Word: whitsun
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...WHITSUN WEDDINGS by Philip Larkin. 46 pages. Random House...
...three-day Whitsun weekend, the weather was as warm and bright as the sky in a Visit Britain poster. Streaming out of London by scooter, motor bike and train, the kids swarmed into two seaside resorts, the prearranged settings for their teen-age rites of spring. There, in two days of juvenile violence without parallel in England, they left no stone unhurled to turn holiday into holocaust...
Life Was a Unity. In that year, when Shakespeare and Marlowe were twelve, and the Church of England was in its infancy, the townsfolk of Wakefield in Yorkshire were told that their annual Whitsun-week cycle of 32 mystery plays could no longer portray "God the Father, God the Sonne or God the Holie Ghoste or the administration of either the Sacra ments of baptisme or of the Lordes Supper." This effectively banned the plays altogether-as was intended by Queen Elizabeth I, who was determined to break the hold of Roman ritual on English minds...
Early one Saturday last May, a thin, grim line started forming outside the Royal Opera House at London's Covent Garden. All through the long Whitsun weekend it sweltered and swelled, until, the following Tuesday, tickets went on sale for the first London performance of Cherubini's Medea in 89 years. Within three hours every seat in the house was sold out. Last week the lucky ticket holders finally got a look at what they had battled so tenaciously to see: Maria Meneghini Callas in the role of Euripides' savagely tormented heroine...
...Whitsun Tuesday in 1865, the Sunday-school children of an English mill-town mission named Horbury Brig, in Devonshire, were scheduled to march to church to join the children of the nearby parish in worship. As the mission's curate later told it, "Mr. Fred Knowles [a church warden] came to me at the Vicarage and asked what they were to sing on the long walk. We discussed one thing and then another and I said I would write a processional. 'You must be sharp about it,' said Mr. Knowles, 'for this is Saturday and there...