May’s poem
Samuel now often falls asleep to this track (pun intended):
So, it is fitting to recall a poem about a train.
(Also, we live near some tracks.)
(Also, while sleeping today, Samuel smiled and laughed, as if enjoying a hilarious dream.)
(Commentary for a G.P.O. Film)
I
This is the Night Mail crossing the Border, / Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, / The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb: / The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder, / Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily, she passes / Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches, / Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course; / They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes, / But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.
II
Dawn freshens. Her climb is done. / Down towards Glasgow she descends, / Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes, / Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces / Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen. / All Scotland waits for her: / In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs, / Men long for news.
III
Letters of thanks, letters from banks, / Letters of joy from girl and boy, / Receipted bills and invitations / To inspect new stock or to visit relations, / And applications for situations, / And timid lovers’ declarations, / And gossip, gossip from all the nations, / News circumstantial, news financial, / Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in, / Letters with faces scrawled on the margin, / Letters from uncles, cousins and aunts, / Letters to Scotland from the South of France, / Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands, / Notes from overseas to Hebrides, / Written on paper of every hue, / The pink, the violet, the white and the blue, / The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring, / The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring, / Clever, stupid, short and long, / The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
IV
Thousands are still asleep, / Dreaming of terrifying monsters / Or a friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s: / Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh, / Asleep in granite Aberdeen, / They continue their dreams, / But shall wake soon and hope for letters, / And none will hear the postman’s knock / Without a quickening of the heart. / For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
(W.H. Auden)
So, it is fitting to recall a poem about a train.
(Also, we live near some tracks.)
(Also, while sleeping today, Samuel smiled and laughed, as if enjoying a hilarious dream.)
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
NIGHT MAIL(Commentary for a G.P.O. Film)
I
This is the Night Mail crossing the Border, / Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, / The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb: / The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder, / Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily, she passes / Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches, / Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course; / They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes, / But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.
II
Dawn freshens. Her climb is done. / Down towards Glasgow she descends, / Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes, / Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces / Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen. / All Scotland waits for her: / In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs, / Men long for news.
III
Letters of thanks, letters from banks, / Letters of joy from girl and boy, / Receipted bills and invitations / To inspect new stock or to visit relations, / And applications for situations, / And timid lovers’ declarations, / And gossip, gossip from all the nations, / News circumstantial, news financial, / Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in, / Letters with faces scrawled on the margin, / Letters from uncles, cousins and aunts, / Letters to Scotland from the South of France, / Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands, / Notes from overseas to Hebrides, / Written on paper of every hue, / The pink, the violet, the white and the blue, / The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring, / The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring, / Clever, stupid, short and long, / The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
IV
Thousands are still asleep, / Dreaming of terrifying monsters / Or a friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s: / Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh, / Asleep in granite Aberdeen, / They continue their dreams, / But shall wake soon and hope for letters, / And none will hear the postman’s knock / Without a quickening of the heart. / For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
(W.H. Auden)