresolved tension at the end” (Marsh,
76). Deconstructing that binary, one might observe that the changing speeds of the train andthe speaker’s proximity to the wedding couples cause him to lose objectivity, or rather that
his objectivity is something that can only be regained in hindsight. Larkin wrote the poem in1957 about an experience he had had in July 1955, actually a couple of months after Whitsun.
In rather more straightforward terms, Gillian Steinberg argues that because Larkin rejects
the certainties of religious orthodoxy he is drawn instead toward self-questioning andempathy (Steinberg, 146), and this impetus toward empathy may be reflected in Marsh’s
tension between objectivity and metaphor. Objectivity is a gathering of facts about the humancondition, metaphor the making of comparisons and connections. In the Christian narrative,
the great “facts” of the life of Christ are the birth of Jesus at Christmas, his death on Good
Friday, and resurrection at Easter. Yet it was not until fifty days after Easter that the fullimport of Christ’s message comes alive in the hearts of the disciples at the feast of Pentecost,when they were quite literally inspired by the Holy Spirit to found the Church that would
spread that message. Since Pentecost was an ancient festival commemorating the giving of
the Law at Mount Sinai, the Holy Spirit is seen to work through both the historicalframework of the Jewish calendar and the disciples’ trepidation, since they knew they werebound to be persecuted by the Jewish and Roman authorities.
As Osborne notes, the meaning of Whitsun in “The Whitsun Weddings” is primarily thatof a tax incentive for the less well-off, but even – and indeed particularly – in a traditionally
Christian country like Britain, tax breaks can serve to promote the Christian institution of
marriage, to cooperate with the human tendency for delay and trepidation, and above all give
couples on low incomes a momentary financial power that is equivalent to the spiritual power
granted to the disciples at Pentecost: the spiritual dimension of the Welfare State, if you will.
Pentecost is remembered as the Church’s birthday, the first day of the Church year, the dayon which the Gospel became consolidated among the disciples, and the Church became
institutionalised as an organisation whose imperative was to practise koinonia and to preachthe gospel among the nations. Yet they were still preaching to the converted, and so the next
dramatic act in this narrative is the conversion of St Paul after he was blinded by a divine
light on the road to Damascus where he was heading to persecute members of the new
Christian sect.
Osborne and other critics are right to insist on the lack of explicit religious imagery in“The Whitsun Weddings”, but the Pentecostal setting still seems to me an undeniable subtext
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that is played out as a metaphor of postponed realisation. In the very first line, the speakermentions that he was “late getting away” (l. 1): late according to his own professionalschedule but not too late to catch a train and get to London. What begins as a rather humdrum
detail becomes the central theme of the poem: this is not the immediate joy of Easter, ofspring in its first buds, but the afterthought of Pentecost, when spring in England is at its veryheight, tipping into summer, when – as he puts it in “The Trees” (1968) – “the unresting
castles thresh / In fullgrown thickness every May.” (ll. 9-10) Larkin experiences this changeor becoming as a shift from indecision to resolve, both his own and that of the wedding
parties he sees on the station platform stations. In the third stanza (ll. 28-37), he notices
them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,
As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leantMore promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat
This shift in perception may also be equivalent to the difference between “The women” who“shared / The secret like a happy funeral” (ll. 52-3) and the “girls, gripping their handbags
tighter”, who “stared / At a religious wounding.” (ll. 54-5) Larkin is referring to 1950s Britain,
when premarital sex was still the exception rather than the norm, and even for non-believers
still shrouded with a degree of guilt. Larkin himself was not especially critical of sex before
marriage, or rather he was less sympathetic toward the whole business of sex itself as messy
and depressing. The contrast of simile (“like a happy funeral”) with metaphor (“a religious
wounding”) separates the spheres of known and unknown experience in a way that resonatesin the poem’s theological hinterland.
Larkin’s narrator can make no claim to understanding the inner thoughts and feelings ofthe people he sees on the platforms, although he can still memorialise “this hour” (l. 68) ofsilent fellowship shared in a railway carriage as they race towards London. Larkin’s Whitsun
is undoubtedly less intense or dramatic than the first Pentecost, when, as the Book of Acts
tells us (Acts 2: 2-4),
2. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, andit filled all the house where they were sitting.
3. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each ofthem.
4. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as
the Spirit gave them utterance.
Larkin’s poem is not a windy poem, although it is a poem imbued with a spiritual quality that
may surprise even the poet itself. At Pentecost, people of many nations and languages came
together and were able to understand each other through the power of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:6-11). The narrator and the couples have little in common with each other except the visuallanguage of marriage, traditionally associated with the colour white. This association is
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somewhat misleading when we consider that the purity symbolised by the white wedding
may in fact conceal other realities, and that although in the early church adult converts werebaptised at Pentecost and wore white robes to mark their purification, the actual colour ofPentecost is the red fire of the Holy Spirit. Larkin’s poem is coloured with both the white ofWhitsun (“White Sunday”) and the colourful details that stand against a white background,“The lemons, mauves, and olive ochres” (l. 40) and “the tall heat” (l. 11) of the sun.
Apart from the title, the colourless colour white is absent from the poem, and, as I havebeen arguing, is an absence that allows the poem to happen; we never get to see the brides intheir wedding dresses. The colour white is the colour of the newly baptised as they begin
their new lives as Christians, and it is the colour of the blank page on which the newlywed
couples begin their lives together. It is the colour that inspires Larkin to write his poem andfor “A dozen marriages” to get “under way” (l. 63), but in the poem’s rhetoric the institutionof marriage that it symbolises is an ideal that conflicts with the human potential both for
failure and for overcoming failure. As an ideal, it also conflicts with the sense of movement
and change that is intrinsic to the journey that frames the poem. Where the blankness (or“whiteness”) of tradition may be more present is in the poem’s prosody, comprising eightstanzas of ten lines each, each line being a perfect iambic pentameter (except the second ineach stanza). The rhyme scheme of abab cde cde also implies a perfection of form that could
refer to the ideals of an institution such as marriage, while the short second lines could serve
as a none too subtle reminder that Larkin as the poet, the poem’s shaper, is by his naturequestioning what he sees. Likewise, the alliteration on “w” in the title might indicate wind,
the wind of the Holy Spirit.
Among those present in Jerusalem that first Pentecost was Larkin’s namesake, the apostle
Philip, who was crucified in Hierapolis in modern-day Turkey in AD 80 and is particularly
associated with the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000. Jesus tests Philip’s faith by asking
him, “Whence shall we buy bread, that these may eat?” (John 6: 5), to which Philip replies,“Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one of them may
take a little.” (John 6: 6) St John’s Gospel does not explain how Philip reacts to the miracle
that Jesus then performs, but in the 1950s to the more contemporary questions of how do you
feed, how do you house, how do you employ impoverished newly-wed couples, the answers
might lie in London’s “postal districts packed like squares of wheat” (l. 70). These districts(SW1, EC4 and so on) conceal the ministries and head offices that redistribute wealth andkeep the economy ticking over. As postal districts, they are also emblematic of all the acts ofcommunication upon which a mature civilization relies.
St Philip is one of the lesser known disciples, often pictured with a basket of loaves,which in Larkin’s case might be compared to the volumes he purveyed to a student
population of at least 5,000 in his role as a university librarian. Philip is the fifth disciple afterSimon Peter, John, James and Andrew, and having a Greek name was probably a Greek
speaker. As the fifth disciple, his feast falls in the month of May, the fifth month of the year,
close to the feast of Pentecost. As an educated Greek speaker, he may well have contributed
to the early church a knowledge of conventions similar to the five-footed iambic pentameterin English poetics; the five-pointed star or pentagram has its own history in Christianity as
being a shape that is strong enough to keep out the devil. Philip is equally the kind ofmodestly anonymous Christian that Larkin might have aspired to become had he himself
been a Christian, and which in the poem he does in a sense become through the narrator’spresence in the railway carriage. The narrator looks at everyone but no one appears to look athim, and yet Larkin fulfils the charitable role of recording these Whitsun weddings forposterity.
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As I have mentioned, the apostle who comes after Pentecost is Paul, which spelt inEnglish is close to Larkin’s initials P.A.L. (Philip Arthur Larkin). The name “Paul” means“small” or “humble”, when in fact Philip Larkin was tall and certainly ambitious, if notconceited, but it seems that if only Philip had found his “you” or “other” then he could havebecome a Paul, or rather that it is through the cooperation between the poet and his readersthat he is able to acquire something like humility. A further point may be made, which is that
although Philip is by tradition the fifth of the disciples, this poem comprises eight not fivestanzas, and the eighth disciple is disputed to be either Matthew the tax collector or Thomas
the doubter. Both of these roles seem relevant to the poem: Matthew quite literally as the tax
authority whose benevolence authorises the marriage and Thomas whose scepticism
characterises both Larkin himself and perhaps even the couples who have held back so long.
If “The Whitsun Weddings” is a May poem, then it reaches its climax in the fifth stanza,
when “as we moved, each face seemed to face to define / Just what it saw departing’ (ll. 48-9).
This is a moment of truth or mutual recognition, but in fact the poem extends into August –as it were – to a full eight stanzas, as if like the tax break the weddings give the young
couples a little extra energy to get them on their way: regardless of what the couples actually
feel for each other, the very institution of marriage contains its own hidden momentum that issimilar to the momentum of iambic meter.
Unlike St Paul, Larkin experiences no blinding light convincing him of the desirability ofmarriage, and yet the motif of enlightenment does not seem to me completely lacking fromthe poem. In the third stanza, Larkin comments wryly that “sun destroys / The interest ofwhat’s happening in the shade” (ll. 23-4). At face value, this is a stark statement: “The Lordgave, and the Lord hath taken away” (Job 1: 21). The government grants a tax break, but thensome fiercer presence like the sun sucks off any interest accrued on the capital of humanenterprise. In the poem’s context, that interest may comprise no more than the children who
have grown up and now are pulled away from the family home to repeat the circle in a life ofhomemaking and labour: to “London spread out in the sun” (l. 69).
In a Christian context, the sun is a symbol of spiritual enlightenment that may be punned
fortuitously with the Son of God. Larkin may be hinting as much in his aside in lines 23 and24, touching on an old literary grudge (Donne’s “busy old fool, unruly sun”) that the Light of
the World reveals too much, and renders plain human “larking about” uninteresting. One canimagine the narrator being charmed by the sunlit landscape he sees from the railway carriage
and losing touch with a shadier reality, but in fact the light may also serve to reveal the shadyside of life, although not in the accidental, disconnected logic of the poem.
There are three flashes of light in “The Whitsun Weddings”: the “blinding windscreens”(l. 8) of motor cars as the train leaves Hull, “A hothouse” that “flashed uniquely” (l. 16), and“Bright knots of rail” (l. 72) as the train crosses other tracks on its final path into London.
The “blinding windscreens” denote a mode of transport that Larkin on this occasion forgoes;the opportunity to obtain a driving licence and drive on public roads at the age of 17 is a riteof passage in British society. The hothouse may be the academic hothouse, in Larkin’s case
Oxford, from which he graduated with a 1st class honours degree in 1943, and the “Brightknots” may be marriage itself or indeed any other commitment that pulls the individual
forward on life’s journey. None of these flashes are connected directly with the wedding
parties, but they do in their contingency seem to epitomise the inspired and spontaneous
manner in which the narrator interprets what he experiences as an unanticipated body of“fresh, open life”. “The Whitsun Weddings” is an unreligious poem by an unreligious poetbut one for which “the Whit connection” is quite a strong connection.

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Works Cited
Almond, Ian. “Larkin and the Mundane: Mystic without a Mystery.” In James Booth, ed.
New Larkins for Old: Critical Essays. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000.
Booth, James. Philip Larkin: Writer. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992.
Booth, James. Philip Larkin: The Poet’s Plight. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005.
Bradford, Richard. First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin. London: PeterOwen, 2005.
Brennan, Maeve. The Philip Larkin I Knew. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.
Brown, Callum G. The Death of Christian Britain. London: Routlege, 2001.
Burnett, Archie, ed. Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 2012.
Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael
Hughes. London: Routledge, 2001.
Larkin, Philip. Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces. London: Faber and Faber, 1983.
Lodge, David. “Philip Larkin: The Metonymic Muse.” In Stephen Regan, ed. Philip Larkin.
Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.
Hartley, Jean. Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press and Me. London: Faber and Faber, 2010.
Marsh, Nicholas. Philip Larkin: The Poems. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007.
Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin. London: Methuen, 1982.
Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.
Osborne, John. Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction.
Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Rowe, M.W. Philip Larkin: Art and Self. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Steinberg, Gillian. Philip Larkin and His Audiences. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010.
Thwaite, Anthony, ed. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin: 1940-1985. London: Faber andFaber, 1992.
Tolley, A.T. Larkin at Work. Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire: University of Hull Press, 1997.
Ward, Graham. “Deconstructive Theology.” In Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ed. The Cambridge
Companion to Postmodern Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
児玉実用等訳、『フィリップ・ラ―キン詩集』、東京：国文社、1988 年.

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