Song of a Train
A MONSTER taught
To come to hand
Amain,
As swift as thought
Across the land
The train.
The song it sings
Has an iron sound;
Its iron wings
Like wheels go round.
Crash under bridges,
Flash over ridges,
And vault the downs;
The road is straight --
Nor stile, nor gate;
For milestones -- towns!
Voluminous, vanishing, white,
The steam plume trails;
Parallel streaks of light,
THe polished rails.
Oh, who can follow?
The little swallow,
The trout of the sky:
But the sun
Is outrun,
And Time passed by.
O'er bosky dens,
By marsh and mead,
Forest and fens
Embodied speed
Is clanked and hurled;
O'er rivers and runnels;
And into the earth
And out again
In death and birth
That know no pain,
For the whole round world
Is a warren of railway tunnels.
Hark! hark! hark!
It screams and cleaves the dark;
And the subterranean night
Is gilt with smoky light.
Then out again apace
It runs its thundering race,
The monster taught
To come to hand
Amain,
That swift as thought
Speeds through the land
The train.
John Davidson(1857 - 1909)
Often compared to
Joesph Turner's Rain, Steam, Speed (1844. Oil on Canvas).
Song of a Train was penned by the late
Victorian Scots poet
John Davidson (1857-1909) who is remembered chiefly as an eccentric. A writer of short lyrical verse like this one, his most powerful works are the many ballads he wrote. Today we are so jaded by travel that flights by Concords halfway round the world are memorable only when the're punctual and Davidson's poem expressing the awe and magic of trains seems completely out dated. Davidson didn't care for that kind of change, he killed himself in
1909 because, as one critic puts it,
"he was tired of the 20th century."
Public domain text taken from The Poets’ Corner:
http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/2001/davidson0101.html