Tone and Mood

Tone is the speaker's attitude and mood is the feeling a poem creates in the reader. In “The Whitsun Weddings” Philip Larkin lets both shift during a single train journey, from a drowsy, offhand beginning through amused observation to a warm and almost reverent close.

Tone is the attitude a speaker takes towards what he describes, while mood is the atmosphere a reader picks up from the words. This lesson follows both through the eight ten-line stanzas of Larkin's poem: a relaxed, faintly ironic voice while the speaker watches from a distance, curious and gently satirical amusement as wedding parties crowd the platforms, sympathy and thoughtfulness as he considers the couples themselves, and a hushed, lyrical, hopeful close in the last stanza. You will see which choices of diction, detail, sentence length, rhyme and imagery produce each effect, and how to describe tone precisely in an examination answer.

Every poem tells us what happens and also how to feel about it. In “The Whitsun Weddings” the what is simple: a man takes a slow afternoon train from Hull to London on the Saturday of the Whitsun holiday and watches newly married couples join the train at station after station. The how-to-feel is the subject of this lesson, because the speaker's attitude changes during the journey and the poem is largely the record of that change.

1. Tone and mood: two different things

• Tone is the attitude of the speaker, and behind him the poet, towards the subject and the reader. It is the poem's tone of voice: wry, tender, solemn, scornful, detached. You hear it in word choice, sentence length and the details the speaker decides to notice.
• Mood is the feeling or atmosphere the poem builds around the reader: drowsy, festive, hushed, uplifting. A simple way to remember it is that tone belongs to the teller and mood belongs to the reader.
• The two can differ. A speaker may sound calm while the scene feels tense. In this poem they begin together at a low simmer, a relaxed voice and a sleepy atmosphere, and then they rise together.

2. Who is speaking, and from where?

The speaker is a solitary traveller who tells the journey in the first person and the past tense, as a remembered day. He belongs to no wedding party. He sits in a train carriage and looks out of a window. That position gives him freedom to observe, and to judge, and it also gives him the distance that makes his first remarks cool. His language is mostly plain, conversational English: he sounds like an intelligent man telling a friend about a journey, not a performer reciting. This everyday register is the base tone of the poem. Whenever it lifts into something richer, we notice the lift.

3. A map of the changing tone: four movements

• Stanzas 1 and 2 (lines 1–20): the detached traveller. The speaker reports the late start, the heat and a flat, unglamorous landscape without excitement. Tone: relaxed, matter-of-fact, mildly ironic. Mood: drowsy, sultry, slow.
• Stanzas 3 and 4 (lines 21–40): the amused observer. He has begun to notice the noise on the platforms, and the wedding parties are sketched in broad, comic strokes: loud relatives in their best clothes, crude jokes, young women in bright, showy fashion. Tone: curious and satirical, with a streak of class superiority. Mood: noisy, bustling, festive.
• Stanzas 5 to 7 (lines 41–70): the moved witness. Attention shifts from the comic families to the couples themselves, their nerves and their sense of one life ending and another beginning, and to the odd fact that roughly twelve separate couples are setting out on married life aboard one train. Tone: sympathetic, thoughtful, quietly moved, with the mockery softened. Mood: hushed, expectant, solemn.
• Stanza 8 (lines 71–80): the visionary at the journey's end. The train nears London and slows, and the poem closes on a large image: a feeling of coming down, compared to a volley of arrows that vanishes from view and comes down somewhere as rain. Tone: lyrical, elevated, affirming but not naive. Mood: release, wonder, bittersweet hope.

4. How Larkin builds the tone

• Diction. The early stanzas use plain, concrete, sometimes slangy words, the language of ordinary talk, and avoid poetic vocabulary. The families are described in blunt, comic terms. Near the end the vocabulary widens and becomes more image-led, and the earlier plainness makes that change visible.
• Selection of detail. Tone lives in what a speaker chooses to notice. At first the details are about discomfort and surfaces: heat, glare, smells and the working look of the places the train passes. On the platforms they are about clothes, bodies and noise. Later they are about feelings. The attention moves from the outside of people to the inside.
• Sentence shape. Long, rolling sentences run across the ends of lines and of stanzas. They make the voice sound unhurried and conversational, as if thoughts occur to him as the train moves, and they echo the train's steady motion. In the last stanza the sentence builds and gathers, so that the closing image arrives like a release.
• Form and sound. The ten-line stanza, the regular rhyme scheme (ababcdecde) and a short second line in each stanza give the poem a tidy frame. A speaker who sounds casual inside such a controlled frame produces a dry, wry effect early on and a sense of ceremony and dignity by the close.
• Imagery. The poem opens in sunlit heat and closes on rain. That weather arc moves from dry to wet, from stillness to renewal, and it carries the change of feeling with it.
• Structure. The poem is organised like the journey itself: start, middle, arrival. The tone shifts gradually, not suddenly, which is why the change feels earned.

5. The mood: how the reader is carried through the poem

Read the poem aloud and watch your own reactions. In the opening stanzas you settle into the heat and the slowness. In stanzas 3 and 4 you smile at the crowds and hear the noise. In the middle you grow quieter and a little tender. In the last lines you may feel a small lift, like a held breath being let go. That sequence is the mood arc: languor, liveliness, hush, release.

6. Irony and tenderness together

Larkin seldom offers plain celebration. Even when the speaker is moved, his language stays honest about how ordinary and how odd the occasion is. The weddings are shown as a Saturday crowd in cheap finery and also as the start of whole lives. The final image holds the same double sense. Arrows are released with direction, but they also go beyond control, and the rain comes only after the volley has vanished from view, so the future stays unseen. A good answer therefore avoids single labels such as happy or sad and uses compound labels such as wry detachment, amused sympathy, hushed awe and guarded hope.

7. Writing about tone in an examination answer

Use four steps: name the tone with a precise word or pair of words, place it by stanza, show the craft that produces it, and link it to meaning. Mention the shift, because for this poem the change of attitude is the point. Common mistakes are to give one label for the whole poem, to confuse mood with tone, to list devices without saying what they do, and to make claims without pointing to a stanza and an image.

A model paragraph: In the opening stanzas the tone is relaxed and faintly ironic. The speaker reports the late start, the heat and the flat countryside as if nothing here deserves more than a shrug, and the long, easy sentences keep him sounding like a man chatting rather than performing. This detachment matters because it sets up the poem's real movement. By the last stanza the same plain voice has grown richer and warmer, and the closing image of arrows turning into rain expresses a wonder that the early stanzas would have been too guarded to admit.