I knew ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ very well, but memorisation has made me appreciate the way Larkin makes his pastoral out of sound and form, as well as image; I also understood the presence of death more clearly. And I thought I heard the influence of Eliot and Gray, as well as the more apparent Keats and Tennyson. You can watch this recitation here or on YouTube. The poem is available on Poetry Foundation.
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this was first class Henry.
I listened to the final lines with my eyes closed. You hit the final note.
at school, for A level, my teacher Mrs Cowan recited it in full, a few times, to insist we see the poem. I remember being lulled by her reading.
Once I was catching a late summer Sunday train to London and was stopping at these commuter towns and it felt like the rhythm and day of the poem
I caught some of the end era of those old train carriages when I was young - I remember they had them on the Paddington route west in the 1990s, right at the tail end, so can picture the train as a certain type
Thanks for this mate. a pleasure.
No finer poem——