The Whitsun Weddings Page 3

  By slippers on warm mats,

  Reflect none of the rained-on streets and squares

  They dominate outdoors. Rather, they rise

  Serenely to proclaim pure crust, pure foam,

  Pure coldness to our live imperfect eyes

  That stare beyond this world, where nothing’s made

  As new or washed quite clean, seeking the home

  All such inhabit. There, dark raftered pubs

  Are filled with white-clothed ones from tennis-clubs,

  And the boy puking his heart out in the Gents

  Just missed them, as the pensioner paid

  A halfpenny more for Granny Graveclothes’ Tea

  To taste old age, and dying smokers sense

  Walking towards them through some dappled park

  As if on water that unfocused she

  No match lit up, nor drag ever brought near,

  Who now stands newly clear,

  Smiling, and recognising, and going dark.

  Send No Money

  Standing under the fobbed

  Impendent belly of Time

  Tell me the truth, I said,

  Teach me the way things go.

  All the other lads there

  Were itching to have a bash

  But I thought wanting unfair:

  It and finding out clash.

  So he patted my head, booming Boy,

  There’s no green in your eye:

  Sit here, and watch the hail

  Of occurrence clobber life out

  To a shape no one sees –

  Dare you look at that straight?

  Oh thank you, I said, Oh yes please,

  And sat down to wait.

  Half life is over now,

  And I meet full face on dark mornings

  The bestial visor, bent in

  By the blows of what happened to happen.

  What does it prove? Sod all.

  In this way I spent youth,

  Tracing the trite untransferable

  Truss-advertisement, truth.

  Afternoons

  Summer is fading:

  The leaves fall in ones and twos

  From trees bordering

  The new recreation ground.

  In the hollows of afternoons

  Young mothers assemble

  At swing and sandpit

  Setting free their children.

  Behind them, at intervals,

  Stand husbands in skilled trades,

  An estateful of washing,

  And the albums, lettered

  Our Wedding, lying

  Near the television:

  Before them, the wind

  Is ruining their courting-places

  That are still courting-places

  (But the lovers are all in school),

  And their children, so intent on

  Finding more unripe acorns,

  Expect to be taken home.

  Their beauty has thickened.

  Something is pushing them

  To the side of their own lives.

  An Arundel Tomb

  Side by side, their faces blurred,

  The earl and countess lie in stone,

  Their proper habits vaguely shown

  As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,

  And that faint hint of the absurd –

  The little dogs under their feet.

  Such plainness of the pre-baroque

  Hardly involves the eye, until

  It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still

  Clasped empty in the other; and

  One sees, with a sharp tender shock,

  His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

  They would not think to lie so long.

  Such faithfulness in effigy

  Was just a detail friends would see:

  A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace

  Thrown off in helping to prolong

  The Latin names around the base.

  They would not guess how early in

  Their supine stationary voyage

  The air would change to soundless damage,

  Turn the old tenantry away;

  How soon succeeding eyes begin

  To look, not read. Rigidly they

  Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths

  Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light

  Each summer thronged the glass. A bright

  Litter of birdcalls strewed the same

  Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths

  The endless altered people came,

  Washing at their identity.

  Now, helpless in the hollow of

  An unarmorial age, a trough

  Of smoke in slow suspended skeins

  Above their scrap of history,

  Only an attitude remains:

  Time has transfigured them into

  Untruth. The stone fidelity

  They hardly meant has come to be

  Their final blazon, and to prove

  Our almost-instinct almost true:

  What will survive of us is love.

  About the Author

  Philip Larkin was born in Coventry in 1922 and was educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and St John’s College, Oxford. As well as his volumes of poems, which include The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, he wrote two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, and two books of collected journalism: All What Jazz: A Record Library, and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose. He worked as a librarian at the University of Hull from 1955 until his death in 1985. He was the best-loved poet of his generation, and the recipient of innumerable honours, including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and the WH Smith Award.

  In the Poetry Firsts collection

  Simon Armitage – Kid

  Wendy Cope – Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis

  Alice Oswald – Dart

  Don Paterson – Nil Nil

  Sylvia Plath – Ariel

  Copyright

  First published in 1964

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2010

  All rights reserved

  © Philip Larkin, 1964

  The right of Philip Larkin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571– 25944–1