The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin

1)      What was the overall tone/mood of the collection?

2)      Thinking about the title poem “The Whitsun Weddings” – who is the speaker in the poem? What is your impression of the speaker? How would you describe his attitude to what he sees? Did the layout and the stanza breaks add anything to your reading of the poem?

3)      What function do you think Mr Bleaney performs in the poem Mr Bleaney?

4)      What impression did you get of Larkin’s views of humanity? Marriage?

5)      What was your favourite/least favourite poem? Why?

6)      Did you notice anything about the forms of the poems or the rhyme schemes?

7)      How did you feel about Larkin’s use of language?

8)      What do you think Larkin was trying to achieve in the poem about the shop “The Large Cool Store”? Are the shop and the clothes it sells analogies for something else?

9)      Did you notice any pre-occupations or emerging themes within the collection?

10)  Poems like “The Whitsun weddings” and “Nothing to be Said” give a sense of changing ways of life and the passing of time, how life ultimately leads to death – do you think Larkin does this effectively? Are lines like “Life is a slow dying” too melodramatic?

11)  Does the collection give away anything about the writer’s state of mind?

12)  Did you enjoy the collection as a whole? What did you particularly like/dislike about it? Did the order of poems work for you? 

13)  Larkin is widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century – would you agree with this? Why?

The Water Table by Philip Gross

1.      Gross lays many of the poems out in unusual or irregular form (e.g. Amphora and The grounds). Did you understand why he chose each particular form? Do you think these poems are successful? Did you think that it worked better for some poems than others? Which (if any) did you think were more/less successful?

2.      Who or what did you think First Dog was in the poem First Things?

3.      The poem To Build a Bridge is a villanelle; did you notice any other traditional forms amongst the poems? Why do you think Gross chose a villanelle for this particular subject matter?

4.      There is a sequence called Betweenland that is spread out through the book – would you have  rather seen these poems together or do you think they work better spread out? Did you enjoy the sequence?Why? What was the gist of the sequence? Did you understand why the poems were connected?

5.      Gross often mixes the colloquial with the scientific e.g. "we've punched clean into heaven: snow- // dazzle plains of stratocumulus around us, the paleo-arctic…(Ice Man Dreaming); do you think this works? Did you like it?

6.      The Water Table won the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize in 2009, do you think it was a good choice? Why?

Glossary

Jeremy Hooker  (Stilt City) – an English poet who lived for eleven years in Wales.

Amphora - An amphora (plural: amphorae or amphoras) is a type of vase-shaped ceramic container with two handles and a long neck narrower than the body. 

Visigoth (The Presence) - A member of the western Goths that invaded the Roman Empire in the fourth century a.d. and settled in France and Spain.

Gillian Clarke (Globe) – a Welsh poet and playwright.

The Rosetta Stone (Thinks Bubble) – an ancient Egytian piece of granite inscribed with words in two languages – Egyptian and Greek.

Petroglyphs – rock engravings.