Trains in the Night

Claugton Pellew - "The Train"

Claugton Pellew – “The Train”

Continuing our fortnightly poetry feature, Stephen Pentz takes the train…

It is a commonplace that travelling by train is more conducive to observation and to contemplation than travelling by, say, car or airplane. Not surprisingly, therefore, a great store of poetry exists that has its origins in someone gazing out of the window of a train at the passing world, or in someone sizing up his or her fellow passengers (which may, in the end, lead to a sizing up of himself or herself).

In the Train

She is the passenger with restless eyes
Who twists the ticket in her black-gloved fingers.
None knows what calculation, what surmise
Disturb her as the train jerks on or lingers.
Above the eyes her brow is smooth and yellow.
‘I grant,’ her silence says, ‘that all I planned
Has been like something graven in the sand,
But tell me how your schemes work out, my fellow.’

James ReevesCollected Poems, 1929-1974 (1974)

 

I can easily picture Louis MacNeice — that urbane and questioning figure — deep in thought in a smoke-filled train.  Perhaps he is on his way to Holyhead to catch a boat to Ireland.  (In fact, R. S. Thomas has written about encountering W. B. Yeats on that route:  “Memories of Yeats Whilst Travelling to Holyhead.”)  Or perhaps he is headed to western Scotland and the Hebrides.  And, sure enough, MacNeice did write his share of train poems, among them “Corner Seat,” “Train to Dublin,” and “Trains in the Distance.”  I think that this is my favorite.

Star-gazer

Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else
The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night
And the westward train was empty and had no corridors
So darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight
Of those almost intolerably bright
Holes, punched in the sky, which excited me partly because
Of their Latin names and partly because I had read in the textbooks
How very far off they were, it seemed their light
Had left them (some at least) long years before I was.

And this remembering now I mark that what
Light was leaving some of them at least then,
Forty-two years ago, will never arrive
In time for me to catch it, which light when
It does get here may find that there is not
Anyone left alive
To run from side to side in a late night train
Admiring it and adding noughts in vain.

Louis MacNeiceCollected Poems (1966)

Given the circumstances of its composition, “Star-gazer” inevitably has a bitter-sweet air about it.  MacNeice wrote it in January of 1963.  He died unexpectedly of pneumonia in September of that year, just short of his 56th birthday.

I hold romantic notions about the sound of distant trains in the countryside at night.  Perhaps this is due to the fact that I am a city dweller.  Or perhaps it has something to do with country music — Emmylou Harris singing “Tulsa Queen,” for instance.

Siegfried Sassoon wrote the following poem near the beginning of the Second World War:

A Local Train of Thought

Alone, in silence, at a certain time of night,
Listening, and looking up from what I’m trying to write,
I hear a local train along the Valley.  And “There
Goes the one-fifty,” think I to myself; aware
That somehow its habitual travelling comforts me,
Making my world seem safer, homelier, sure to be
The same to-morrow; and the same, one hopes, next year.
“There’s peacetime in that train.”  One hears it disappear
With needless warning whistle and rail-resounding wheels.
“That train’s quite like an old familiar friend,” one feels.

Siegfried SassoonRhymed Ruminations (1940)

Stephen Pentz curates poems and pictures at the First Known When Lost blog.
Share This Post

About Author Profile: Stephen Pentz

Stephen Pentz curates poems and pictures at the First Known When Lost blog.

8 thoughts on “Trains in the Night

  1. zmkc@ymail.com'
    September 22, 2013 at 13:26

    Really great to see you here as well as on your own beautiful blog. Lovely post.

  2. September 22, 2013 at 19:03

    Thank you very much, zmkc. I’m honored and delighted to be here.

  3. wormstir@gmail.com'
    September 22, 2013 at 19:47

    Really like that Sassoon poem, wonderfully atmospheric

    My favourite train based poem has to be The Whitsun Weddings by Larkin

    • September 22, 2013 at 23:39

      Worm: I’m pleased that you like the Sassoon poem. As you know, he is now remembered mostly for his poetry and memoirs of the First World War, but he wrote a number of fine poems in later years that merit attention.

      Ah, yes: “The Whitsun Weddings” is at the top of my list of train poems as well. And there is also his lesser-known (and less exalted): “The local snivels through the fields:/I sit between felt-hatted mums . . .” The two (or more) sides of Larkin!

  4. Gaw
    September 23, 2013 at 22:08

    Thanks Stephen. My own favourite would be Midnight on the Great Western by Thomas Hardy.

    • September 23, 2013 at 23:43

      My pleasure, Gaw. And thank you for reminding me of “Midnight on the Great Western” — a wonderful poem, and one that provides a nice complement to MacNeice’s “Star-gazer.”

  5. george.jansen55@gmail.com'
    George
    September 24, 2013 at 01:41

    The first one that came to mind on reading this was Randall Jarrell’s “Orient Express” (I had to look up the title.) I wonder if the vernacular poetry of folk and “folk” music doesn’t do about as well with railroads.

    • September 24, 2013 at 03:56

      George: thank you for the poem by Jarrell, which is new to me. Very nice.

      Your point about folk music is a good one. Where would country music be without train songs? Think of Johnny Cash alone: I seem to recall that he made at least one album (maybe more) devoted entirely to train songs, and, of course, there is “Folsom Prison Blues.” And — in another direction — we can’t forget Dylan’s “It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”: “Don’t say I never warned you when your train gets lost.”

Comments are closed.