Lucyl Harrison weaves together the poems and life of Larkin with train journeys taken by both her and the novelist Yiyun Li.
TW: Suicide
5.49am
On a train, commuting to Hull
Leaving the supine shires of East Anglia, iced hedges dip and rise in daybreak’s flush of nectarine. Shared with me by a friend, a word pops into my head – apricity – the warmth of the sun in the winter. I experience the word through the insect-spattered window as I spy the cathedral spire of Ely in its Cromwellian seat. By then, the Rosie and Jim narrowboats on the Great River Ouse are getting away from me. Miles inland, the train begins to race north. A sugar-white mist is blanketing Lincolnshire when a bald porter in nitrile black gloves and his corporate blue sweatshirt travels through the aisle with a transparent bin bag. In my peripheral, I catch the capitals, shouting at me from the back of his uniform:
COVID aware.
Clean and protect, travel with confidence.
I picture the miniature, green-tinged-red planets of COVID, rotating through the uncrowded carriage.
Eris, Fornax, Arcturus.
Astronomically nicknamed subvariants of SARS-CoV-2 (Geddes, 2023).
As a PhD student of English, researching COVID’s contamination of contemporary literature, I prefer the literary names for variants, like Frankenstein (Institut Pasteur, 2025). A double-click launches the PowerPoint for my teaching seminar on The Fell by English writer and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin, Sarah Moss. I highlight, enlarge, and then press B on the quote said by Moss’s ‘favourite voice’ in the novel, Alice (TLS, 2021):
Language is infected. Return, George Orwell, England has need of thee.
I didn’t yet know that my ordinary commute would gather its unknowable chain of coincidences – between writers, between lives, language and the pandemic, and between the tracks themselves. Trains as a public stage, lives transported together in moving rooms, each passenger carrying woes that brush against the windows.
What follows is braided with a purpose: my journey to Hull; Philip Larkin’s account of Britishness in the poetry collection ‘Whitsun Weddings’ (1964); and writer Yiyun Li’s journeys (and her words to me on Pandemic Pages podcast, where I interviewed her in March 2026).
The carriage became a place for life as it happens.
9.57am
The first travelling coincidence
I alight at Hull. Morning embers the bronzed, 7ft statue of poet Philip Larkin who, posed, running for his train, strides past. From here, the day begins to read itself back to me through literature and conversations.
Yiyun Li tells me she met with her agent the day before coming to the University of Hull to see the Philip Larkin exhibition in 2017, her agent said: “I think you would like to be on the train… Your body is still, but the train is moving, so you go through the landscape”. ‘Whitsun Weddings’ by Larkin is the literary locomotion for watching the landscape – it’s a verbal photography of his journey from Hull on a sunlit Saturday afternoon. Extraordinarily, station after station, around twelve wedding parties climbed aboard.
In an essay for The New Yorker, Li distilled her own journey to Hull, writing how a train “makes a public stage for private woes” (The New Yorker, 2022). She had booked a seat in the quiet carriage for her trip:
“When the train left King’s Cross, the only other travellers were a pair of parents and their teen-age children, a boy and a girl. They sat down at a table across the aisle from me, took out a pack of cards, and began a jubilant game” (The New Yorker, 2022).
On Pandemic Pages, we talked about her trip to the Netherlands in the summer of 2021 and how Philip Larkin has influenced her writing. She tells me, “It’s funny because, you know, I certainly did not mean to write pandemic fiction, but the pandemic happened, so stories happened”.
“It’s just life as it happened” (1993), Larkin told Andrew Motion, biographer and friend of the poet and University of Hull librarian, about the composition of the poem, Whitsun Weddings. Li’s journeys follow the tracks laid by Larkin, creating coincidental and intertextual echoes between their writing.
16:46pm
Hull –> London Kings Cross
Southbound again, I return to people-watching on the way home. Observing strangers in tubed proximity, we all have no idea that a parasocial grief will soon tie us all together like a shoelace with fraying aglets, borne out through the tangles of timetables and interruptions. The navy, dolphin-nosed Hull Train is stationary under a plaid, blackened roof, curved like a whale’s rib cage. Pigeons nod like they’re in a warehouse rave, pushing in front of nondescript passengers on the platform: the nylon puffer jacket hunched over a phone on the bench; a long, lamb merino coat with a Kahlo red suitcase.
In Wednesday’s Child, Li’s titular short story of her 2023 collection, the protagonist, Rosalie, catches a train from Amsterdam to Brussels just as the Delta variant of COVID-19 starts to gain notoriety. The author took this trip in the summer of 2021. When Rosalie gets to the station, a uniformed railway worker informs her the trains to Brussels are cancelled because “a man walked in front of the train” (Li, 2023: 4). Eventually on board a train, Rosalie is sat near a “tightly double masked” pregnant woman (13). The train passes “villages with steepled churches, flower farms, and rivers, canals alongside which cyclists rode as though in a movie. Sometimes a passenger got off the train, pausing on the platform. Framed by the window, they looked as though they were extras on a film set” (17). The pregnant woman goes into labour, and Rosalie helps.
Li’s train journey to the University of Hull and her trip to the Netherlands in the summer of a pandemic are folded into her memoirs, fiction, and ‘quiet COVID’ stories. Her writing always crosses back to Larkin through the terrain and narrative mode of his train journey, but also to the deaths of her teenage sons, Vincent and James in 2017 and 2024 respectively.
“I wished I could have this conversation with Larkin”, Yiyun Li writes in Dear Friend (Li, 2017: 131). Larkin’s influence throughout Li’s writing is as clear as day. Her novel, and latest memoir, about the separate deaths and dialogues with her two sons each contains the poem Larkin thought “hardly a poem at all” (2014: 418). In Where Reasons End, imagining a conversation with her dead son, Nikolai, the anonymous protagonist tells him about an exhibition of Philip Larkin she had seen in England:
There were covers of Larkin’s journals, the insides taken out and burned in a fireplace the day after his death.
I applaud that as much as you do, Nikolai said.
The key is to have someone you trust agree to live longer, I said.
Then, the anonymous writer reads Nikolai a stanza from Larkin’s poem, ‘Days’:
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us.
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Days are not the only place where we live, Nikolai said.
In Things In Nature Merely Grow, her memoir written after her son James’ death in 2024, Li brings in the refrain again to convey the hollow depths of a life lived in the magnitudes of grief:
But in all those days, where one is obliged to live (“where can we live but days?” in Philip Larkin’s words), there remained that thought: every single day, for the rest of my life, I will be thinking of Vincent.
(2024: 51)
[…]
And the days after James’s death are but an abyss.
How does one live in an abyss?
By marking time, how else does one live?
(2024: 125)
Writing about her train trip to Hull to visit the Larkin exhibition is directly Larkinesque, emulating Larkin’s world-famous train sequence. The coincidence is intertextual: her longstanding engagement with Larkin, Li’s navigation of the terrain of train literature, and these cavernous journeys of grief, recovery, and isolation. The train journey framework is Larkinian, but also intensely personal: James and Vincent both died by rail suicide.
19.55pm
The second travelling coincidence
On a train, somewhere between Hull and London.
At first, I didn’t notice that we had stopped before we reached one of the stations – the black night had destroyed my awareness of what was happening ahead on the spine of the track. The train conductor delivering a message over the weak, prickly tannoy says they have shut the train lines, passengers can disembark at the next station, if they wish. Gossip about the reasons why is airborne, a mosaic virus spreading down the stem of the carriage. Some passengers keep working on their laptops, a casual party of teens are sharing videos on their phones, laughing. I suppose a dozen minutes could have gone by before the conductor breathed slowly into the train’s speaker again:
There is someone on the train tracks, so they have stopped all trains. Aerial support has been sent to locate the member of the public who has climbed onto the tracks.
Trains cancelled, talks of rail replacements, titters of those making claims for the journey. The staggered phone calls home start, telling loved ones they will be late. Larkin’s lines in Whitsun Weddings fizz in my head now like a soluble tablet in the bottom of a tumbler of water. So do Li’s literary inheritance of our University of Hull librarian, and I see this day all again in different terms:
These frail travelling coincidences
How our lives will all contain this hour
Of the member of the public we would never meet
About the author
Lucyl Harrison is a doctoral candidate with the Living with Death: Learning from COVID cluster at the University of Hull – her thesis is titled ‘On Being Ill’: Writings from the 1918 Influenza Pandemic and COVID-19. She is host of Pandemic Pages – a top 30% video podcast on Spotify – and a ‘Story Maker’ for the National Centre for Writing.
References
Li, Y. (2025) Things in Nature Merely Grow. 4th Estate, London.
Li, Y. (2023) Wednesday’s Child.
Li, Y. (2017) Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.Random House Inc, New York.
Larkin, P and Burnett, A (2014) Philip Larkin The Complete Poems, Faber & Faber, London.
Li, Y. (2022) In The Beforetime. The New Yorker, 11 July. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/11/in-the-beforetime (Accessed: 13 April 2026).
Motion, A. (1993) Philip Larkin: A writer’s life. London: Faber & Faber.Geddes, L (2023) From Kraken to Pirola: who comes up with the nicknames for COVID‑19 variants? Available at: https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/kraken-pirola-who-comes-nicknames-covid-19-variants (Accessed: 13 April 2026).
Institut Pasteur (2025) COVID‑19: how worried should we be about the Frankenstein variant? Available at: https://www.pasteur.fr/en/research-journal/news/covid-19-how-worried-should-we-be-about-frankenstein-variant (Accessed: 13 April 2026).
Pandemic Pages Podcast (2026) Yiyun Li. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2CvRYz8PFpVRi6LLFlQDln (Accessed: 13 April 2026).
