...There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. 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.
It is 45 years since Philip Larkin published "The Whitsun Weddings." Most of the newlyweds he saw climbing aboard the train to London -- and documented in this, the title poem of that collection -- are likely divorced or dead by now. But just as the era of free love began, just one year after Larkin famously declared sex was invented, these British baby boomers took their honeymoons in the capital city and started to settle down out of sight.
Marital bliss -- even the urge for it -- was surely "out of sight" to Larkin. Elsewhere in "The Whitsun Weddings," in "Wild Oats," he cooly diagnosed his problem: ...I was too selfish, withdrawn / And easily bored to love... Though never married, Larkin carved out several romantic lives for himself: the longest with Monica Jones.
We know far too much about their predilections, and it's sad that Larkin has become somewhat comical as a consequence. His two farcical books of lesbian pornography written as a cheeky undergrad, an abiding interest in school-girl spanking, his revolting reactionary views on immigrants have all been chortled over since his death in 1985.
And yet, he is an authority on love, on the pressures on it from within and without, on the faulty structures that we build around it and then substitute for it. Larkin's ambivalence about marriage and attendance to his pessimism display the type of commitment he feared in his life's love affairs. His efficient images always favor the gray wash over brighter colors.
And so the title: arrow-shower -- I'd always loved the phrase. To me it captures not only the letting loose, but the vague transformation that is required of something new. To some, Larkin's "rain" seems to predict failure and gloom in the new marriages. To me, interpreting the rain is beside the point, what's known is that what is started will change. Our intentions are not our outcomes. We send up a volley of arrows, and our weapons turn to water.
