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The Whitsun Weddings
    That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
       Not till about
    One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
    Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
    All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
    Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
    Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
    Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
    The river’s level drifting breadth began,
    Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.
    All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
       For miles inland,
    A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
    Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
    Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
    A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
    And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
    Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
    Until the next town, new and nondescript,
    Approached with acres of dismantled cars.
    At first, I didn’t notice what a noise
       The weddings made
    Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
    The interest of what’s happening in the shade,
    And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
    I took for porters larking with the mails,
    And went on reading. Once we started, though,
    We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
    In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
    All posed irresolutely, watching us go,
    As if out on the end of an event
       Waving goodbye
    To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
    More promptly out next time, more curiously,
    And saw it all again in different terms:
    The fathers with broad belts under their suits
    And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
    An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
    The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
    the lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that
    Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
       Yes, from cafés
    And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
    Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
    Were coming to an end. All down the line
    Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
    The last confetti and advice were thrown,
    And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
    Just what it saw departing: children frowned
    At something dull; fathers had never known
    Success so huge and wholly farcical;
         The women shared
    The secret like a happy funeral;
    While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
    At a religious wounding. Free at last,
    And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
    We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
    Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
    Long shadows over major roads, and for
    Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem
    Just long enough to settle hats and say
       I nearly died ,
    A dozen marriages got under way.
    They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
    – An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
    And someone running up to bowl – and none
    Thought of the others they would never meet
    Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
    I thought of London spread out in the sun,
    Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat: 
    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.

Self’s the Man
    Oh, no one can deny
    That Arnold is less selfish than I.
    He married a woman to stop her getting away
    Now she’s there all day,
    And the money he gets for wasting his life on work
    She takes as her perk
    To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier
    And the electric fire,
    And when he finishes supper
    Planning to have a read at the evening paper
    It’s Put a screw in this wall –
    He has no time at all,
    With the nippers to wheel round the houses
    And the hall to paint in his old trousers
    And that letter to her