C.S. Lewis - A Grief Observed Quotes

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Grief_Observed

A Grief Observed is a collection of C. S. Lewis's reflections on the experience of bereavement following the death of his wife, Joy Gresham, in 1960. The book was first published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk as Lewis wished to avoid identification as the author. Though republished in 1963 after his death under his own name, the text still refers to his wife as “H” (her first name, which she rarely used, was Helen).^[1]

The book is compiled from the four notebooks which Lewis used to vent and explore his grief. He illustrates the everyday trials of his life without Joy and explores fundamental questions of faith and theodicy. Lewis’s step-son (Joy’s son) Douglas Gresham points out in his 1994 introduction that the indefinite article 'a' in the title makes it clear that Lewis's grief is not the quintessential grief experience at the loss of a loved one, but one individual's perspective among countless others. The book helped inspire a 1985 television movie Shadowlands, as well as a 1993 film of the same name.

Excerpts from A Grief Observed

by C.S. Lewis

note: H. referred to Lewis' wife, "Helen Joy Davidman"

I

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
*
There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met H. I've plenty of what are called "resources." People get over these things. Come, I shan't do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden job of red-hot memory and all this "commonsense" vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.
*
Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be--or so it feels--welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.
*
I once read the sentence "I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake." That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
*

II

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back--to be sucked back--into it?
*
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.
*
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.
*
You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing--the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact--our worse fears are true--all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It's only our depravity makes them look black to us.
*
And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen.
*

III

You can't see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. you can't, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can't get the best out of it.
*
The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.
*
On the other hand, "Knock and it shall be opened." But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac? And there's also "To him that hath shall be given." After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can't give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.
*

IV

Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.
*
Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.
*
I ought to have said [about H.] "But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you entered."
*
My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time.
*
Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbor, but my neighbor. For don't we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive--who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture--almost the precis--we've made of Him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact. In real life--that's one way it differs from novels--his words and acts are, if we observe closely, hardly ever quite "in character," that is in what we call his character. There's always a card in his hand we didn't know about.
*
But then of course I know perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all.
*
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of "No answer." It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, "Peace, child; you don't understand."
*
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
*
For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives--to both, but perhaps especially to the woman--a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
*
Sometimes, Lord, one is tempted to say that if you wanted us to behave like the lilies of the field you might have given us an organization more like theirs. But that, I suppose, is just your grand experiment. Or no; not an experiment, for you have no need to find things out. Rather your grand enterprise. To make an organism which is also a spirit; to make that terrible oxymoron, a "spiritual animal." To take a poor primate, a beast with nerve-ending all over it, a creature with a stomach that wants to be filled, a breeding animal that wants its mate, and say, "Now get on with it. Become a god."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Related Poetry

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A poem by Petrina Barson

from her book "Now We Are Four"

The Facts of Life

1

In the early days
I felt I wore you
like some logo
on my face.
Amazed only
when the woman at the eggs
could not read your absence
from the creases and
undulations there.
My traitor face -
bland as an egg carton -
did not scream at her.
I wanted to tell her -
standing there reading labels -
of all the things
I was discovering
that I had lost -
each moment cracking open
to find you gone:
only four places at the table;
only three pink sugared biscuits
left in the fridge (you helped
to roll them before boredom
eased you back to Lara
jumping on the sofa);
only two children
in the rear vision mirror;
only one direction
that this blessed life drags us -
heels banging on the road.

2
It's half your little life
since I helped you onto the see-saw
and we tipped laughter
into each others' faces.
Two birthdays gone:
imagination
some failed artist
totally lacking the repertoire
to sketch you at five.
And memory no better:
a three-toothed old lady
driving her trolley full of papers
into the wind.
For you are fading:
this precious pain
that is my ice bridge to you
melting in the grimy flow
of circumstance.
Now I bump into it -
one fact among others -
as the river pulls me
to its own end
gaily ignorant of rocks
and plates of ice
hurling me down rapids -
a bony glissando -
then rolling me over
and showing me
(the bright sky).

John McCrae - In Flanders Fields

John McCrae, May 1915



In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, 1st Brigade Canadian Field Artillery.

Inspiration for ‘In Flanders Fields’

by John McCrae

http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/john-mccrae-in-flanders-fields-inspiration.htm

During the early days of the Second Battle of Ypres a young Canadian artillery officer, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed on 2^nd May, 1915 in the gun positions near Ypres. An exploding German artillery shell landed near him. He was serving in the same Canadian artillery unit as a friend of his, the Canadian military doctor and artillery commander Major John McCrae.

As the brigade doctor, John McCrae was asked to conduct the burial service for Alexis because the chaplain had been called away somewhere else on duty that evening. It is believed that later that evening, after the burial, John began the draft for his now famous poem “In Flanders Fields”.

It is thought that doctor John McCrae (30th November 1872 — 28th January 1918) began the draft for his famous poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ on the evening of the 2nd May, 1915 in the second week of fighting during the Second Battle of Ypres.

• One account says that he was seen writing the poem sitting on the rearstep of an ambulance the next day while looking at Helmer's grave and the vivid red poppies that were springing up amongst the graves in the burial ground.

• Another account says that McCrae was so upset after Helmer's burial that he wrote the poem in twenty minutes in an attempt to compose himself.
• A third account by his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Morrison, states that John told him he drafted the poem partly to pass the time between the arrival of two groups of wounded at the first aid post and partly to experiment with different variations of the poem's metre.

John McCrae, was serving as a Major and a military doctor and was second in command of the 1st Brigade Canadian Field Artillery. The field guns of his brigade’s batteries were in position on the west bank of the Ypres-Yser canal, about two kilometres to the north of Ypres. The brigade had arrived there in the early hours of 23^rd April.

For More Information

On John McCrae -

http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/john-mccrae-in-flanders-fields-inspiration.htm

Wikipedia -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Flanders_Fields

On World War I -

The GreatWar of 1914-1918

Major John McCrae, second in command of the
1st Brigade  Canadian Field Artillery during the
Second Battle  of Ypres in April and May 1915.

Courtesy of Bee MacGuire
Obtained From TheMcCrae Museum of The Guelph Museum

In Flanders Fields

Made for the folks who serve and served

In Flanders Field

Paschendale: The Great War

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

http://thereaderonline.co.uk/2010/08/16/featured-poem-from-a-railway-carriage-by-robert-louis-stevenson/

by Lisa

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

W.H. Auden

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.*

The Whitsun Weddings

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)