Program 5: Poetry on trains

This program contains the poetry on trains.

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Transcript

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Ideas that have shaped human history as expressed in poetry, speeches, myth, and documents. A podcast by Alan Anforth.

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Trains were a were a major innovation in our society and that most of the rest of the world in the nineteenth century. And the poetry of trains has been used as a metaphor for the excitement, the journey in life for individuals, the interconnectedness of humans, industrial progress, nostalgia, but also as a symbol of unwelcome industrial and technical change. The first trains were driven by steam, powered by coal or wood. Some were gravity driven, the funiculars. Then trains moved to diesel and now electrically powered. For my part I've always enjoyed travel by train. When I was younger, trains connected the cities and the country towns in Australia and were important to the survival of those towns. Trains took traffic off the road, including heavy transport. As I travel around now, I feel a sense of nostalgia and loss at the way the train lines throughout Australia have been allowed to deteriorate associated with the move to road transport for passengers and freight, which to me seems uninviting, unwise, and an unwarranted intrusion on the culture and the history of the people. An example of the poetry concerning railways as a metaphor for the excitement of the journey in life is the English poet Leo Capello in his poem called Dear Railway. The places referred to in Capello's poem are some of the towns in England that were the first linked by railways. The poem reads When a boiler was lit and wheels slowly proceeded to start rolling down parallel tracks, transporting people between Silden, Darlington and Stockton, the first of your kind, augred a new age, started a revolution in the world. People feared your impact at first the sight of you trailing smoke through the countryside with your huffing and puffing as you outran horses and carriages, conveying passengers in different classes faster than further as your speeds crept ever upwards. On sleepers with beds of gravel, barreled cylinders of boilers turning into streamlined diesel and electric engines shifting from single power units pushing and pulling to energy flowing across carriages. You've transformed communities and sceneries. The poem continues. Names of trains, services and different class members became part of our shared culture, as whether in posters or cinema and a certain video game mentioning your lack of stops for its character with cathedrals to motion, both classical and modern being constructed for your function and honour, whether intermediate or terminus. And I pause there to note that the cathedrals are of course the train stations. The poem continues to the call of let's meet in many different spoken languages linking countries and crossing continents. Whether over nighttime or daytime freight, humans with mail has kept on travelling, to different places navigating technical and social destiny, bringing and keeping friends and family, as well as many others together with further dreams, barriers and challenges to follow in uncertain future. Maybe some day the end of steel rails will finally be upon us all. Perhaps a new dawn of floating travel in magnetic corridors, in and out of transparent tubes or colourless tunnels will finally make its arrival in full. Regardless of whether you remain ascendant or take your place as a transport mode among many others, what a thrill it's been to see the likes of you rumble underground and overground through the cities and the countryside, a part of our shared human experience. For all the grumbles about your running on time or not, you're something that ultimately we'll be and are forever grateful and thankful for. As riding and watching you, we keep on travelling further forwards. Another of the nostalgic poems concerning trains is Ed Thomas's poem Audalstrop. The origin of the poem lies in an event that took place on the twenty fourth of june nineteen fourteen. Thomas was on the Oxford to Worcester Express train. The train made an unscheduled stop at Aldastrop in Gloucestershire, a tiny village in Cotswold with a population of just over a hundred. Thomas was later to write his observations of that stop in nostalgic terms concerning the loneliness and disintegration of the line and the station. Thomas was a Welsh poet from the Wiltshire area. Some of his biography has been traversed in an earlier program. Died in the French trenches in the First World War. He was a close friend of American poet Robert Frost, and in fact was the subject of Frost's famous poem The Road Not Taken that featured in an earlier program. The poem Aldostrop reads Yes, I remember Aldostrop the name because one afternoon of heat the express train drew up there unwantedly. 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 Aldostrop, only the name, and willows, willow herb and grasses, and meadow sweet and hushed acox dry, no whit less still the lonely fare than the high cloudlets in the sky. And for that minute a blackbird sung, then around him mystier father and father, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. W. H. Orden nineteen oh seven to nineteen fifty three was a British poet who took dual American citizenship. The night mail is about the night train carrying mail from London to Scotland, carrying ordinary letters that connect desperate lives. Speaker traces the train's steady progress, the landscape as it passes and a variety of human messages aboard, from bills and gossip to love notes and condolences. The poem links mechanical regularity with human longing, showing how everyday postal work sustains communities and anticipation across distances. The poem reads This is the nightmail crossing the border, bringing the check and the postal order, letters for the rich, letters for the poor, the shop at the corner, and the girl next door. Pulling up Beetok a steady climb, the gradients against her, but she's on time, past cotton grass and moorland boulders, shoveling 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. Sheepdogs 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, her climb is done, down towards Glasgow, the descent, towards the steam tugs, yelping down a glade of cranes, towards the field of apparatus, the furnace set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen. All Scotland waits for her, in dark glens, beside pale green locks, men long for news. Letters of thanks, letters from banks, letters of joy from girl and boy, seated bills and invitations to inspect new stock or visit relations, and applications for situations, and timid lovers' declarations, and 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, written on paper of every hue, the pink, the violet, the white and the blue, the chatty, the catty, the boring and the adoring, the cold and official and the hearts outpouring, clever, stupid, short and long, the typed and the printed, and spelt all wrong. Thousands are still asleep, dreaming of terrifying monsters, or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranstoff or Crawford's. Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in Wellset 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. Randall Jurell nineteen fourteen to nineteen sixty five was an American poet. His poem The Orient Express was written in nineteen forty at the height of the Second World War. The poem presents a portrait of a journey through Europe on a train that symbolizes all the hopes and fears of that generation. The train is running from Paris to Istanbul and passing through many European cities and countries along the way. The Orient Express was a luxury train that attracted wealthy and famous passengers, but also served as a means of transportation for ordinary people, including soldiers and refugees. During the war the train was used by the Germans to transport prisoners and loot from conquered countries. The train has become a symbol of adventure, romance and danger and has inspired many films, novels and songs. The poem is full of metaphors and allusions that relate to things occurring within the train, but more particularly what he sees out the windows of the train. The poem reads One looks from the train almost as one looked as a child. In the sunlight what I see still seems to me plain. I am safe, but at evening as the land darkens, a questioning precariousness comes over everything. Once, after a day of rain, I lay longing to be cold. After a while I was again cold, and hunched shivering under the quilt's many colours, grey with the ending of the winter day. Outside me there were a few shapes of chairs and tables, things from a primer. Outside the window there were chairs and tables of the world. I saw that the world that seemed to me plain, grey mask of all that was strange. Behind it of all that was was all. But it is beyond belief one thinks behind everything unforced joy and unwilling sadness moves changelessly. One looks from the train and there is something, the same thing. Behind everything, all these little villages, passing woman, a field of grain, the man who says goodbye to his wife, a path through a wood or full of lives, and the train passing, after all unchangeable. And now and not now ever to stop like a heart. It is like any other work of art. It is and never can be changed. Behind everything there is always the unknown, unwanted life. Mildred Kirkpatrick, nineteen thirty to two thousand twenty three, an Australian country music singer songwriter and wife and manager of the iconic Australian country music singer Slim Dusty. Joy McLean, that McLean being her maiden name, wrote the words of the poem concerning the Australian Indian Pacific Railway from Sydney to Perth, which was converted to a song by Slim Dusty. There is a repeating chorus which I've not always recited. It reads From coast to coast by night and day, hear the clicking of the wheels, the humming of the diesel on her ribbons of steel, or carrying the memories of a nation built by hand, see the Indian Pacific span the land. She's the pride of all the railwaymen, cross countries where she flies, From the blue Pacific waters to where the mountains rise, by lakes and wide brown rivers, through desert country dry, see the Indian Pacific passing by and the chorus reads Oh the Indian Pacific, she goes rolling down the track, five thousand miles to travel before she's there and back. Then it resumes. Besides the line of drovers waves, his battered old grey hat and kids are catching yabbies down by the river flat, and a woman hangs her washing in the backyard near the line as the Indian Pacific rolls on by. Hear the whistle blowing lonely near the Nullabor starlight, saluting those who walked across the track she rides tonight, calling to the railway camp and the fetlers on the line I'm the Indian Pacific right on time. From the silver of the broken hill to old Kalgoolis, she mirrors all the colours of a land so hard and old. Then the western rivers are blooming, and the air is just like wine, and the Indian Pacific's making time. Oh the Indian Pacific she goes rolling down the track, five thousand miles to travel before she's there and back. From the waters of the Western Sea to the Eastern Ocean sand, the Indian Pacific spans the land. Oh the Indian Pacific spans the land. Simon Robert Armitage nineteen sixty three is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. He was appointed poet laureate of the UK on the tenth of may twenty nineteen, his professor of poetry at Leeds. He wrote a poem to mark a hundred years since the train the Flying Scotsman first entered service. His poem describes how the famous steam engine coughed into life, featuring vast steel circumferences and rippling body work pouring with sweat. The poem reads I can still recall the smells and vibrations, the shrill whistle of the engine, and the tink tink of the rails, and points of endless line racing towards the final destination, amid spewing, spitting and smut from its chimney in black clouds, doors sliding back and forth in char cha formation, allowing pipe smoke and leather to mingle, along with pencil skirts and brogues, fractious infants wailing in time to the breathing of the steam locomotive as it struggles in its one in five gradient from King's Cross to Edinburgh. In eight and a half hours of travel, the Scottish dragon rides the rails alone, in the dead of night and squeals of wheels pounding poundling endlessly to the tune off the eight forty five PM out of London on a dismal December night seeking the lights, of passing towns and remembered memories, the Royal Mile. William Wadsworth, seventeen seventy to eighteen fifty, was also an English poet laureate, whose biography has been traversed in previous program. He lived in the Lakes District in England. The Kendall to Windermere Railway was first proposed in 1844 and opened in 1847. Wadsworth opposed the building of the railway, believing it would destroy the beauty of the Lakes district. And in addition to various letters to the Morning Post, he penned this sonnet using poetry put across the nature of his objections. In doing so he became one of the first high profile poets to write about the arrival of the railways, though admittedly his writing about the land before the railway was built. Nonetheless, Wordsworth in Passion Please shows poetry on railways beginning an uneasy coexistence. Poem is entitled On the Projected Kendall Windlemere Railway and it reads Is then no nook of English ground secure from the rash assault, schemes of retirement sown in youth, and midst the busy world kept pure, as when their earliest flowers of hope were blown, must perish How can they this blight endure? And must he too, the ruthless change bemoan, Who scorns a false utilitarian lure, Midst his paternal feels at random throne? Baffle the threat, bright scene from Orastead, given to the pausing traveller's rapturous glance, plead for thy peace, thou beautiful romance of nature, and if human heart be dead, speak passing wingy torrents, with your strong and constant voice protesting against the wrong. Wordsworth's reservation about industrial progress were not isolated to him. By way of example, the English poet Samuel Butler, eighteen thirty five to nineteen oh two, satirically described a higher level utopia as part of his fear about the advent of artificial intelligence as early as eighteen sixty three. Their poem read We refer to the question what sort of creature man's next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated, but it appears to us that we ourselves are creating our own success. We are daily giving the greater power and supplying all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self regulate, self activating power, which will be to the machine what intellect is to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race, inferior in power, inferior in oral quality of self control. We shall look up to them as the acne of all that is the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at. No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires will disturb the serene might of these glorious creatures. Sin, shame, and sorrow will have no place amongst them. Their mind will be in a state of perpetual calm. The contentment of a spirit that knows what it wants is disturbed by no regrets. Ambition will never torture them. In gratitude we will never cause them uneasiness for a moment. The guilty conscience, the hope defer, pain of exile, the insolence of office, and the spurn that patience merits of the unworthy, these will be entirely unknown to them. A funicular railway is a type of cable railway system that connects points along a railway track laid on a steep slope. The system's characterized by two counterbalanced carriages permanently attached to opposite ends of a haulage cable which is looped over a pulley at the upper end of the track. The result of such a configuration is that the two carriages move synchronously as one ascends the other descends at an equal speed. The history of funicular railways dates back to the fifteenth and sixteenth century, initially appearing in mining operations. However, it was not until the nineteenth century that funiculars became practical and elegant solutions for transporting people up steep hillsides. Roger Joseph Goff nineteen thirty seven is an English poet, broadcaster, children's author and playwright. His poem Funicular Railway is about his experience on a funicular ascending a mountain in Italy's Lake Como district. It reads halfway up the mountain it stops, slips back, judges, slips again. Sheesh screamed a Fraudline. Sheesh word for word, you think exactly the same thing in English. Two little maids in white dresses toting prata bags think the same in Japanese. The wind rocks the cradle, but not gently. No driver, no door handles on the inside. Reassuringly there is a hammer for smashing windows in case of emergency. But is this an emergency? Or just the run up to one? Unsure of the etiquette, better wait until the carriage bursts into flames or fills up with water. She it slides back down the track. Stop a voice crackles over the panoy. Pardon? If it were in writing it would be illegible. Why are there no Italians on board? Obviously they've heard the rumours. So what did it say? Help is on the way or emergency you fools. The hammer use the bloody hammer? A power failure, your lives hang on a thread, albeit a rusty metal one, circa eighteen eighty eight. A winch turns and the long haul up begins. You hold your breath twenty meters, stop, shutter, and a sickening fall for ten, a tooth being slowly drawn out and then pushed back in. Should the cable break, the descent will not be death defying. The view below is breathtaking, but you have no wish to be part of it. Like the muzzle of a mincing machine, the station waits to chew you up and spit out the grisly bits into the silver kidney bowl that is Lake Como. An hour and a half later the tug of war ends and the passengers alight. The Brits to seek explanation, the Americans compensation, the Germans to seek first aid, and the Japanese seemingly unfazed to seek a little shop that sells snow globes and model funicular railway sets. Robert Louis Stevenson, eighteen fifty to eighteen ninety four, was a Scottish novelist and poet whose biography has been traversed in earlier programs. In his poem From a Railway Carriage, he captures the vibrational rhythm of the steam train journey. It reads 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 the cattle, all of the sight of the hill and the plain flies thick as the 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 gathers brambles. Here is a tramp who stands and gazes, and there is the green or stringing the daisies. Here is a cart run away in the road, lumping along with man and load, and here is a mill and there is a river. Each is a glimpse and gone forever.

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Ideas that have shaped human history as expressed in poetry, speeches, myth, and documents. A podcast by Alan Anforth.