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.
Commentary
From Martin, whose email is still giving him problems:
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
The Wondering Minstrels
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Beth Sherman · 21 February 2005
The second to last line is “Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take”
Alice McLerran · 25 December 2006
I THINK the second verse starts with the word “At” rather than “All,” but am not sure. I love this poem too, and was trying to recall it on Dec. 23rd as we waited for it to be time to take two of our grandkids to the train to return them to their parents after a pre-Christmas visit with them. I had been telling them stories of how trains USED to be in my own childhood. Even the efficient trains of Europe don’t touch the glamour of those old steam trains with their sumptuous dining cars, their kind conductors and porters. I still remember the baked apples that I could order for breakfast. Cinnamon-scented and steaming hot, they could be cooled by cream poured from a small silver pitcher of luxurious heaviness. An alloy, surely, but it seemed real silver. A pity my grandchildren can never know those trains, the sounds and smells of them. When I had a lower berth with access to the window, I used to lie awake as long as I could so as to be able to peek out at the towns through which we passed in the dark. Tracks passed by lighted windows; I was glimpsing lives mine would never cross. It was magic.
Marshall Butow · 2 March 2007
I understood the poem viscerally from when I read it in third grade . The Day is long with voices speaking- speaking but not saying \ anything- certainly not communicating . The poem is about escape, both inner ( ennui) and outer (the every day ). It speaks to movement and progress. I still love it
Marshall Butow
Barbara T · 18 June 2007
Oops - I meant to say:
The poem, “Travel,” is from a Millay collection of poems called Second April.
Barbara Torrey Clegg
Barbara T · 18 June 2007
And I believe the title of the work is called Second April, not Travel.
Barbara Torrey Clegg