Larkin describes a stopping-train journey southwards from Paragon station in Kingston upon Hull, where he was a librarian at the university, on a hot Whit Saturday afternoon.
It has always been supposed the poem was based on an actual train journey Larkin made in 1955 on Whitsun Saturday, a day which was popular for weddings at that time[1] though since there was a rail strike on that weekend Larkin scholar John Osborne now thinks the journey an unlikely one to have taken place.
[2] The poem's narrator describes the scenery and smells of the countryside and towns through which the largely empty train passes.
He notes the different classes of people involved, each with their own responses to the occasion – the fathers, the uncles, the children, the unmarried female relatives.
As the train continues into London, with the afternoon shadows lengthening, his reflections turn to the permanence of what the newly-weds have done, yet its significance, though huge for them, seems to give him an ultimately disappointing message, suggested by the poem's final phrase.