Travel -- Edna St Vincent Millay

From Martin, whose email is still giving him problems:

(Poem #1064) Travel The railroad track is miles away, And the day is loud with voices speaking, Yet there isn't a train goes by all day But I hear its whistle shrieking. All night there isn't a train goes by, Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming, But I see its cinders red on the sky, And hear its engine steaming. My heart is warm with friends I make, And better friends I'll not be knowing; Yet there isn't a train I'd rather take, No matter where it's going. -- Edna St Vincent Millay

Another poem that really speaks to me (indeed, I believe that it is this
quality of speaking to, and often for, me that Millay possesses in greater
measure than any other poet with whom I am familiar). I am faintly reminded
of the old saying "It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive", but
even that misses the point - the word 'hopefully' implies that travelling is
a means towards an end. Millay celebrates, instead, the pure act of travel,
and the powerful attraction it can possess.

Of course, there is also a strong escapist subtext running through the poem,
the implication that, while the narrator might not care where she is
travelling *to*, she is certainly travelling *from* 'here'. However, I
believe, or perhaps prefer to believe, that that is not the poem's main
thrust - that, instead, the lure of the train is purely positive, a desire
to travel rather than to escape.

I've run a number of Millay's poems in the past, and attempted to analyse
their appeal; this one I'm running for the sheer visceral reaction it
provoked, and for the way it resonated with my own feelings on the matter.
Any further analysis would be superfluous.

-martin.

[Minstrels Links]

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Poem #34, First Fig
Poem #49, The Unexplorer
Poem #108, The Penitent
Poem #317, Inland
Poem #590, Sonnet XLIII
Poem #604, Euclid Alone Has Looked On Beauty Bare
Poem #817, Grown-up
Poem #860, Sonnet: Love Is Not All
Poem #905, I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
Poem #926, Dirge Without Music
Poem #956, Ashes of Life

all of which can be found at
[broken link] http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/index_poet_M.html#Millay