Here are a few favorites. The first four are from roughly the era of Locomotive and reflect some of the age’s wonder, admiration, and even fear of the new machines: “Type of the modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent”!

 

The last is a later poem; the locomotive is still a sort of snorting monster, but now one that has integrated itself into the great and small business of daily life.

 

 

 

 

I Like to See it Lap the Miles

by Emily Dickinson (1830-86)

 

I like to see it lap the Miles,

And lick the valleys up,

And stop to feed itself at tanks;

And then, prodigious, step

 

Around a pile of mountains,

And, supercilious, peer

In shanties by the sides of roads;

And then a quarry pare

 

To fit its sides, and crawl between,

Complaining all the while

In horrid, hooting stanza;

Then chase itself down hill

 

And neigh like Boanerges;

Then, punctual as a star,

Stop—docile and omnipotent—

At its own stable door.

 

 

From a Railway Carriage

by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94)

 

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 there is the green for 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 a glimpse and gone for ever!

 

 

To a Locomotive in Winter

by Walt Whitman (1819-92)

 

Thee for my recitative!

Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining,

Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,

Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel,

Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides,

Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,

Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front,

Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,

The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,

Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels,

Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following,

Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;

Type of the modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent,

For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,

With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,

By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,

By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.

 

Fierce-throated beauty!

Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night,

Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all,

Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding,

(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)

Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,

Launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes,

To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.

 

 

Song of a Train

by John Davidson (1857-1909)

 

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.

 

 

Night Mail

by W.H. Auden (1907-73)

(Listen to this poem on YouTube here.)

 

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?

 

 

Snow

And for a bit of visual as well as sonic railroad poetry, here's the short film Snow (1963), directed by Geoffrey Jones.