With thanks to Philip Watson for this…..
Wedding Wind – by Philip Larkin (1922-1985 )
The wind blew all my wedding-day,
And my wedding-night was the night of the high wind;
And a stable door was banging, again and again,
That he must go and shut it, leaving me
Stupid in candlelight, hearing rain,
Seeing my face in the twisted candlestick,
Yet seeing nothing. When he came back
He said the horses were restless, and I was sad
That any man or beast that night should lack
The happiness I had.
Now in the day
All’s ravelled under the sun by the wind’s blowing.
He has gone to look at the floods, and I
Carry a chipped pail to the chicken-run,
Set it down, and stare. All is the wind
Hunting through clouds and forests, thrashing
My apron and the hanging cloths on the line.
Can it be borne, this bodying-forth by wind
Of joy my actions turn on, like a thread
Carrying beads? Shall I be let to sleep
Now this perpetual morning shares my bed?
Can even death dry up
These new delighted lakes, conclude
Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters?
Just brilliant. Obviously been reading DH Lawrence I should imagine.Don’t think he’d have got round to HE Bates, of which there’s an echo, what with floods and all.
Peter: Yes, Lawrence, absolutely. (Don’t know if Larkin read Bates; his great mate Kingsley Amis did, though.)
I believe this is a very early poem, written in about 1946 – though he published it later in XX Poems and then again in The Less Deceived. He does seem to have written a lot when he was young from the point of view of women who had been deceived or in some disappointed (Deceptions another example and his novel A Girl in Winter). He seems to have identified with them in some way – though that strain gradually vanished as he got older.
My grandfather was in the year below H.E. Bates at Kettering Grammar School. I think he (Bates) used to do the scoring for the cricket team.
BW: So you you shook the hand of the man who shook the hand of HE Bates. Splendid!