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?
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