‘A long poem for me would be a novel, in that sense, A Girl In winter is a poem’
...d straight miles by stealing flat faced trolleys, At first one might assume that having spent the greater part of his later life in Hull that that is the place that the poem must be about too, especially the description of the train running along the side of a river that you at first again assume to be the Humber. But on closer inspection the details are too vague to be about any one place in particular and the place could be any English town and that Larkin is writing not about a certain place but the general feeling and atmosphere in all the places that are like this. He uses this device from ‘Here’ again when describing the English town that Katherine visits to stay with Robin and his family. We are told that it is well within walking distance of Cambridge, but again any other details could be about any rural village in England with is fields and churches Only infrequently did she see things that reminded her of landscape painting, a row of cottages, a church on rising ground, the slant of a field… Everything seemed enshrined beneath the sky We find Larkin living up to his own quote by creating his own “freshly created universe” and it seems that he is keeping the reader at a distance, so that they don’t quite feel included in events and act simply as a voyeur by making his settings both familiar and yet at the same time so distant and alien. Liz Hedgecock comments on the subject of Larkin’s settings by suggesting that Philip Larkin is Creating a mythical world that the read can never enter into fully, yet is familiar enough to make exclusion into exile He uses the same technique again throughout A Girl In Winter in regards to Katherine’s birthplace. It is established very early on that Katherine is a foreigner staying in England and is unable to return home because of circumstances that are never made clear. Larkin never mentions whereabouts Katherine is from. Again the details are kept vague only referring to her as coming from another country or someone asking her about “home”. The only clear mention of where Katherine might be from is made by Robin when the pair are boating on the lake near the Fennels home and Katherine inquires what the river is called only to find out that it is part of the Thames and Robin comments how he could have taken her home If we’d lived in prehistoric times , before England was an island, I could nearly have taken you home. The Thames used to flow into the Rhine So the nearest one can pin point Katherines home to is somewhere in Europe as the Rhine passes through many countries including France, Austria and the Netherlands. As in his poem ‘Here’ Larkin seem s to create a universe without any definite places, as if the place isn’t important as he concentrates on the thought and emotions of his characters more. This is used in the description of the town that Katherine lives and works as a librarian in. Once again the description could be of any town, but the place is also obscured by a thick snow that has fallen and when it grew lighter, it seemed they were right, for there was no sun, only one vast shell of cloud over the fields and woods. In contrast to the snow the sky looked brown However this also demonstrates how A Girl In winter resembles a poem. The beginning of the book begins with Larkin describing the show covered town, which is entirely obscured by a snow that shows no signs of melting anytime soon, and with the inhabitants of the town working or keeping indoors to stay out of the cold the town seems curiously deserted and lifeless. This passage gives strong echoes of one of Larkin’s many influences. T.S.Eliot . The snow covered town that the people discover when they awake in Lar...