Journeying in Time and Space “through the tall heat that slept”: Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings”
Journeying in Time and Space “through the tall heat that slept”: Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings”

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines Philip Larkin’s use of the metaphor of a train journey in his famous poem “The Whitsun Weddings” to transform time into space in such a way so as to enablethe speaker to present a geographical and historical survey of the rural, urban and industrial landscape of mid-twentieth-century, post-war England, registering the social and cultural changes brought about by the process of modernization. The paper argues that the train journey functions as a metaphor for an imaginative journey, through time and space, that brings, in a characteristically discursive manner, Larkin’s solitary and contemplativespeaker from a state of detachment and superiority to one of heightened and thoughtfulrealization of the deeper implications of his perceptions as the train, and the poem near thefinal destination. In other words, the railway journey through the spatial and temporalmetaphor of “the tall heat that slept” becomes a means of revealing and patterning thespeaker’s changing responses to the modern English landscape and English people.

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