The Faber Book Club

Our online book club is run by Faber Members but is open to all. Each month, Faber staff from across the company select key works, from current releases to classic texts, and create a monthly set of suggested questions around titles selected, holding events three times a year for further discussion.

The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin

The Whitsun Weddings was Philip Larkin’s third collection of poems, the first to be published by Faber. It came out on 28 February 1964 and has been in print ever since, containing as it does some of Larkin’s most well-known and quoted poems.

‘Larkin, with his (in the best sense) provincial eye, and his unparalleled ear, is the supreme writer of post-war England.’ Telegraph

‘Larkin’s originality is palpable . . . Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? And let it be emphasised that Larkin is never “depressing”.’ Martin Amis

Questions on The Whitsun Weddings:

1. In the title poem, what is ‘this frail travelling coincidence’, and how does it relate to Larkin’s vision of life expressed in other poems?
2. Larkin draws our attention to the discrepancy between the life of hoardings and posters (the advertiser’s dream life) and the life that is lived. He says in a letter: ‘to me [advertisements] appear as something like the platonic forms, infinitely vulgarised, but nonetheless ‘essential’ to our view of the world.’ In what way do you think this is true or relevant to the world we live in now? (see ‘Sunny Prestatyn’, ‘Essential Beauty’ and ‘Send No Money’)
3. Larkin is fond of the negative prefix ‘un’, and particularly effective is his use of the double negative.  What is the difference between ‘words at once true and kind’ and ‘not untrue and not unkind’ (‘Talking in Bed’)? Discuss.
4.  In ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’ the last line reads, ‘Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.’ Compare this to the poem, ‘Home is so Sad’ and think about the ways in which Larkin characterises or thinks about home. What emotion/s does he attach to ‘home’? How are these emotions conjured?
5.  In ‘Water’ Larkin attempts to ‘construct a religion’. How do light and water manifest themselves in other poems from the collection, and are we able to come to an understanding about Larkin’s belief/s, religious or poetic?
6.  Larkin’s biographer Andrew Motion presents a character filled with contradictions and paradoxes – funny and melancholy, gentle and trenchant – how do these contradictions manifest in the poems? Think about how ‘voice’ is deployed in the poems and the different registers struck: look, for instance, at ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ and ‘Dockery and Son’.