"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]


Wednesday, January 11, 2012

W.H. Auden - Night Mail


W.H. Auden, 1907-1973


45661 Vernon in an early British Railways livery (photo by T. Lewis, courtesy of Mark A. Hoofe)



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 and 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 as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the 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.
Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or 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 in 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, 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.
Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?





Wikipedia

Night Mail is a 1936 documentary film about a London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train from London to Scotland, produced by the GPO Film Unit. A poem by English poet W. H. Auden was written for it, used in the closing few minutes, as was music by Benjamin Britten. The two men also collaborated on a documentary on the line from London to Portsmouth, The Way to the Sea, also in 1936. The film was directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright, and narrated by John Grierson and Stuart Legg. The Brazilian filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti was sound director. It starred Royal Scot 6115 Scots Guardsman.

As recited in the film, the poem's rhythm imitates the train's wheels as they clatter over track sections, beginning slowly but picking up speed so that by the time the penultimate verse the narrator is at a breathless pace. As the train slows toward its destination the final verse is more sedate. The opening lines are "This is the Night Mail crossing the border / Bringing the cheque and the postal order". The copyright on the film has expired after 50 years, however some sources assert that the W.H. Auden poem however remains copyright as a written piece. The musical score was first published in 2002.

Such is the status of the film, it was used as inspiration for a British Rail advertisement of the 1980s, the "concerto ad".




Night Mail - (1936) - Part 1





Night Mail - (1936) - Part 2





Night Mail - (1936) - Part 3






Robert Louis Stevenson - From a Railway Carriage

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850-1894







Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And here is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart runaway in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill, and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone forever!






Notes

This poem is similar in many ways to Auden's http://reslater.blogspot.com/2012/01/wh-auden-night-mail.html


Commentary
August 16, 2010

When looking for inspiration for a piece of writing, I often take time to ponder what specific occurrences inspired the verse of the greatest poets. Of course there are those significant, overwhelming things that none of us can get away from; ever flowing reservoirs that can be dipped into time and time again and still provide something to get the ink flowing – the ‘big’ issues such as life, death, love, loss. Then there are the altogether simpler things, the tiny fragments of beauty and wonder that can be magnified by a selection of words; the first ray of sun after rainfall, a flower bursting into bloom…all perfectly poetic. Though in theory nothing should be strictly out of bounds – or at least, almost nothing – there are some things that it’s hard to muster much excitement for, scribble about enthusiastically or give an air of elegance to. One such subject is surely public transport; as practical and undoubtedly necessary as it is, even the most accomplished of bards would struggle when faced with points of inspiration such as delays, jams and replacement services.

Yet the very topic is gearing up a range of writers, with the most famous network of public transport in the country – the London Underground – at the centre of a major poetic project which aims to collect 270 odes, each correlating to an individual station in the network. It does sound like an interesting idea, and I’m thinking that The Tube is an exception to the rule; there is something about it that sparks the senses, be it the sheer variety of stations and passengers; bright-eyed and bushy tailed tourists alongside suited and booted (and slightly bored) businessmen and women. The zigzagging of lines meaning if you so wish, you could embark on a mini adventure into the unknown. And also the very fact that actually being underground gives a slight eerie edge to proceedings. The few times I’ve joined the hoards while in the capital have certainly been eventful, thanks to train doors literally closing on me with the rush to get on board and a fellow passenger deciding to use my shoulder as an alternative to a pillow. Back home, as I’m a slave to bus timetables (which are seldom correct) the predominant emotions evoked are frustration, annoyance and impatience, prone to far too many near misses, drivers who seem to be more interested in skipping as many stops as possible and revving engines that seem to taunt as you watch hope ride away into the distance… (that’s more ridiculously exaggerated drama than the makings of a poetic masterpiece).

A different, perhaps more conventionally poetic train journey is detailed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem, taken from his A Child’s Garden of Verses – not, funnily enough, Songs of Travel and Other Verses, even though it would be fitting there. The connection to childhood is evoked as it is reminiscent of ‘old-fashioned’ over-ground train journeys complete with all their numerous sights glimpsed as you go chugging by, the verse’s rhythm echoing the pace of the vehicle along with the scenes jostling for the passenger’s attention. It has been suggested that there is something about trains that appeals to poets above all other modes of transport. Whether this is true, who can say? They’re certain more rhythmic than a bumpy old bus.





Robert Louis Stevenson
From a Railway Carriage




Night Mail







Wilfred Owen - The Send Off


Wilfred Owen, 1893-1918



Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.
Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.
Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.
So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent.
Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.
Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild trainloads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.


Some railways journeys were both sickening and mind-numbingly frightening in equal measure. One thinks of those trains of death approaching the watchtower gateway at Auschwitz. Here Owen, possibly the greatest first world war poet, drives home the experience of the ordinary soldier travelling to incomprehensible horror. - Peter Ashley

A Collection of Railway Poems

Railroad/Train Poetry

Marigolds grow wild on platforms, Peggy Poole, Publ July 11, 1996; 192 pgs

The coming of the railways changed the economic and social fabric of Britain beyond recognition. Railways often generate an emotional response in people; the romance of travel, the excitement of departure and the pleasures of arrival, plus the thrill of the machinery itself, appeal to the emotions. This anthology of over 160 poems about railways and rail travel includes works by poets as varied as Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, W.H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, Wendy Cope, Philip Larkin, John Betjeman and Louis MacNeice. The editor of this collection, Peggy Poole, is herself a poet, and was drawn to the magic of railways when changing trains at Preston station, which led to the publication of this anthology. The poems range from the simply lyrical to the rudely mechanical, and are grouped in six themes to represent the different aspects of rail travel.



Railway Lines - a website dedicate to railroad poetry:

  • 150017 by A.Boodoo

  • INTERCITY country by A.Boodoo

  • Leaves on the line by A.Boodoo

  • Night Mail 98 by A.Boodoo

  • Night Train Circa 1904 by Bill Burns

  • The First Hot Day in Spring by Martin Reed

  • The Little Toy Train by Bill Burns

  • The passing train by A.Boodoo

  • The train home by A.Boodoo

  • The Wimbleware song

  • Train Scape by Bill Burns

  • XC evening by A.Boodoo



  • Peter Ashley's Top 10 Railway poems
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/nov/14/top10s.railway.poems

    Peter Ashley is the editor of Railway Rhymes, an Everyman collection of poems celebrating the railway and published to coincide with the opening of St Pancras International. Below, Peter Ashley picks his favourite poems from the anthology including commentary to select poems:


    Pershore Station, or A Liverish Journey First Class
    by John Betjeman

    The train at Pershore station was waiting that Sunday night
    Gas light on the platform, in my carriage electric light,
    Gas light on frosty evergreens, electric on Empire wood,
    The Victorian world and the present in a moment's neighbourhood.
    There was no one about but a conscript who was saying good-bye to his love
    On the windy weedy platform with the sprinkled stars above
    When sudden the waiting stillness shook with the ancient spells
    Of an older world than all our worlds in the sound of the Pershore bells.
    They were ringing them down for Evensong in the lighted abbey near,
    Sounds which had poured through apple boughs for seven centuries here.

    With Guilt, Remorse, Eternity the void within me fills
    And I thought of her left behind me in the Herefordshire hills.
    I remembered her defencelessness as I made my heart a stone
    Till she wove her self-protection round and left me on my own.
    And plunged in a deep self pity I dreamed of another wife
    And lusted for freckled faces and lived a separate life.
    One word would have made her love me, one word would have made her turn
    But the word I never murmured and now I am left to burn.
    Evesham, Oxford and London. The carriage is new and smart.
    I am cushioned and soft and heated with a deadweight in my heart.


    Betjeman usually makes an ideal travelling companion in his railway poetry but on this journey we would discreetly move to another compartment to leave him alone with his thoughts. This is the perfect evocation of the Sunday Fear, that dead time when thoughts crowd in of Monday's business. The sound of evening bells are as melancholy to me as the Antiques Roadshow theme tune.*



    Great Central Railway Sheffield Victoria to Banbury
    by John Betjeman

    "Unmitigated England"
    Came swinging down the line
    That day the February sun
    Did crisp and crystal shine.
    Dark red at Kirkby Bentinck stood
    A steeply gabled farm
    'Mid ash trees and a sycamore
    In charismatic calm.
    A village street {---} a manor house {---}
    A church {---} then, tally ho!
    We pounded through a housing scheme
    With tellymasts a-row,
    Where cars of parked executives
    Did regimented wait
    Beside administrative blocks
    Within the factory gate.
    She waved to us from Hucknall South
    As we hooted round a bend,
    From a curtained front-window did
    The diesel driver's friend.
    Through cuttings deep to Nottingham
    Precariously we wound;
    The swallowing tunnel made the train
    Seem London's Underground.
    Above the fields of Leicestershire
    On arches we were borne.

    And the rumble of the railway drowned
    The thunder of the Quorn;
    And silver shone the steeples out
    Above the barren boughs;
    Colts in a paddock ran from us
    But not the solid cows;
    And quite where Rugby Central is
    Does only Rugby know.
    We watched the empty platform wait
    And sadly saw it go.
    By now the sun of afternoon
    Showed ridge and furrow shadows
    And shallow unfamiliar lakes
    Stood shivering in the meadows.
    Is Woodford church or Hinton church
    The one I ought to see?
    Or were they both too much restored
    In 1883?
    I do not know. Towards the west
    A trail of glory runs
    And we leave the old Great Central line
    For Banbury and buns.



    Railway Rhymes
    by CL Graves

    "When books are pow'rless to beguile
    And papers only stir my bile,
    For solace and relief I flee
    To Bradshaw or the ABC
    And find the best of recreations
    In studying the names of stations."


    This poem was fortuitously discovered after I'd settled on the title for my anthology. This is a jolly romp through a railway gazetteer, seeking out station names that not only scan but also give us a sense of the decidedly odd in English topography. I've always loved the name Stogumber, (good name for a Dickens' curate perhaps), still on the West Somerset line.*



    Harviston End
    by Peter Ling

    "I looked out of the train,
    And I suddenly saw the empty station
    As we hurtled through, with a hollow roar . . .
    'Harviston End' . . . It was dark and dead"


    A quiet hymn to all that we've lost. It's all here, the sights, sounds and smells of a country station about to close. I've searched my railway book shelves to see if Harviston End existed, but it appears not. But the word 'end' in the title goes much further than the white-pebbled station name.*



    Adlestrop
    by Edward Thomas

    Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
    The name because one afternoon
    Of heat the express-train drew up there
    Unwontedly. It was late June.
    The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
    No one left and no one came
    On the bare platform. What I saw
    Was Adlestrop – only the name
    And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
    And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
    No whit less still and lonely fair
    Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
    And for that minute a blackbird sang
    Close by, and round him, mistier,
    Farther and farther, all the birds
    Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.



    Restaurant Car
    by Louis MacNeice

    "Fondling only to throttle the nuzzling moment
    Smuggled under the table, hungry or not
    We roughride over the sleepers, finger the menu,
    Avoid our neighbour's eyes and wonder what"


    Watching waiters doing their staggering ballet down the aisles of restaurant cars with plates of roast beef and gravy jugs is a rare pleasure. As first class passengers stare meaningfully into their laptops, we steerage 'customers' queue for our red-hot microwaved sausages in flaccid buns.*


    On the Departure Platform
    by Thomas Hardy

    We kissed at the barrier; and passing through
    She left me, and moment by moment got
    Smaller and smaller, until to my view
    She was but a spot;

    A wee white spot of muslin fluff
    That down the diminishing platform bore
    Through hustling crowds of gentle and rough
    To the carriage door.

    Under the lamplight’s fitful glowers,
    Behind dark groups from far and near,
    Whose interests were apart from ours,
    She would disappear,

    Then show again, till I ceased to see
    That flexible form, that nebulous white;
    And she who was more than my life to me
    Had vanished quite.

    We have penned new plans since that fair fond day,
    And in season she will appear again—
    Perhaps in the same soft white array—
    But never as then!

    —‘And why, young man, must eternally fly
    A joy you’ll repeat, if you love her well?’
    —O friend, nought happens twice thus; why,
    I cannot tell!



    The Send-Off
    by Wilfred Owen

    Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
    To the siding-shed,
    And lined the train with faces grimly gay.
    Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
    As men's are, dead.
    Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
    Stood staring hard,
    Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
    Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
    Winked to the guard.
    So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
    They were not ours:
    We never heard to which front these were sent.
    Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
    Who gave them flowers.
    Shall they return to beatings of great bells
    In wild trainloads?
    A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
    May creep back, silent, to still village wells
    Up half-known roads.

    Some railways journeys were both sickening and mind-numbingly frightening in equal measure. One thinks of those trains of death approaching the watchtower gateway at Auschwitz. Here Owen, possibly the greatest first world war poet, drives home the experience of the ordinary soldier travelling to incomprehensible horror.*



    The Tourist's Alphabet
    by Mr Punch's Railway Book

    A is the affable guard whom you square:
    B is the Bradshaw which leads you to swear:
    C is the corner you fight to obtain:
    D is the draught of which others complain"


    The sadly lamented Punch magazine was always fertile ground for railway ribaldry. This ABC is rich in comedy with its juxtapositions of details like kettles and lemon drops with train crashes.*



    Changing at York
    by Tony Harrison

    "A directory that runs from B to V,
    the Yellow Pages' entries for HOTELS
    and TAXIS torn out, the smell of dossers' pee,
    saliva in the mouthpiece, whisky smells - "


    Oh we've all been here. The guilty phone call from a freezing phone box at a station. I once fell asleep on a train and had to get off at a place called Sole Street, and nearly died of cold when nobody came to pick me up. Serve me right, she said.*



    By Philip Larkin 1922–1985

    That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
    Not till about
    One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
    Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
    All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
    Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
    Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
    Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
    The river’s level drifting breadth began,
    Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

    All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
    For miles inland,
    A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
    Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
    Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
    A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
    And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
    Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
    Until the next town, new and nondescript,
    Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

    At first, I didn’t notice what a noise
    The weddings made
    Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
    The interest of what’s happening in the shade,
    And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
    I took for porters larking with the mails,
    And went on reading. Once we started, though,
    We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
    In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
    All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

    As if out on the end of an event
    Waving goodbye
    To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
    More promptly out next time, more curiously,
    And saw it all again in different terms:
    The fathers with broad belts under their suits
    And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
    An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
    The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
    The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

    Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
    Yes, from cafés
    And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
    Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
    Were coming to an end. All down the line
    Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
    The last confetti and advice were thrown,
    And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
    Just what it saw departing: children frowned
    At something dull; fathers had never known

    Success so huge and wholly farcical;
    The women shared
    The secret like a happy funeral;
    While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
    At a religious wounding. Free at last,
    And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
    We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
    Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
    Long shadows over major roads, and for
    Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

    Just long enough to settle hats and say
    I nearly died,

    A dozen marriages got under way.
    They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
    —An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
    And someone running up to bowl—and none
    Thought of the others they would never meet
    Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
    I thought of London spread out in the sun,
    Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

    There we were aimed. And as we raced across
    Bright knots of rail
    Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
    Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
    Travelling coincidence; and what it held
    Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
    That being changed can give. We slowed again,
    And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
    A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
    Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.


    Philip Larkin, “The Whitsun Weddings” from Collected Poems.
    Used by permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Phillip Larkin.

    Source: Collected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2001)