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.
For White Sunday – Henry Mancini and Philip Larkin
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What a stupendous poem the Whitsun Weddings is! Great choice Bisto!
We make a stupendous big deal out of Larkin in Hull – quite right too. A lot of of it, to anyone remotely acquainted with the man and his work, is gloriously inappropriate. Like huge fibreglass toads decorated in bright colours by schoolkids (“Colour…. kids…fun… fuck off!”). It’s not even the right poem for Hull, where there are very,very many people who do not let the toad squat on their lives.
It’s Whitsun Weddings weather here – white sky, dry, a little windy, not quite nice enough to sit out.
I think every public building in Hull ought to have a line from Larkin inscribed over the entrance. The first line of “This Be The Verse” above Social Services, natch. “Time has transfigured them into /Untruth” above the council chamber. Maybe “Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt” above the Register Office.
And, as KFD reminds us below, there could be no more resonant thought to have above cemeteries than ‘What will remain of us is love.’
The great man reading another favourite of mine: An Arundel Tomb.
I love Larkin. My dad loved Mancini. I didn’t love my dad enough while he was alive.
“In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps,
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures.”
― Philip Larkin
My dad loved the colour blue
Henry Mancini
Royal Blue
Tiny bit disappointed – thought this was going to be a previously unheard collaboration between Henry Mancini and Philip Larkin, inspired by a shared love of Sidney Bechet, maybe. Now that would be something.
But good to be reminded – sending me back to the Collected Works.
Here’s a favourite bit of Mancini anyway.